The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture 9780857451132

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Preface
Introduction
Part 1 Intersubjectivity
CHAPTER 1 The Dance of Rhetoric: Dialogic Selves and Spontaneously Responsive Expressions
CHAPTER 2 Co-Opting Intersubjectivity: Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self
CHAPTER 3 Echo Chambers and Rhetoric: Sketch of a Model of Resonance
CHAPTER 4 Discourse Beyond Language: Cultural Rhetoric, Revelatory Insight, and Nature
CHAPTER 5 The Spellbinding Aura of Culture: Tracing its Anthropological Discovery
CHAPTER 6 Tenor in Culture
Part 2 Emergence
CHAPTER 7 Attending the Vernacular: A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric
CHAPTER 8 Enhoused Speech: The Rhetoric of Foi Territoriality
CHAPTER 9 Transcultural Rhetoric and Cyberspace
CHAPTER 10 Jesuit Rhetorics: Translation Versus Conversion in Early-Modern Goa
CHAPTER 11 Evoking Peace and Arguing Harmony: An Example of Transcultural Rhetoric in Southern Ethiopia
Part 3 Agency
CHAPTER 12 In Defense of the Orator: A Classicist Outlook on Rhetoric Culture
CHAPTER 13 Rhetoric, Anti-Structure, and the Social Formation of Authorship
CHAPTER 14 Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning
CHAPTER 15 Emergence, Agency, and the Middle Ground of Culture: A Meditation on Mediation
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture

Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Edited by Ivo Strecker, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Addis Ababa University, Stephen Tyler, Rice University, and Robert Hariman, Northwestern University Our minds are filled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and others of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric which allows us to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world and which becomes central to the formation of individual and collective consciousness. This series is dedicated to the study of the interaction of rhetoric and culture and focuses on the concrete practices of discourse in which and through which the diverse and often also fantastic patterns of culture—including our own—are created, maintained, and contested.

Volume 1 Culture & Rhetoric Edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler Volume 2 Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life Edited by Michael Carrithers Volume 3 Economic Persuasions Edited by Stephen Gudeman Volume 4 The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture Edited by Christian Meyer and Felix Girke

The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture






Edited by

Christian Meyer & Felix Girke

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2011 Christian Meyer and Felix Girke All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The rhetorical emergence of culture / edited by Christian Meyer and Felix Girke. p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric and culture v.4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-112-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-113-2 (ebook) 1. Culture—Semiotic models. 2. Communication and culture. 3. Rhetoric. I. Meyer, Christian. II. Girke, Felix. GN357.R5 2011 306.01—dc22 2011000706

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-0-85745-112-5 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0-85745-113-2 (ebook)

Contents








List of Figures

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction Felix Girke and Christian Meyer

1

Part 1




Intersubjectivity

1. The Dance of Rhetoric: Dialogic Selves and Spontaneously Responsive Expressions John Shotter 2. Co-Opting Intersubjectivity: Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self John W. Du Bois 3. Echo Chambers and Rhetoric: Sketch of a Model of Resonance Theory Pierre Maranda

35

52

84

4. Discourse Beyond Language: Cultural Rhetoric, Revelatory Insight, and Nature Donal Carbaugh and David Boromisza-Habashi

101

5. The Spellbinding Aura of Culture: Tracing its Anthropological Discovery Bernhard Streck

119

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contents

6. Tenor in Culture Ivo Strecker

137

Part 2




Emergence

7. Attending the Vernacular: A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric Gerard A. Hauser

157

8. Enhoused Speech: The Rhetoric of Foi Territoriality James F. Weiner

173

9. Transcultural Rhetoric and Cyberspace Filipp Sapienza

191

10. Jesuit Rhetorics: Translation Versus Conversion in EarlyModern Goa Alexander Henn

210

11. Evoking Peace and Arguing Harmony: An Example of Transcultural Rhetoric in Southern Ethiopia Felix Girke and Alula Pankhurst

225

Part 3




Agency

12. In Defense of the Orator: A Classicist Outlook on Rhetoric Culture Franz-Hubert Robling

253

13. Rhetoric, Anti-Structure, and the Social Formation of Authorship James Thomas Zebroski

264

14. Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning Todd Oakley

282

15. Emergence, Agency, and the Middle Ground of Culture: A Meditation on Mediation Stephen A. Tyler

304

Notes on Contributors

319

Index

321

Figures








Figure 3.1

A Digraphic Probabilistic Network of the Corpus of 100 Fairytales as Modeled Algebraically by Vladimir Propp (1928)

Figure 3.2 An Adaptation of the “Category Adaptive Resonance Theory” to Rhetorical Performance Figure 9.1

In and Out

90

94 200

Figure 14.1 Mental Spaces Composition of “Blank Future” Blend

293

Figure 14.2 Mental Spaces Completion of “Blank Future” Blend

295

Figure 14.3 Mental Spaces Elaboration of “Blank Future” Blend

297

Preface Christian Meyer and Felix Girke








In writing this preface we are reminded of the earliest days of the Rhetoric Culture Project at the end of the twentieth century, when we were working on applications for funding, invitational letters, programmatic outlines, and all kinds of bureaucratic texts in Ivo Strecker’s office at the University of Mainz. The animated atmosphere was more reminiscent of a bustling openplan editorial office, than of the solemn quietude of an academic retreat. The room housed three permanently occupied desks, an additional workstation for student assistants, a small but comfortable coffee lounge, a kitchenette, and a camp bed. Ever-shifting piles of papers, photocopies, journals and books, the ringing of the phone, the aroma of Ivo’s “Wüstenkaffee” (wasteland coffee), and constant visits by curious colleagues, startled students, and confused computer repairmen contributed to the ambience of the place. The three of us were constantly chatting, muttering fragments of text, discussing tropes and figures, intuitively suggesting words to complete somebody else’s sentence, reading out emails as they were arriving. … Something out of the ordinary was in the making, as anyone who witnessed the turbulent activities could tell. For several years already, Ivo Strecker had been calling for a reunion of anthropology and rhetoric, and had alerted us to the promises of a rhetorical theory of culture, but it was only at the 1998 EASA Conference in Frankfurt (Main) that he and Stephen Tyler organized a panel on the topic of “Rhetoric Culture.” One of the presenters was Christian Meyer, who only three days before had completed his MA in anthropology. After the Frankfurt conference, we all began to envision a larger project. A first step was taken in an application for funds from the German Research Foundation (DFG) that allowed Christian and a host of student assistants to assemble and study much of the literature on the anthropology and ethnography of rhetoric. One of these students was Felix Girke, who soon joined the team as a full member.

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preface

Out of the transatlantic emails between Stephen, Ivo, and Christian, a general theoretical manifest began to emerge, which subsequently helped us to secure some practical support, the interest of scholars from all over the world, and finally persuaded the Volkswagen Foundation to join the Rhetoric Culture endeavor. Once we held in our hands the grant approval from Volkswagen, we jumped right into inviting all those scholars whose texts we had been reading but whom we had never met. The replies we received raised true storms of enthusiasm on the bridge of our flying dreamboat, as we realized that people found our vision congenial to their own. All the somewhat overly optimistic ideas we had been juggling suddenly seemed less outlandish. When we met the participants of the first Rhetoric Culture Conference in February 2002, they turned out to be as patient and friendly with us youngsters as we had imagined them from their emails. So not only did we listen to presentations on the subject of “resonance,” i.e., on the ways in which people deal with the collision or harmonization of their respective rhetorical energies in social interaction and the creation of culture, but we also found that a number of our visitors were eager to join our project and help think toward Rhetoric Culture. However, as the second conference on linguistics followed only a few months later, our inchoate office found no respite. After submitting our reports, we successfully applied for two more conferences on “Social Relations and Religion” and “Politics and Economics,” which were then also held at Mainz in 2005. The rhetorical emergence of culture was discussed in all four conferences, and our final selection of papers also includes some contributions to conferences II and III. A number of papers from all four conferences, and even additional ones, have been published in the first three volumes of the Berghahn series “Studies in Rhetoric and Culture.” Now we find ourselves again in an emergent office, this time in Bielefeld, hammering out a preface like it was the old days. The creative and cooperative work on the Rhetoric Culture Project has significantly inspired our ongoing scientific interests up until today. We want to thank all the participants and colleagues who during the four conferences proved to us how academic life can be exciting and joyful as much as challenging and daunting. We especially want to thank Ivo Strecker for having given us the initial opportunity to have these experiences.

Introduction Felix Girke and Christian Meyer








The International Rhetoric Culture Project has stated in its theoretical outline that “just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric.” The first part of this chiasmus can readily be accepted, since crosscultural research on speaker performance, memory techniques, social expression of emotion, practical reasoning, and the interrelation between speaking styles and political organization have provided abundant evidence that rhetoric is culture-specific. Extensive research in folklore studies, the ethnography of speaking, and linguistic anthropology have also proved this claim over and over again, the most spectacular cases being the use of parallelism and metaphor (e.g., Fox 1988, Fernandez 1991, Meyer 2007 for an overview). It is the second part of the chiastic assertion—that culture is founded in rhetoric—that is unfamiliar and seems more difficult to accept. How can culture be founded in rhetoric? Earlier volumes of this series have already presented theoretical reflections and empirical cases that address the complex and ever-shifting relationship between rhetoric and culture. Each, however, focused on a specific aspect of the larger project. The first volume, Culture & Rhetoric, edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler, opens up a whole range of possible connections between the two, both as academic fields of study and as basic phenomena of human experience. This is achieved in particular by highlighting the pervasiveness and imaginative power of figuration. The topic of the second volume, Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life, edited by Michael Carrithers, is how people talk themselves into, through, and out of existential predicaments. It focuses in particular on narratives and ambiguities—external as well as internal—of explaining, naturalizing, justifying, or overcoming dissociating crises and destinies. The third volume, Economic Persuasions, edited by Stephen

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Gudeman, applies rhetoric culture theory to economics, a field that recently has been gaining explanatory prominence far beyond its nominal boundaries. The contributors to that volume reveal the rhetorical character of basic economic concepts. The book that you are holding in your hands addresses a complementary topic, namely, how culture emerges out of rhetorical action.1

From “Dialogic” to “Rhetorical” Emergence of Culture In recent years, across many fields, scholars have made constant attempts at finding models that free culture and communication from idealist and mentalist biases and situate them within ephemeral human practice. Alternative concepts such as discursivity, intertextuality, or dialogicality, however, are burdened and constrained by their background in literary and social criticism. For example, their reliance on “text,” which is a rather special form of communicative exchange, or the aim of establishing normative guidelines for rational discourse, guidelines that have little descriptive, let alone analytical capacity, are among their central features that one might not want to retain. Still, the basic concern to do justice to the situated, bodily, and often antagonistic character of cultural and communicative practices has come to be shared by numerous scholars throughout linguistic anthropology, interactionalist sociology, discursive psychology, and rhetoric studies. On the one hand, this is evidenced by newly introduced concepts such as linguistic ideology (Irvine/Gal 2000), meta-pragmatics (Silverstein 1993), embodied knowledge (Lakoff/Johnson 1999), persuasion (Cialdini 2001), or construction grammar (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995). On the other hand, rhetoric studies in particular have begun to address issues far beyond formal speech and literary aesthetics by turning to topics such as popular culture (Mailloux 1989), identity, new media, race, or visual culture, and embracing ethnographic methods (Cintron 1997), which better allow taking account of social processes and cognitive dynamics. In the light of these developments, we suggest that rhetoric might provide an adequate background for a contemporary, dynamical notion of culture. Rhetoric acknowledges the virtues of a discursive or dialogical approach, while simultaneously emphasizing just as much the material dimension of living bodies who communicate and, conjointly or in contention, create culture. For us, the most fundamental site of such creation, of the eponymous emergence, is the social situation itself rather than individual socialization or collective moments of a largely statistical nature. We maintain this preference from an earlier inspirational source to which the title of the present book alludes: The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (1995, hereafter Dialogic), edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim. Their volume, well received by crit-

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ics but still awaiting further utilization for anthropological theory building,2 presents a “dialogical critique of anthropology” (1995: 3) and aims at a theory, which is more embracing than preceding varieties of dialogical anthropology3 (e.g., Rabinow 1977, Dwyer 1982). The editors of Dialogic emphasize that “the production of objects by means of discourse is already under way among the natives before any field-worker gets there” (1995: 2). They expand the Bakhtinian view that cultural knowledge emerges from dialogue by starting off with a brief anecdote related by Roman Jacobson about a Russian storyteller who told his tales in permanent dialogue with his audience, whose replies, responses, and reactions he continually integrated into the twists and turns of his narrative. In other words, Jacobson found that these folktales were dialogic in nature (1995: 1). To consider them monologic would be evidence of an academic “pathology.” The same applies to other forms of communication, so that most of our every-day language evolves as “an emergent property of dialogues” (ibid.). The argument holds true mutatis mutandis for culture—“cultures are continuously produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues of their members” (1995: 2).4 This implies that individual action does not merely reflect social structure, but that structure emerges through social action in dialogue (1995: 5).5 Complex cultural patterns develop out of simpler interactions, yet no authorial agency is clearly identifiable (see Stoller 1994: 356). Tedlock and Mannheim here refer to the standard definition of emergence by evolutionary biology, which states, first, that new levels of organization have their own properties and are irreducible to their component parts, and, second, that they include “some degree of contingency” (1995: 9). Thus, the first aspect of emergence is that it describes processes as being in a constant state of becoming, even as they are always drawing on former developments. Thinking about social processes in such a way makes sense not only for history but for any discipline that runs the risk of reifying nonphysical non-entities (such as, say, “practice” or “culture”), even if only for heuristic purposes. Instead, we remain aware that “all of our closures are but possible openings” (Strecker et al. 2003), and that, both in social science and in quotidian life, “the object emerges out of the description only as the description emerges out of the object” (Tyler, chapter 15, this volume). Secondly, the aspect of contingency is central—the whole is more than its constituent parts because it is not predetermined. In Tedlock and Mannheim’s model of cultural emergence through dialogical interaction, “every interaction takes place within specific social, institutional, and historical coordinates, all of which color the interaction at the same time as they are reshaped, to a greater or lesser extent, by that interaction” (1995: 9). Conversations, thus, are contingent “joint ventures” (Clark 1996) of their participants. Nobody is able

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to fully anticipate the outcome, since conversations are affected by dynamics beyond their own reach and even by seeming bystanders, who now have to be understood as participants, too: they—be it through gesture and posture, or “rhythmic synchronization”—signal their stances or attitudes (Tedlock/ Mannheim 1995: 9), thus contributing to the shaping of the dialogue, which thereby becomes a blend of different life stories, personal interests, and spatiotemporal conditions. “Any single participant is, indeed, positioned socially, but no single voice can be understood except in the context of all the others, against the background of the emergent social reality that both reflects and shapes their interaction” (1995: 14). Tedlock and Mannheim emphasize that the acting individual is at “no point in this process … regarded as autonomous” (1995: 5). This problematizes the notion of “subjectivity,” and Tedlock and Mannheim are clear on that it has to be thought of as “an embodied constellation of voices” (1995: 8). Thus, the self, similar to Bakhtin’s ideas, needs to be conceived as consisting of multiple selves, or of a “society of minds” as Hubert Hermans (2002) has put it, which interact with one another in dialogical fashion and polyphonic concerto. Accordingly, culture, dialogically emergent, cannot be fully understood through recourse to the separate actions of individuals.6 More than in the theory of dialogue, where properties of the whole seem to be retraceable to their constituent parts more readily, in rhetorical theory contingency plays a prominent role as basic to the human condition. As Hans Blumenberg (1981) has pointed out, lack of evidence caused by contingency provides the ultimate raison d’être of rhetoric. As people cannot always await sufficient information, as they are caught in a constant, inevitable need to act, their only means to overcome the uncertainties of their situation is resolute inward and outward persuasion. People constantly experience surprises, and they just as constantly try to rhetorically make sense of experienced contingency, i.e., in persuading themselves and others of one convenient interpretation out of a vast array of options. The constitutional problem for interaction addressed by Niklas Luhmann (by way of Talcott Parsons) as “double contingency,” with which he refers to the awareness of actors in a social situation of both their own and the Other’s contingency, can only be dealt with by rhetoric. Since interactants are black boxes to each other and can only interact by deploying “self-referential operations” (e.g., Luhmann 1995: 109f.), rhetorical success—an attitude change, a desired behavior—is the one and only measure of communicative felicity. Furthermore, since only the materiality of a subsequent action (or utterance) objectifies communicative success, rhetoric, through the possible change of the addressee’s behavior, attitude, or opinion, fulfills the exigency of a quality leap inherent in emergence theory. Dialogue, as Tedlock and Mannheim expose it, merely displays supervenience, i.e., the

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5

simple aggregation of a multitude of identifiable intertextual elements to a new organic textual feature. Embracing emergence, and a correspondingly limited directorial power of intention, thus has the epistemological advantage that we are wary of all naturalizations of social life, be it in structural functionalism or any other deterministic research program. Karin Barber describes this danger by identifying two diametrically opposed sides—one “proposes that the normal situation is inertia, stability and repetition. What needs to be explained is how and why change happens … [t]he other model starts from the opposite assumption— that everything that happens is new, unrepeatable and not wholly predictable from what went before” (2007: 25). Sympathetic to the second stance, she refers to G. H. Mead in stating that “scientists and historians seek to find rational order and stretch this back to that the present may be seen to follow from the past; but in fact time itself is constituted out of a succession of ‘interruptions.’… The past is ‘as hypothetical as the future’; the present, defined by the emergent, is constantly breaking new ground” (2007: 26). The explanandum is therefore how the idea (or illusion) of continuity, pattern, and direction comes about— in Barber’s catchy phrase, “how people go about solidifying the flux of social life” (ibid.)—rather than why and how change happens. Agency, as the authors of Dialogical have put it, therefore emerges out of the intersubjective dialogical situation. It is neither situated in the autonomous subject as in existentialistic conceptions, nor in any kind of transcendental agent as in idealism.7 Hence, again applying the heuristic model of the chiasmus, neither does the orator fully master their discourse, nor does the discourse entirely master the orator—“rhetoric is taken as an uncertain and provisional social project” (Battaglia 1995: 2). Rather, as agency and structure are co-emergent and mutually determinant, so are culture rhetorically emergent and rhetoric culturally emergent. Philip Chase (2006), after the discoveries of so many facets of “animal culture” by ethologists, claimed “cultural emergence,” not culture, to be the one determining, qualitative difference between humans and animals (for an early viewpoint, see Galpin 1937). Culture created by humans is the only culture that can become the frame of reference, toolbox, and buildingkit for the creation, or even escalation of further culture. Thus humans, as the only animals, are able to leave their biological determination and create a selfreferential culture (see Csányi 1994, Levinson 2005). According to Chase, the “socially created coding” that emerges out of interaction may lead to behavior that—being already motivated by other codes—can even be detrimental to “individual evolutionary success” (2006: 1f., 49). In doing so, Chase dissociates the analysis of interaction from assumptions of “functionality.” While the notion of culture thus might be used in reference to the entirety of phylogenetic evolution and human history (and rhetoric has certainly

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played its part in it) as well as to the question of how the individual becomes culturally socialized (or “enculturated”—another moment where rhetoric is crucial), the issue we are mainly engaged with in this volume is different: the much more situational emergence of cultural phenomena that solidify only afterward in institutions, conventions, or other forms of cultural memory. Seeing the creation and reproduction of culture as a truly dialogical process wherein individual authorial agency cannot be assumed, how do Tedlock and Mannheim understand meaning? Instead of locating it in the preformed intentions of interacting individuals, they put it as “an emergent property of performance, conceived as a fully engaged social event and constructed jointly through the actions of all participants in the event” (1995: 13). As a rhetorical approach would add, these multiple voices within us are rhetorical insofar as they are laden with will and power (see Du Bois, chapter 2, this volume). However, if the individuals who act dialogically are already dialogically socialized, and think dialogically, can any subjectivity, any quintessential individualism be assumed as driving forces of structuration? How can we conceive of individual agencies as vectors in dialogue when the individual is already essentially dialogical? When the individual has inescapably internalized social structure and culture through past dialogues? When, moreover, it is actually thinking against imagined dialogue partners even in internal dialogues (G. H. Mead’s “generalized Other”)? The present book suggests that rhetoric (as opposed to dialogue) overcomes this dilemma, for rhetoric emphasizes the role of power in conversation, the experience of one individual imposing their will on another. Moreover, the notion of rhetoric also highlights the human body as one of the factors involved in interaction. The production of utterances and other actions is a bodily activity requiring energetic effort and involvement, so that these actions do not only possess a symbolic, but also a material aspect (see Meyer 2009: 28, 46). One consequence is that actions do not only transport ideas, but also all kinds of affective qualities and bodily presences, as becomes evident in the famous Wittgensteinian expression that “meaning [is] a physiognomy,” quoted in John Shotter’s contribution to this volume (chapter 1). This sometimes even collision-prone materiality of dialogic interaction was also emphasized by Bakhtin in his earlier work (e.g., 1981: 340, 405). Later, Bakhtin step-by-step gave up this position for one that more decidedly argued for an intertextual notion of the dialogic, a usage still commonly encountered today: that speakers talk by borrowing and reusing the words of others. As the later Bakhtin says: “Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is elated by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supple-

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ments, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account” (1986: 91; see also 1986: 76, 125, 150). This move in Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, from a materialistic conception to a more idealistic one, might well mirror his life and times. From his rhetoric-saturated world of Soviet propaganda (see his hostile remarks on rhetoric in, e.g., 1986: 150), he pleaded for a more thorough consideration of dialogue (although in a dialectical sense at first) in order to raise awareness of the mutually collaborative activities in producing utterances, thus providing a counterpoint to contemporary top-down declarations of ideologies. Conversely, today many scholars advocate the concept of rhetoric out of their dialogue-saturated democratic world of civic institutions and politically correct ethics of discourse. Therefore, a compelling reason for us to replace “dialogue” with “rhetoric” is that Tedlock and Mannheim’s approach is not sufficiently clear in explaining what happens when models, definitions of the situation, or individual intentions made manifest in dialogue, happen to conflict and collide. Tedlock and Mannheim merely assume that “social events require the tacit collusion of the participants, who implicitly agree that they are interpreting the events within the same general framework” (1995: 13). By introducing the term collusion, they do in fact evade the danger of excluding conflict from interaction by acknowledging that the emergence of dominance relations is part and parcel of this interactional play of track-and-respond. For, while collusion does not imply consent to, it definitely entails compliance with dominance relations. Still, as Strecker and Tyler (2009: 3) have already stated, the terms collusion and compliance inevitably refer back to persuasion: how can collusion be produced in interaction if not rhetorically? Tedlock and Mannheim seem aware of the power dimension in interaction when they write that dialogical actors are “socially positioned … , embodying vectors of power and authority,” and they “are always specific individuals with specific histories of interaction with the other participants in the performance” (1995: 13). But they do not enrich the anodyne and inoffensive concept of “dialogue” with ideas of power, dominance, and fight. So whereas dialogue, in Bakhtin’s later writings and also in our everyday understanding, is by definition non-(ant)agonistic, or, to take up the ancient Socratic term, non-eristic, rhetoric calls to mind the successful, energetic orator who bends the audience to his will and manipulates people’s desires, who can even overwhelm the subjective Other, manipulate their most inner self, their desires, dreams, feelings, who can exploit them, violate, damage, change, shape, or seduce them, and at the very least monopolize their attention by any means available (see Oakley, chapter 14, this volume). Rhetoric, as Kenneth Burke says (1945: xvii), adds on to its dialogical “‘you and me’ quality” the dimension that it is willfully “addressed to some person or to some advantage,”

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that it intends “to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (1950: 41). Dialogue, at least in its widely held normative sense, evokes an overly harmonic love-fest, whereas rhetoric emphasizes the open or clandestine attempt at seizing the Other’s inner being, which is principally understood as malleable. The chapter (10) by Alexander Henn in this volume presents a drastic example of a transition from collusion to collision, analyzing how a translation process, originally born out of a genuine interest in an Other, is turned on its head and becomes instead aimed at the cultural destruction of this very Other. Focusing on dialogue, Tedlock and Mannheim, as well as the other contributors to Dialogic, underemphasize the permanent play of individuals with their own intentions and those of others in the interactional endeavor, as part of strategies to ambush each other by verbal force and “dangerous words” (Brenneis/Myers 1984). Intentionality, addressivity, attribution, motivation— all these concepts of social, psychological, and linguistic theory require some appreciation of the inchoate individual will, be it the Nietzschean will for power or the biological will for existence (see Geist 1978; or a newer discussion in Ross et al. 2007). The Bakhtinian notion of “true dialogue” they employ, that is, “a social field across which multiple voices and multiple cultural logics contend with each other” (Tedlock/Mannheim 1995: 4) or in “dialogy as a relational dialectic grounded in complementarity and diversity, rather than antagony and monopoly” (Albro/Berkley 1999: 39), rings hollow in its idealism. It recalls Jürgen Habermas’s normative pragmatics where the focal force operant in communication is the “peculiar non-coercive force of the better argument” (1973: 137). But already to speak of interactional or dialogical coordination (e.g., Marková et al. 1995, Clark 1996: 82–91) entails thinking of something to be coordinated, be it intentionality or will, some subjectivities to be made intersubjective through interaction. Our references to intentionality and will do not mean to deny, but rather to affirm that participants are caught up in emergent situations beyond their own making; but we suggest that the concept of dialogue that enables us so well to think of the intersubjectivity in social life does not do full justice to the “multiplicity of voices” invoked by Tedlock and Mannheim and their contributors. Participation in a dialogue entails being involved with one’s personality, responsibility, and anticipation (see Du Bois, chapter 2, this volume). People participate in interaction in a holistic way, as acting selves and bearers of “embodied experience,” as the advocates of an anti-Cartesian notion of self and society have introduced it (e.g., Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, Simmel, Mead, etc.; also Shotter, chapter 1, this volume). Thus, with rhetoric, we expand the dialogical field from the space in between interactants to also embrace their selves, their very subjectivities that, strangely protected and sacrosanct in the notion of

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dialogue, are the very target of rhetoric. The cultural product of a dialogue is then not necessarily a polyphonic opera, but might also be merely one voice that has overpowered the others, or one voice fusing together the many, whose multivocality is not retraceable any more, and where the outcome, to put it in terms of emergence, has acquired a new quality irreducible to its component parts. The concept of intentionality, prominent in many Western approaches to language and action, such as speech act theory or pragmatics, has also rightly been criticized by linguistic anthropologists for its bias on the autonomous individual based on Western folk models of the person (see Duranti 2006). Thus, in the exploration of intentional efforts in persuasion, we have to move beyond the individual, strategic agency of the rational actor. For this, Dialogic has laid the groundwork. To say that human beings act dialogically rightfully refers to their awareness of intersubjectivity (also a theory of mind [ToM]), which leaves them responsive to the verbal or nonverbal clues they perceive, often in a habitual and barely conscious way. What is missing from this approach is the power of persuasion—the signals we give, the claims we make, the vectors of power we exude. They are initiated by will and creativity, aimed at stirring others and ourselves into action (and not, as in dialogue, merely into interested contemplation). We humans can open up to dialogue just as well as we can close down to it at times, and are cognitively equipped to even venture into the fantastic, or into madness, and be brilliantly creative as well as insanely antisocial, monad-like, shutting out other voices against our better knowledge. Only then can one render intelligible in more than an evolutionary sense why people even speak dialogically when they “talk to themselves” (Dialogic 1995: 7). Thus, dialogue is only one side of the rhetorical medal, the, in one way or the other, collaborative side, whereas its obverse is the voluntary or involuntary retreat of the individual into their subjective self. It seems overdue to integrate the dialogical and the voluntaristic in one rhetorical approach. For just as there are instances where an overarching history moulds its subjects, there are also moments when the competent individual may make history through prudent, kairotic rhetorical action. What we take from the introduction to The Dialogic Emergence of Culture is, thus, an awareness of the nature of culture: that it emerges, and keeps emerging, from human interaction. In advocating rhetoric we suggest a model of emergence that takes account of both the oscillating forces of the cooperative and the confrontational in interaction and of the individual as genuinely social yet existentially willful. By reason of its power to create unity as well as fragmentation (see Hogan 1998), rhetoric, as we propose it, must be conceived as more wide-ranging than dialogue, for it is constituted both by will and by dialogue, in fact by the constant back and forth feedback between the two. It then stands for the permanent oscillation of actors between the intersubjec-

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tive and the subjective, or between the situation and its constraints, and the individual and their will. It can neither be reduced to subjectivity nor to intersubjectivity, but is constituted by the situational interaction between both (see also Hariman 1995: 183).

Previous Narratives on Rhetoric and Culture The pursuit of the present book has many predecessors in the humanities even in pre-academic times—but also contemporary, differently worded approaches (see Meyer 2009). In tracing some ideas from the early Sophists up to current thinkers, we want to ground our claims about the rhetorical emergence of culture in a long tradition of scholars who have attempted to not only reconcile simplistic oppositions of agency and structure, body and mind, and matter and idea, but who have tried to render intelligible how culture can arise from seemingly dispersed individual actions and interactions. The idea that culture is created by rhetoric was already proposed in antiquity. At the time of emerging Greek democracy the power of persuasion was the great mystery of the time, and Gorgias marveled how “discourse is a great potentate, which by the smallest and most secret body accomplishes the most divine works; for it can stop fear and assuage pain and produce joy and make mercy abound” (1999: § 8). Speaking is social action and much of social action is speaking, and as only rhetoric was considered capable of organizing social life, the Sophists held it in high esteem, performing it in public and teaching it, sometimes even claiming that, as an art, it enabled all humans “to make the weaker argument the stronger” (Protagoras; also Aristotle 2004: 112/II, 24.1402A18–27). Isocrates, heir to the sophists, praised the “power” of persuasion in the development of societies and cultures, saying: Because there is born in us the power to persuade each other and to show ourselves whatever we wish, we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain practically all of the things we have devised. For it is speech that has made laws about justice and injustice and honour and disgrace, without which provisions we should not be able to live together. By speech we refute the wicked and praise the good. By speech we educate the ignorant and inform the wise (1928: 326).

In contrast to the later rhetorical tradition, the Sophists held that rhetoric comprises all kinds of human expressions and sociality and is not restricted to specific social settings or genres (see Baumhauer 1986, Schiappa 1992, 1999). Evidently, Isocrates, just as the authors of Dialogic as well as of the present vol-

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ume, asks how we may grasp the question of individual action in the process of history. He seems to suggest that neither the rhetorical actor nor a transcendental teleological program constitute the sole driving force in the creation of humanity. It is rather the “inborn power to persuade,” which urges us to act and interact and thus creates the continuous impulse to change. With the concept of such an inborn power, Isocrates offers a possible reconciling moment in the classical social science opposition between approaches emphasizing the rationally acting individual and approaches highlighting structural determination of cultural practice: his actor is not determined but tries to determine others, he acts willfully, but is constrained in many ways and not a fully rational homo economicus. The rivaling and eventually triumphant positions of Plato and later, though less radical, of Aristotle, promoted a conceptual (and political) reduction of rhetoric to monological eloquence, and a semiotic divide between the orator and the audience (see Hauser, chapter 7, this volume). The intentionality residing in speech was now facilely assigned to the speaking person, and questions of understanding were assigned to the relation between the two. Persuasive action, then, was seen as a direct result of the orator’s will as related to concrete historical circumstances. However, the orator is rarely the real master of his audience or of the rhetorical situation (see Zebroski, chapter 13, this volume), but is subject to constraints and contingencies that he cannot fully control. Some centuries later, Cicero, while agreeing with the Sophists on the constitutive importance of the interplay of rhetoric and culture/social life (1967: 23–27), presented rhetoric merely as an art and technique completely under the thorough control of man, which had to be acquired through education (see Robling, chapter 12, this volume). The idea that culture emerges out of rhetorical action was (with the notable exceptions of the early modern philospher Vico—as John Shotter reminds us in chapter 1 of this volume—and of Nietzsche) not taken up again until the linguistic turn and the New Rhetoric at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kenneth Burke was among the first to rediscover rhetoric as a way to deal with the paradox of human sociality. Anticipating current insights of brain research, he said that although humans are separated from each other as physical beings, they are psychically “con-substantial” (1950: 21) and use language and symbols in order to identify with one another. If all of us were incommensurably different, language would be in vain, and if we were all of one mind, we would not need language. Rhetoric acts in the middle ground between identity and difference, it induces cooperation and harmony as well as discord and misunderstanding. Through the constant process of inward and outward persuasion, individuals acquire social and cultural competence and learn to understand themselves: “If [the individual] does not somehow act to

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tell himself (as his own audience) what the various brands of rhetorician have told him, his persuasion is not complete. Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (1950: 39).

Resonance: The Elementary Stimulant of Cultural Emergence One way to address the problem of emergence in culture is to take account of resonance, which is accordingly recognized in the present volume as a universal and basic feature of human existence. The notion of “resonance” emphasizes that people “tune in” with their social, cultural, and ecological environment (see Gallagher 1994, Strecker 2000, and also chapter 6, this volume), and, in particular, it addresses unspeakable phenomena in interaction, such as body language and spontaneous understanding. Whereas concepts like agency or coordination tacitly imply a conscious conduct of humans in responding to each other, resonance stresses the elusive power that is exerted in communication and that is not easily controlled or even consciously registered by us. Resonance accords well with our view that social life is emergent and constantly needs mutual adaptation. Subjectivity and objectivity are thus to be understood as mental concomitants of the intersubjective situation where people, who are physically separated but mentally connected through their common response to symbols, constantly and in a never-ending dialogue create their subjective as well as objective worlds. Unni Wikan—in seeking to get “beyond the words”—has explored resonance as an alternative research method “that better enables us to heed people’s complaints, along with their joys … [it] allows us to see communication within social relationships and to put what is unspoken and self-evident to speakers into place before focusing on concepts and discourse” (1992: 470f.). This can be achieved through “attending” and sharing as much of others’ dayto-day worlds as possible. In effect, Wikan demands that anthropologists open themselves up to resonance, which means to open up not only their minds but also their hearts—for Wikan’s Balinese interlocutors effectively the same thing: keneh, “feeling-thought” (1992: 463)—and listen to the unsaid, or even unspeakable, that other actors want to convey. While Wikan has an ethical and methodological agenda, it is clear that she also views resonance as a constitutive element of interaction. This is where Pierre Maranda (chapter 3, this volume) comes in: “If we ‘resonate’ in unison or at least in some sort of harmony, if we think that we feel approximately the same ‘vibes’ as our interlocutors, we maintain and reinforce positive relationships. Orators work on such dynamics when they aim at consolidating cultural inertia. On the other hand, when they disrupt inertia through defiant or rebellious speeches, dissonance arises,

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consensual vectors are no longer operational and dissent or even conflict may ensue.” Thus, in this volume, resonance is understood as the ephemeral and elusive process that makes it possible and indeed attractive for us to coordinate with each other without being explicit about it. Resonance is a seemingly noncoercive force, a seductive power of culture and communication, which affects the body, the emotions, and the mind. Audiences for example do not merely strive to literally understand speakers, but are instead caught up in dense fields of concomitant associations and implications as well as their own bodily responses. As a speaker, we might only in the reactions of our opposites come to develop our conscious intentions. We experience the total communicative situation as a “physiognomy” (see Shotter, chapter 1, this volume), a “Gestalt” that affects us holistically, even with all its contingencies. To use resonance in discussions of social interaction means putting a strong emphasis on the affective qualities of dialogic interaction, its unpredictable, sometimes poetically harmonious and sometimes disruptive instances. It is here where the Baconian definition of rhetoric as “applying reason to the imagination for the better moving of the will” may be inverted—we might as well apply imagination to reason in order to constrain somebody’s will and intentions. Despite the worry of double contingency, humans—as physical beings—are principally open to external influences. They are exposed to forces that emanate from nature as well as from other human beings, through their voices (melody, rhythm, volume) or their bodily presence (posture, gesture, facial expression, movements, appearance, smell). Thus, the always bodily experience of intersubjectivity, along with the Burkean “deep propensity to address” (Carrithers 2009: 7) and our constant lookout for meaning and the attribution of intention to human or non-human Others, is inseparable from, indeed embodied in, interaction. Meaning is used here in a sense that is somewhat removed from referentiality; it serves—corresponding to the ethnomethodological notion of meaning—as a placeholder for the assumption of an actor that there is something unsaid behind the said, that there is still another rhetorical will at work, that another being, just as thrown into existence as oneself, is calling out: “So now for us meaning is not in some scarce and minuscule germ of abstraction secreted in the interstices of quasi-mathematical forms, it abounds instead in the resonating silence of the unsaid—in that possibility of all meaning” (Tyler 1978: 465; see also Strecker, chapter 6, this volume). To attend to resonance also aligns with George Kennedy’s idea of rhetoric as the “energy inherent in communication,” the “emotional energy that compels the speaker” that is never fully absent in any interaction (1992: 2), well visible in the constant attribution of meaning motivated by will and intention to

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the actions of others and oneself. Similarly, Paul Friedrich and John Attinasi, in Dialogic (1995: 35f.), use notions of “corporeal attraction” and “energies” of the participants in social discourse. Rhetoric, then, is an energetic and bodily, at least as much as a semiotic and mental, phenomenon, it is the means, and also the manifestation, of the perpetual adjustment of our expressiveness to the “physiognomy of the dialogic situation” (Shotter, chapter 1, this volume), and our intentions are constantly transformed in such energetic dialogues through which the “worded world strives to capture a non-worded practice” (Carbaugh/Boromisza-Habashi, chapter 4, this volume). Several of the contributors to this book address the issue of how human interaction is caught up in uncertainty and ambiguity, how it is irreducible to prefigured, emergent, or ex post facto ascribed intentions of the interactants, how very little determinacy and evidence there are in which to ground beliefs. However, as the ancient notion of kairos implies, human beings have the ability to make productive use of crises. Stephen Tyler pointed this out some time ago: Our speaking presupposes that we do share in the same objective conventionality, and when we are rudely made to see that we do not, as when others misunderstand us, we do not, except in unusual circumstances, give up on speech, but we seek instead to repair the rents in our net of common intersubjectivity and to get others to understand us. When, in the course of practical affairs, we are confronted with the fact of the presuppositional basis of intersubjectivity, we interpret that revelation as a signal to re-establish and reaffirm its objective conventionality. Apprehensive at the incipient disintegration of our world of previously unquestioned common understandings, we do not retreat into desperately silent loneliness, but are impelled instead to reaffirm and accomplish that world through constructive negotiation. Thus it is that conventionality emerges from and is sustained in communication. Communication does not require just an objective conventionality, it needs conventionality which is at once subjective and objective. (1978: 148)

Tyler’s “constructive negotiation” corresponds to our rhetorical interaction, as it affirms the fleeting patterns we create to make sense of the world. Culture perpetually resonates with us in “concrete or virtual practices of discourse” (see Strecker et al. 2003). As the contributions to this volume emphasize, the rhetorical creation of culture comes about through emergent decentered or collective intentionality, which bears resemblance to an invisible hand, or even Maximilien Robespierre’s understanding of the revolutionary volonté generale8 (see Žižek 2007: xxi–xxiii). Such emergence embeds ephemeral microphenomena of resonance in a wider historical field, letting them coalesce into more or less permanent and observable social or cultural facts. Culture, thus,

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is to some extent created, manipulated, and renewed through never-ceasing resonant phenomena as they are produced in intentional or unintentional acts of persuasion.

Contemporary Parallels As we have seen, this book draws on one direct parent and various remote ancestors. Other books of the same generation as this one also bear a strong family resemblance as they address related issues. We have exemplarily chosen two recent publications, Nick Enfield and Stephen Levinson’s Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction (2006), and Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold’s Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (2007), both of which are strong contributions to contemporary anthropology and address two questions that are important for this book: the question of creative action, and the question of sociality. The creative power of the individual as the wellspring of cultural innovation is the central focus of Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (hereafter Improvisation). For the authors, improvisation is the driving force of culture, since there “is no script for social and cultural life” (2007: 1). If culture is nondeterminate, all actions making up social life stem from the human capacity to learn and to improvise. This should not be understood as hasty bricolage, or shoddy social workmanship. Rather, improvisation is a “cultural imperative” because the world is an unreliable place, and cultural conventions are at best “rules of thumb whose power lies in their very vagueness or non-specificity” (2007: 2). Thus, improvisation is the norm, not an exception or a deviation. It is evidence of creative adjustment and adaptation in a constantly shifting field, rather than a process that breaches a set of more static conditions, be they natural or cultural. This does not mean to say that there are no conditions, no “scripts” at all: improvisation has a temporal, a sequential component in that it can only be diagnosed where it references a previous convention. Instead of being thought of as random, improvisation in fact requires shared cultural “scripts” that have to be understood as prototypes around which actual practice mostly aligns in a scattershot pattern. Such patterns shift, too, and yesterday’s improvisation can quickly coalesce into today’s script, again inviting creativity and improvisation. In their introduction, Hallam and Ingold invoke emergence as the nature of the world in anything but the name: “The improvisational creativity of which we speak is that of a world that is crescent rather than created” (2007: 3). “Crescent” vividly captures the developing and continuous yet twisted and branching path of culture, which neither follows blueprints nor remains at

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predictable homeostasis. Life is, as Kirsten Hastrup’s chapter argues, “always spilling over into new histories, new ways of thinking and new complexities” (2007: 193). Her pithy Bakhtinian phrase here is “the eventness of being” (2007: 193f)—life is not configured, life occurs; or, referring back to Nietzsche, “being is becoming.” While individuals are thus not in full command of their actions, like agents in Aristotelian drama being “caught in the action” (2007: 196), anticipation plays a central role (2007: 199), especially in our reaction to our anticipation of a “story” (see also Oakley, chapter 14, on prolepsis, and Hauser, chapter 7, on Burke, both in this volume). As human beings are constantly engaged in reconciling emerging developments with the past they are prone to illusions, which are necessary for social life (2007: 198), and it is thus that we “perform a world into being … [w]e may even speak the world into occurring, because speech in itself is an act” (ibid.), and patterns emerge in retrospection or anticipation—in the end, “the eventness of being concedes to the illusion of wholeness” (2007: 199). The editors claim that improvisation is “relational, in that it is continually attuned and responsive to the performance of others” (2007: 1).9 But this relatedness, as they develop it, seems to refer only to individual “ways of life” (2007: 7), the paths persons travel. It does not refer to the relatedness to other persons, not even to cooperation and even less so to persuasion, struggles, or conflicts. The relation lies in connecting to antecedents and in carrying over to subsequent events, and not in having to deal with synchronically alternative and competing responses “to life’s contingencies” (2007: 2), and how people adapt to each other in creative ways, or try to convince each other. Even the editors’ idea of “copying or imitation” does not refer to the elementary social condition of interpersonal resonance or negotiated plausibility, but instead is claimed to demand a vague “alignment of observation of the model with action in the world” (2007: 5). For Ingold (2007: 52), the concrescent nature of the world entails that agency in the creation of culture does not lie in the dyad, nor in the creative individual, it lies “neither in persons nor in things, nor even in persons and things.” Instead, Ingold advances that, “agency ‘possesses’ the entities that … are caught up in it. This agency could be none other than the generative flux of the world itself in its continual concrescence, from which persons and things emerge and take the forms they do for the duration of their existence” (ibid.). It is certainly true that in most of the social situations we participate in, the decision to be an agent or a patient is beyond our control; still, to us it seems inconsistent to stress the necessity for human beings to constantly improvise and create culture out of existing features, but not to ground all this in human sociality, in interaction as well as in persuasion and in anticipatory moves such as intention attribution and attention maintenance. We would imagine that a discussion of the rhetorical kairos could have been a central ele-

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ment of a work on improvisation, since kairos is all about well-chosen action, of doing the right thing at the right time in the right place. Human creativity as one important factor in cultural emergence has to be pursued not only into the human mind, or the creative individual, or in its historical imprint, but also in the social situation, the dialogical and rhetorical condition in which willful interactants jointly, through their mutual responsiveness, create something new. The problem of human sociality—so surprisingly missing in Improvisation—has been thoroughly addressed from interdisciplinary perspectives in Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction (hereafter Roots). With its focus on sociality in and out of the fine mechanics of interaction, Roots is moving in quite the opposite direction from Improvisation. The editors emphasize that the main characteristic of human interaction is that it is “built on intersubjectivity,” and is “enabling a brand of joint action that is truly open-ended in goals and structure” (2006: 3). Because of the principal inaccessibility of the Other’s mind, people interact by means of mutual intention attribution: “[H]uman social life is intricately structured through the attribution of actions, motives, intentions, and beliefs to fellow interactants” (ibid.). Enfield and Levinson suggest that individuals are only motivated to react to an event if they can assume that it is not fully contingent, i.e., that it follows an intention, which they see as the most basic requirement for meaning. This is a familiar mainstay of interpretive anthropology since Clifford Geertz’s popularization of the Rylean “wink” and “twitch” distinction (1973). An eye blinks—one observer sees an involuntary, meaningless tic, another feels addressed in a conspiratorial manner, and yet a third recognizes that the wink is in fact a parody of a blink of somebody else again. Without the propensity for “intention attribution,” as Enfield and Levinson stress, participants in any social situation could never know anything, and could accordingly never act, let alone interact meaningfully. It is only through the projection of subjectivity, through a theory of mind (ToM), that we are able to interact, i.e., to create intersubjectivity—again with shades of Luhmann’s double contingency: “Recipients of others’ signals work on the assumption that such signals have been designed specifically for them to extract the intended meaning. In turn, senders of such signals design those signals in such a way as to take into account such an expectation of targeted design on the part of the hearers” (Enfield/Levinson 2006: 6). Several concepts dwelled on in the contributions to Roots, such as Enfield’s “common ground,” William Hanks’s and Herbert Clark’s “commitment,” and Edwin Hutchins’s “distributed cognition,” provide useful tools for further explorations of the emergence of culture through dialogic interaction. “Common ground,” to briefly discuss one of these examples, is designed as the umbrella

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term for “mutual knowledge” and “shared expectations”; it “serves the mutual management of information” (Enfield 2006: 399). Following Paul Grice, Enfield describes it as “the open stockpile of shared presumption that fuels amplicative inference in communication” (ibid.). In other words, it is a repertoire of knowledge, not unlike the ancient thesaurus rhetoricae [the topics]. People are compelled to maintain and reproduce this common ground with others, as it both furthers “affiliation” in a public display of shared grounding and “interactional efficacy,” as coded signals can be “leaner” (2006: 422). Enfield points out that common ground is an important factor in the “communicative economy” and provides evolutionary advantages. Much of Roots is based on such an evolutionary perspective, both in relation to ontogeny and phylogeny. Interaction, right from the start, is understood as an instrument that, particularly for humans, secures evolutionary success. This brings with it a focus on adaptation, i.e., on the functionally effective, and, of course, on emergence. But since the authors’ approach works backward from how human interaction optimally works, and how human adults are cognitively more capable than infants, it ends up being teleological, and not open-ended. Somehow, there is a mirror missing from these accounts, that is, a perspective that highlights those aspects of culture, which can become detrimental for evolutionary success, since, as Chase (2006) has stated, culture’s prominent property is self-referentiality and not selective adaptation. Throughout Roots there prevails a distaste of issues such as browbeating, spell-binding, rendering someone speechless, of breach, madness, fanaticism, and, very markedly, of the issue of coercion through power. To be sure, all of these are adaptationally non-optimal strategies, which may well disappear in the long run of human evolution; as of now, though, they are still around and continue to trouble our lives, since—for example—the breach with some often entails the cooperation with others. Through actions, verbal and non-verbal, it is possible to render somebody mute, to overwhelm their capacities of providing an adequate response when (if at all) their turn comes around in the interaction order. People can close their minds to prompting acts and invitations by others, even if they understand full well what the other intends—even if it means losing “interactional efficacy,” people can and often do demolish or deny common ground, or at least compete over it. To clarify: we agree with the old Schutzean insight that “conflict, just as much as co-operation, can only be conducted within an overarching frame of intelligibility” (Heritage 1984: 70), or, in Levinson’s own words even, that “it is cooperative, mutual intersubjectivity that is the complex computational task that we seem especially adapted to. Machiavellian intelligence merely exploits this underlying Humeian intelligence that make intersubjectivity possible” (1995: 253). However, if it is true that Machiavellian intelligence exploits the Humeian basic disposi-

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tion, then human conflict and mutual damaging is a clear example of second order Machiavellian intelligence, i.e., an intelligence that has left the grounds of solely agonistic predator-prey interaction, and entered the ambassadors’ antechambers of disguised cooperation and deceptive collusion. As Joan Silk points out in a comment on Michael Tomasello’s “cooperation theorem” (2009: 119), “mutualism will not generate concern for the welfare of others. Instead, it will generate manipulative tactics. We don’t get from mutualism to Nelson Mandela, we get from mutualism to Niccolò Macchiavelli.” Thus Levinson might be right in stating that “calculating optimal behaviour in agonistic interaction is a far simpler computational problem than calculating coordination: strictly speaking Machiavellian intelligence is child’s play, a lower-order computational ability; Humeian intelligence (coordination through implicit contract) is the adult stuff ” (Levinson 1995: 227). But exploiting Humeian intelligence for disguised Machiavellian goals is a still more refined task, one which maybe only a portion of competent adults is ever able (and probably also willing) to perfectly master. This dark side of, as we want to put it, Humeian-cum-Machiavellian, or second-order Humeian) interaction, which is left out of the evolutionary approaches praising man’s “special capacity for social interaction” (Levinson 2006: 39), is of central interest to rhetoric, as it helps us think about the articulately cultural situations that are less harmonic and less cooperative than the ones described in Roots and, maybe, in Dialogic, too. In human sociality, there is not only collusion, there is also often collision, and while most social interaction (also as reported and analyzed in this book) will have been intended to be “interpretable,” it seems advisable not to get too enthusiastic about human Humeianness. The attempt of Roots to show how cooperation and coordination are possible—even transculturally and across linguistic boundaries—is in principle commendable, but in its totalizing view of the harmonic aspects of human relations runs the risk of sidelining relations of domination, here euphemistically called “imperfections” (2006: 14). It is thus precisely because of the potential of culture to emerge in a self-referential way, and thus free from some of its biological constraints (Chase 2006) that humans are able—alas!—to disregard the rationales for their Humeian intelligence (as there are, e.g., reciprocity, mutuality, and shared sentiments; see Tomasello 2008), and instead to hyperbolize and indulge in their Macchiavellian inclinations. To sum up, the present book is positioned firstly in line with Dialogic, inasmuch as both highlight the discursive emergence of culture, but it adds to the mix the dimensions of confrontation, will, and power in interaction. Secondly, like Improvisation, it stresses the creativity of individual action, but sees it grounded in sociality. Finally, along with Roots, it attends to the fine

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mechanics of interaction and human sociality, but it does so without any reference to evolutionary adaptation and success. This book does not intend to supply a ready toolkit for research and interpretation; it simply hopes to show how rhetoric allows for a more integrated understanding of culture in its dynamic and unpredictable aspects, as it comprehends the oscillation between the subjective and the intersubjective as the basis of emergence.

The Contributions Part 1: Intersubjectivity John Shotter opens up this first section with a discussion of “The Dance of Rhetoric: Dialogic Selves and Spontaneously Responsive Expressions.” He centers his chapter on rhetoric, emergence, and culture, and claims that the very realm of rhetoric is not monological oratory, but “the temporally-unfolding, living processes of everyday activities.” He situates rhetoric at the core of human experience and develops the picture of a living, dynamic, dialogical, and embodied self. Dialogue means for him firstly to respond to a particular situation not only with one’s mind, but with one’s whole being. Such responsiveness can be understood as a “realm of activity which is neither action that can be explained in terms of reasons, nor behavior which can be explained in terms of causes.” This use of dialogue aligns with Bakhtin (see above) and Du Bois (see below), as it explicitly goes beyond idealist notions of the unfettered exchange of detached views. Our bodily participation in the world is the reason why we experience meaning holistically as a “physiognomy,” as Shotter says in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and he points out that “like gestures, like facial expressions, like smiles or frowns, like exclamations of delight or outbursts of dismay, our utterances point outside themselves to a reality beyond.” Understanding others in social interaction is therefore more like understanding a theme in music than a logical theorem in mathematics. This is why rhetoric matters: it is music and reason, action and contemplation, poetry and prose all in one. In the second chapter, “Co-Opting Intersubjectivity: Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self,” John Du Bois examines the tensions between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. He is interested in the achievement of actors “struggling to connect and contend with one another” and uses the concept of resonance for a description of what happens in dialogue, defining it as the “activation of affinities across utterances.” He elucidates discourse through the concept of the “dialogic moment,” which gives weight to stance-differentials and rhetorical

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energies as speakers engage with one another. The stances actors assume have social consequences, and since we are already internally divided and contentious, our stances cannot but arise “in a condition of rhetoric.” In chapter 3, “Echo Chambers and Rhetoric: Sketch of a Model of Resonance Theory,” Pierre Maranda develops a model for a probabilistic theory of communication. He uses a concept of resonance based on a model of mental and emotional “echo chambers,” in which our ideas and domains of semantics and imagery reverberate. Through socialization we grow up in shared representational universes and therefore find it more “natural” to link certain concepts than others. This means that in order for persuasion to be effective, actors try to resonate with their audiences in such a way that the connections they suggest seem to suggest themselves—which they in fact do. This resonance model, which has different emphases but similar interests as Du Bois’s approach, draws on several precursors and contemporary approaches in other disciplines, the most familiar one being Vladimir Propp’s classic Structure of the Russian Folktale, but then widens the scope to include all cultural domains. “Resonance” occurs when a speaker manages to “hit the right tones,” to steer the audience along semantic paths well established by cultural inertia (as in the case of commonplaces) or through glades full of dancing butterflies (as in the case of a successful metaphor or other improvisation). But of course there are also moments of misunderstanding and communicative disharmony. Maranda highlights the role of attention, memory, and imagination in these processes, and he grounds central concerns of this volume in a structuralist and cognitivist approach. In “Discourse Beyond Language: Cultural Rhetoric, Revelatory Insight, and Nature” (chapter 4), Donal Carbaugh and David Boromisza-Habashi allow the Blackfeet to speak to us about a stance of listening and attending, which foregrounds different ways of speaking about nonlinguistic communication, and, correspondingly, about listening and resonating. The basic premise, so the Blackfeet say, is that “there are agents in communication with humans that are other-than-human.” Wisdom lies in listening to the wind and the water; and listening to wind and water is part of a general discursive form, and of cultural beliefs very closely linked to Blackfeet individual and collective identity. This Blackfeet “ethno-rhetoric” presents an explicit cultural critique of self, of mind, of Cartesian dualism, as revealing a lack of humility appropriate for human beings. What is called for in this Blackfeet discourse is constant anticipation, always to be ready to attend to the prosody of nature; to aim at sensory openness, to learn through different channels about oneself and reality; and acceptance of the limitation of words to do justice to our modes of experience. This is another approach to intersubjectivity, one which takes account of the

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ironical aspects of the attempt to linguistically code pre-linguistic or non-linguistic experience. Bernhard Streck takes us on a journey through some little-visited backroads of the shadow history of anthropology. In chapter 5, “The Spellbinding Aura of Culture: Tracing its Anthropological Discovery,” he reflects on early explorations of homo rhetoricus, and the way culture was understood as rhetorical—especially in the way it overwhelms rather than convinces the self and the Other. Streck focuses on the anthropologist who often was—and still is—fascinated by the aura of things. While hardly any researcher would deny this attraction, the enchantment as a rule does not survive the transformation of field experience into published sober monographs. This aura of the exotic, at times recognized under various names in the history of anthropology, takes it strengths from incomplete understanding, from the veil, from mystery, from evocation. It is the refracting surface of an ethnographic object, which holds our attention strongest. Streck shows how different schools in anthropology (the Kulturkreislehre, the configuration theory of culture, the Frankfurt School and French Surrealism, and even Bronisław Malinowski) either refused or embraced the phenomenon of auratic fascination, and he finds in an early anthropology of costume (by Heinrich Schurtz and others) a precursor of the rhetoric culture project. For Schurtz, form was essential. Form is what persuades and holds attention, and form allows attribution of meaning, without the epistemological worry about “truth.” Rhetoric culture theory can build, argues Streck, on much that has come and gone before, which has attended to aura as that which communicates identity and difference, which shows and simultaneously veils. “Tenor in Culture,” chapter 6, by Ivo Strecker explores phenomena that are similarly elusive as the auratic fascination examined by Streck. Tenor is a musical concept, which in everyday life has been analogically extended to refer to “some kind of communicative mood and content that eludes univocal definition” and may also be applied to more embracing social situations and even culture as a whole. Ruth Benedict, Strecker argues, examined, for example, tenor phenomena when she contrasted Apollonian and Dionysian Patterns of Culture (1934), and so did Gregory Bateson in his ethnography of Iatmul male ethos (1936). Strecker presents a detailed overview of the term tenor as used in musical theory, in functional linguistics, and in the theory of metaphor. The latter is of particular interest, because it allows Strecker to recast I. A. Richards’s theory of metaphor in terms of rhetoric and use tenor instead to “indicate the movement of thought and feeling that results from the co-presence, co-operation and interaction of the two parts that constitute a metaphor.” This is then connected to an ethnography of tenor phenomena in Hamar (southern Ethiopia). Various kinds of relationships that “involve an extension of the per-

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sona and can be understood as aspects of what we call ‘face’” are examined to illustrate the tenor in culture.

Part 2: Emergence Such an “ethnography of rhetoric” is called for by the first voice from the academic discipline of rhetoric in the present volume. In chapter 7, “Attending the Vernacular: A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric,” Gerard Hauser provides an overview of “the vernacular” in his field. He starts with the addenda to Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards’s Meaning of Meaning, in which Malinowski tells of his struggle with the recalcitrant pragmatics of Trobriand speech. These quotidian processes are what rhetoricians of that period largely ignored, favoring instead “official discourse” as the object of their (often critical and politicized) analyses. It was with Kenneth Burke’s appreciation of performance, drama, and form, I. A. Richards’s attack on referential understandings of meaning, and Bakhtin’s reformulation of dialogic interaction that new strands started to form, but the detached stance of the rhetoricians persisted, who as a rule preferred to interpret leaders and writers rather than the man in the street. Hauser calls for academic activism, which would try and do justice to the urban vernacular. Public opinion, he argues, could best be studied by leaving the rhetorical armchair, so to speak, to take up methods from ethnography, such as participant observation. The essay turns away from the previous discussions of intersubjectivity, serving to frame the subsequent texts, which are more ethnographic in nature, and each of which constitutes an attempt to deal with emergent phenomena. Thus, Hauser’s chapter provides a starting point to think about the subsequently arising issues of the social, temporal, and spatial situatedness of rhetorical practices (Weiner, Sapienza, Oakley), the violence of genre (Henn), and rhetorics and resonance in ritual (Girke/Pankhurst). Looking ahead, we find that part 3, which focuses on methodological reflections on agency and authority, is also already grounded in this contribution. The first concrete example of a “rhetoric of the vernacular” is provided by James Weiner, in chapter 8, who describes how in Highland Papua New Guinea the rhetoric of the Foi resonates in different ways with their spatial surrounding in their “Enhoused Speech: The Rhetoric of Foi Territoriality.” In the author’s words, “the simultaneous emplacement of talk, and the enhoused talk of place” generate the “historical content of the Foi person’s relationship to and experience of lived territoriality.” Weiner illustrates this finding by two diametrically opposed ethnographic examples of how rhetoric connects with territoriality: In one exemplary debate the Foi “bring the territorial system into alignment with the historical-social alignment of men.” In a second debate re-

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corded fifteen years later, however, the opposite strategy prevails, as “the socialpolitical alignment of men was deemed to be subordinate to the territorial situating of a head-man and his community.” Thus, whereas the first example shows how kinship and descent are used as strategies legitimizing land allocation, the second example demonstrates how land tenure may be employed to explain kinship and descent. Talk, as Weiner says, becomes a “spatially-positioned activity” producing space as well as being produced by it. Weiner’s contribution is thus a good example of how rhetoric and culture constantly co-emerge and, in doing so, go beyond the previously acknowledged status quo. Fil Sapienza investigates the rhetoric of Russian online communities in chapter 9, “Transcultural Rhetoric and Cyberspace.” The notion of “transculture,” as proposed by Mikhail Epstein, is indicative of the ways in which immigrant Russians deal with their own “being an Other” in their new US American environment. The internet has taken on a central role in linking people suffering from cultural alienation and loss of their roots. The traditional basis of community is here divorced from earlier referents, such as co-residence, language, commonplaces, rhetorical tropes (metaphor and metonymy) and language ideologies (i.e., “free speech” vs. “censorship”). How, asks Sapienza, do people rhetorically construct such virtual communities and then begin to accept them as more than just ephemeral acts of interaction? His most important finding is that these online communities not only serve the direct narcissistic needs of their members, but also attract internet users without immigrant background who join in and discuss about Russians in America. The users “perpetually diversify their own unique cultural experiences,” and refuse to identify with an apparently given cultural background. Thus, global virtual communities—despite their own ethos of integration—may really support an individual à la carte-approach to identity without requiring members to really feel committed. Alexander Henn’s study “Jesuit Rhetorics: Translation versus Conversion in Early-Modern Goa” (chapter 10) provides an analysis of missionaries’ attempts at religious conversions in Goa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We are first given an account of the Jesuits’ efforts at mastering cultural repertoires, language as well as performative arts, apparently in order to better transmit the biblical message. Biblical stories were told from the pulpit in a style familiar to the formerly Hindu audiences, and Jesuits active in Goa were at pains to immerse themselves in these pagan traditions. Was this an attempt at intersubjectivity, at translation, as it superficially seems, asks Henn? Following his account, it becomes clear that an element of true mutuality was lacking, and that these initial efforts soon turned into a destructive practice. Hindu temples and idols were destroyed and churches were then built on the sites of these temples, the use of local languages was prohibited and the use

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of the Portuguese language was enforced, and finally the very poetry that had been emulated was immolated. Henn’s argument that these two processes were not two different subjects, but really have to be seen as two sides of the same coin, namely the process of converting the Hindus of Goa to Christianity, puts us on guard for similarly proffered claims of “resonance” through immersion. Attempts to achieve intersubjectivity might not always be as harmless as one may want to believe. Chapter 11, “Evoking Peace and Arguing Harmony: An Example of Transcultural Rhetoric in Southern Ethiopia,” by Felix Girke and Alula Pankhurst, in contrast, provides us with an ethnographic example of the persuasive power of joint action. The authors describe a peace ceremony in Southern Ethiopia that was hosted by elders from one of the ethnic groups in the region, during which the desired joint will for peace was invoked through joint ritual action. As the region is ethnically highly diverse, it is interesting to observe how the protagonists succeed in developing a common “rhetoric of ritual,” including metaphors and figures in the verbal as well as the nonverbal realm of symbolization, and how, step by step, the representatives of all groups concerned feel persuaded by this rhetoric and join in the common endeavor of peace building. The vow of peace is partly given through verbal declarations in public speech in front of the assembly and partly through joint ritual action such as the breaking and burying of spears. Particularly rich as an example of the creation of resonance among the participants is the blessing to which all participants respond in chorus.

Part 3: Agency This final section starts off with a direct counterpoint to Girke and Pankhurst’s essay, offered by Franz-Hubert Robling’s in chapter 12, “In Defense of the Orator: A Classicist Outlook on Rhetoric Culture.” He returns to the rhetorical aptitude and prudence of the competent orator as it was conceived in antiquity. Rhetoric, as Robling insists, has to be understood as an art. The competent orator is not just someone who has the natural talent to capture an audience, rather he has to learn this skill in a long process of self-education, which also involves a thorough study of the cultural conventions of the people he addresses. This is the reason why culture emerges rhetorically: rhetoric requires the cultivation of performance as basis of successful oratory. In a historical overview Robling returns to the Sophists and to the ancient concept of kairos, the patience to wait for the right moment, the ability to find the right words and the knowledge to address the right auditors, and in a final part he applies his findings to an ethnographic description of an orator’s action during James Cook’s voyage around the world.

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The question of “Rhetoric, Anti-Structure, and the Social Formation of Authorship” in the creation of culture is addressed by James Zebroski in chapter 13. Drawing on Steve Mailloux’s cultural rhetoric, Zebroski explores “the political effectivity of trope and argument in culture” using the example of gay authorship in the United States. He agrees with scholars who connect rhetorical epistemology with postmodernism but also notices that rhetoric features a “blind spot,” namely “the tendency to reduce all situations as diverse as they be, to a given situation in an existing social structure.” How does one overcome this blind? He finds the answer in Victor Turner’s anti-structure model: history constantly moves between structure and anti-structure, and rhetoric plays its role in both, affirmative as part of structure, and rebellious as part of the anti-structure. The formation of gay authorship is a good example of the co-emergence of rhetoric and culture first as part of the anti-structure and afterwards of the well-established structure. In his text, Zebroski analyses the slow but insistent rhetorical emergence of gay authorial culture in several wellidentifiable historical steps. Chapter 14, Todd Oakley’s “Attention and Rhetoric: Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning” connects the question of agency back to the issue of intersubjectivity with which this volume begins. To demonstrate how a rhetorical actor is able to grasp and keep an addressee’s attention, he presents an analysis of an advertising campaign aimed at US citizens, encouraging them to take part in the national census of 2000. He asks how “attention,” as a cognitive effort of the addressee, can be alerted, oriented, shared, selected, sustained, controlled, and harmonized through rhetoric. This links up with culture in that attention processes are fuelled by projections of a future through reaching back into experiences of the past, creating an anticipation of an imminent here-and-now. For rhetoricians and anthropologists alike, Oakley’s research on attention is a real eye-opener, for it provides many new concepts and a new mode of thinking about persuasive processes. Most importantly, he makes clear that agency can be distributed, even dispersed, and that “rhetoric” abounds not only in clearly distinguished speaker-hearer relations, but that persuasion is actually present in our minds whenever we “blend concepts” and conjure up “mental spaces.” The book concludes with the chapter (15) “Emergence, Agency and the Middle Ground of Culture: A Meditation on Mediation” by Stephen Tyler. Tyler weaves together the basic ideas of the Rhetoric Culture Project with the issues of this particular volume (i.e., intersubjectivity, agency, emergence). In an essay that deals with quotidian struggles as much as with academic dilemmas, he shows how we try to make sense of our emergent lives, or indeed the emergent lives of others. In doing so, we often privilege certain forms of meaningmaking over others, mark out laudable conviction from unsavory persuasion,

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and assume that our agency (or, alternatively, the agency of other persona, however inanimate they are) conquers all. Tyler, in contrast, sees social actors as will-driven but lacking in scope, and thus advocates reserve in dealing with agency, as so many of even the thoughts we think and the things we feel are prompted by implicit connections between words and objects. This is where he offers us an escape: in the grammatical middle voice, which acknowledges will and action, but treads carefully both in ascribing agency and in establishing the position of the author in representation without on the other hand falling into the trap of ascribing agency to a structure external to agents. Rhetoric has traditionally overemphasized the orator and underestimated culture, whereas anthropology has overrated culture and undervalued the rhetorical agent. Consequently, Tyler grounds the whole endeavor of “Rhetoric/Culture” in the mediating slash signifying “the action and interaction that produces both object and subject as self-organizing systems.” Thus, what is needed, as Tyler invokes, is a chiastic relationship between the two: “just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric.” For our project, this means that we do not want to get bogged down in “rhetoric” as yet another new panacea for all the ills that perennially befall the study of culture; neither do we want to return to the rhetorical turn of the 1990s. As always, theoretical innovation, critiques as well as consolidation, can only serve the enabling purpose of offering new perspectives on empirical problems, and it is with this aim that we have assembled the present volume. This book, then, only succeeds where it sensitizes readers of hopefully various backgrounds to the social and bodily conditions of communication, to the back-and-fro of actors who come to develop and realize their own intentions only in interaction with other will-endowed people and recalcitrant or tempting environments, and to the necessity of attending to the ever present phenomena of resonance, contingency, and persuasion.

References Agha, Asif. 1997. “Review of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture.” Language in Society 26: 593–97. Albro, Robert, and Anthony Berkley. 1999. “Anthro-Signifying at the Millennium: Review of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture and Rhetorics of Self-Making.” Anthropological Quarterly 72 (1): 34–43. Aristotle. 2004. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Mineola: Dover Publications. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barber, Karin. 2007. “Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick.” In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Oxford, New York: Berg.

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Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 1995. Rhetorics of Self-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baumhauer, Otto. 1986. Die sophistische Rhetorik: Eine Theorie sprachlicher Kommunikation. Stuttgart: Metzler. Blumenberg, Hans. 1981. “Anthropologische Annäherungen an die Aktualität der Rhetorik.” In Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben, ed. Hans Blumenberg. Stuttgart: Reclam. Brenneis, Don, and Fred Myers, eds. 1984. Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific. New York: NYU Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1945. A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1950. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Carrithers, Michael, ed. 2008. Rhetoric and the Vicissitudes of Life. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Chase, Philip G. 2006. The Emergence of Culture: The Evolution of a Uniquely Human Way of Life. Berlin: Springer. Cialdini, Robert B. 2001. Influence: Science and Practice. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Cicero, Marcus T. 1967. De Oratore. Trans. E. W. Sutton, completed with an introduction by H. Rackham. London: Heinemann. Cintron, Ralph 1998. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday. Boston: Beacon. Clark, Herbert. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csányi, Vilmos. 1994. “Individuality and the Emergence of Culture During Evolution.” World Futures 40: 207–13. Darnell, Regna. 1996. “Review of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture.” Anthropological Linguistics 38: 560–63. Duranti, Alessandro. 2006. “The Social Ontology of Intentions.” Discourse Studies 8 (1): 31–40. Dwyer, Kevin. 1982. Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Enfield, Nick J. 2006. “Social Consequences of Common Ground.” In Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds. Nick J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson. Oxford, New York: Berg. Enfield, Nick J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2006. Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford, New York: Berg. Fernandez, James W., ed. 1991. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fox, James, ed. 1988. To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Winifred. 1994. The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. New York: HarperPerennial Galpin, Charles Josiah. 1937. “Review of The Emergence of Human Culture.” Journal of Farm Economics 19 (3): 820–821. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books. Geist, Valerius. 1978. Life Strategies, Human Evolution, Environmental Design: Toward a Biological Theory of Health. New York: Springer. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gombrich, Ernst H. 1977. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon.

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Gorgias of Leontini. 1999. Encomium of Helen. Trans. Brian R. Donovan. http://www. classicpersuasion.org/pw/gorgias/helendonovan.htm, date accessed 17 January 2010. Habermas, Jürgen. 1973. “Wahrheitstheorien.” In Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Festschrift für W. Schulz, ed. Helmut Fahrenbach. Pfullingen: Neske. Hallam, Elizabeth, and Tim Ingold. 2007: “Creativity and Cultural Improvisation: An Introduction.” In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Oxford, New York: Berg. Hariman, Robert. 1995. Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hastrup, Kirsten. 2007. “Performing the World: Agency, Anticipation and Creativity.” In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Oxford, New York: Berg. Heintz, Bettina. 2004. “Emergenz und Reduktion: Neue Perspektiven auf das MikroMakro-Problem.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 56 (1): 1–31. Hermans, Hubert J. M. 2002. “The Dialogical Self as a Society of Mind.” Theory & Psychology 12 (2): 147–60. Hogan, J. Michael. 1998. Rhetoric and Community: Studies in Unity and Fragmentation. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1990: Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum. Ingold, Tim 2007. “Introduction to Part I: Modes of Creativity in Life and Art.” In Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Oxford, New York: Berg. Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities, ed. P. Kroskity. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Isocrates. 1928: Isocrates. Trans. George Norlin. London: Heinemann. Kennedy, George A. 1992. “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1): 1–21 Lakoff, George. 1987: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Levinson, Stephen C. 1995. “Interactional Biases in Human Thinking.” In Social Intelligence and Interaction, ed. E. N. Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. “Introduction: The Evolution of Culture in a Microcosm.” In Evolution and Culture, eds. Stephen C. Levinson and P. Jaisson. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2006. “The Human ‘Interaction Engine.’” In Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds. Nick J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson. Oxford, New York: Berg. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP. Mailloux, Steven. 1989. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell. Marková, Ivana, Carl F. Graumann, and Klaus Foppa, eds. 1995. Mutualitites in Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Christian. 2007. “Rhetorik, außereuropäische: Orale Kulturen.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik: Vol. 8., ed. G. Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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———. 2009. “Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory.” In Culture + Rhetoric, eds. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Mosko, Mark S., and Frederick H. Damon, eds. 2005. On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ross, Don, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid and G. Lynn Stephens, eds. 2007. Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schiappa, Edward. 1992. “Rhêtorikê: What’s in a Name? Toward a Revised History of Early Greek Rhetorical Theory.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1): 1–15. ———. 1999. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shore, Bradd. 1998. “A Dialogue on Dialogue: Review of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture with Replies by the Editors.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (2): 210–21. Silk, Joan. 2009. “Comment.” In Why We Cooperate, Michael Tomasello. Boston: MIT Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1993. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John Lucy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Stephan, Achim. 1992. “Emergence: A Systematic View on its Historical Facets.” In Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, eds. A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim. Berlin. New York: de Gruyter. Stoller, Paul. 1994: “Ethnographies as Texts/Ethnographers as Griots.” American Ethnologist 21 (2): 353–66. Strecker, Ivo. 2000. “The Genius Loci of Hamar.” In Journal of Northeast African Studies, Special Issue: Cultural Variation and Social Change in Southern Ethiopia, ed. Jon Abbink, 7 (3): 85–118. Strecker, Ivo, Christian Meyer, and Stephen Tyler. 2003. “Rhetoric Culture: Outline of a Project for the Study of the Interaction of Rhetoric and Culture.” http://www. rhetoricculture.org/outline.htm, date accessed 17 January 2010. Strecker, Ivo, and Stephen A. Tyler, eds. 2009. Culture + Rhetoric. Oxford, New York: Berghahn. Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim, eds. 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tyler, Stephen A. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid. New York: Academic Press. Wikan, Unni. 1992. “Beyond the Words: the Power of Resonance.” American Ethnologist 19 (3): 460–82. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. “Introduction.” In Maximilien Robespierre: Virtue and Terror. Texts selected and annotated by Jean Ducange. London, New York: Verso.

Notes 1. We are grateful to a number of scholars for valuable comments on earlier versions of this introduction, including Ivo Strecker, Jörg Bergmann, Nik Schareika, as well as the three anonymous reviewers.

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2. Reviewers went out of their way to comment: Regna Darnell calls it “an exemplar for the recent turn toward dialogue” and parts of it “brilliant” (1996: 560–63); Asif Agha found it a “rare pleasure” (1997: 593) and extols its virtues over five pages; Robert Albro and Anthony Berkley (1999) take it as an opportunity for a comparative review essay (with Rhetorics of Self-making as foil); Bradd Shore also writes five pages, and invites Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim to reply (1998). Dialogic, then, was wellreceived critically, but we are aware of hardly any instances where the volume or its contributions are prominently referenced. 3. It is useful to recall here that dialogic does not derive from the Greek root “dyo-,” indicating a duality, but from “dia-”, meaning “across or back and forth” (see Tedlock and Mannheim 1995: 4). The central character of a dialogue, then, is its position “in between” the participants rather than in a dyad. Dialogues are thus open to more participants than just two, as often seems implied. 4. Corresponding to the initial claim that culture is created by rhetoric, the “culture” elicited and presented by the anthropologist in their ethnography has to be understood as a naturalistic peek at an ongoing dialogue, that is, on structuration in progress. In this sense, ethnography has the same epistemic status as dialogue in general: “ethnography is … a form of ‘culture making’ … like any other” (Tedlock/Mannheim 1995: 13; see also Shore et al. 1998: 218, Agha 1997: 593). 5. The phrase “First comes the making, then comes the matching,” going back to Ernst H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1977: 99), and often used by Ivo Strecker in lectures and conversations, has been a constant reminder to the authors of precisely this constitutive inchoateness of the world as well as of social actions—our own as well as those of others—which we keep trying to “match,” to make sense of, in ex post facto rhetorical, internal, or external dialogue under the stern gaze of plausibility. 6. Already Émile Durkheim is credited with a concern for emergence. See Stephan (1992) for a biography of the concept, and Mosko (2005: 32f., 35) for a discussion that deals with the idea of self-organization and its various manifestations in the history of anthropology. As Bettina Heintz points out particularly well (2004), starting from Durkheim’s work, it has been common in sociology to conflate and confuse reductionist approaches (which assume that all macro-phenomena are the traceable result of micro-processes) and truly emergence-oriented work (which assumes that microprocesses cannot account for macro-phenomena, the latter being autonomous to a degree). As noted, our emphasis on the contingent moment of emergence puts us in the latter camp. 7. Examples of such god-terms were, among others, proposed by interpretive anthropology (culture), by Claude Lévi-Strauss (structure), by Michel Foucault (discourse), by Durkheim (society), and by cultural ecologists (environment). For structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss and poststructuralists such as Foucault, the agent of social life is structure or a similarly agentic discourse. Myth or discourse is manifesting itself through human action. Accordingly, in structuralism, the only ontological (or essential) being is structure, whereas humans only live biologically (or existentially/incidentally). Thus, man, rather than being the agent of life, is the patient of structure, as agency is overshadowed by patiency. Alternative social theories, such as Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Luhman’s social system theory, or Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration have tried to grasp the relationship between structure and agency more as one of interaction and co-emergence than as one of one-way determination.

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8. Slajov Žižek (2007) explains that the emergence of a general will, the turns and twists of which are determined by a vote, is not decided by the majority, but stated by it. The act of stating shows the minority that they have been mistaken about the collective will. That is, the contingent emergent is naturalized as—indeed!—destiny through the totalitarian concept of the volonté generale. This sleight-of-mind is worth keeping in mind when analyzing statements on contingency, determinism, debate, and compromise, as found in any ethnography. 9. The comment that “there is no reason … to limit the scope of social life to human actants” (2007: 7) is highly appreciated; human beings in fact do find meaning in other realms as well (see Carbaugh/Boromisza-Habashi, chapter 4, this volume), and the resulting models of intersubjectivity and the implied theories of agency and intention cast a welcome light on social life in general.










Part 1

Intersubjectivity

CHAPTER 1

The Dance of Rhetoric Dialogic Selves and Spontaneously Responsive Expressions John Shotter








meaning is a physiognomy —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around—expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction. —Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. —Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays The “otherness” which enters us and makes us other. —George Steiner, Real Presences

A central theme of the Rhetoric Culture project is an exploration of the constitutive interplay occurring between culture and rhetoric—to retrieve, explore, and to make full use of “the ancient insight that just as rhetoric is founded in culture, culture is founded in rhetoric” (Strecker, Meyer & Tyler 2003). I will

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attempt to do just that below, take this theme out of the seminar room and conference hall and resituate it—as is clearly required—out in the dynamic movements occurring in ordinary people’s everyday activities. Giambattista Vico saw the necessity of this shift long ago, and his work has played a large part in my own thinking for many years. In his Scienza Nuova of 1744, he outlined a “conceit of scholars” to which (inexperienced as we academics all are in the practical activities of everyday life) we can easily fall victim; for, as he saw it, scholars “will have it that what they know must have been eminently understood from the beginning of the world, [and this] makes us despair of getting [the understanding we seek] from philosophers. So, for purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no books in the world” (1968: para. no. 330)—that is, we must accept that everything comes to us only in the fleeting, fragmentary “movements” aroused in us by the events and expressions of others occurring around us, and that it is we who fashion these fragments into meaningful wholes or unities. Thus, for Vico, “there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question; that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and that its principles are to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (1968: para. no. 331). Thus the mentalities of different people in different times and in different places can be very different. Those of us trained in the “rational thought” of our day can find this difficult to accept. For example, we can find Vico’s “conceit of scholars” expressed by James Frazer (1890) or by Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1926), who have far too easily seen the “thought” of “primitive mentalities” as a crude and mistaken attempt to frame thought in what we now think of as a correct and scientific manner.1 Vico, however, to break the hold of such a formalistic, and in fact Cartesian framework on our thinking, suggested a developmental view of our cultural history, with our higher, more self-consciously conducted forms of mentality emerging “providentially” from lower, more spontaneously responsive forms. It is precisely this developmental approach that I would like to explore here. However, I want to do so within the context of an emphasis, not on our higher, cognitive, mental activities—the activities of mind—but on the spontaneously responsive movements of our living bodies on, as Vico terms it, our “wholly corporeal imagination” (1968: para. no. 376), our lower forms. The general character of Vico’s developmental approach is very nicely summarized by Michael Mooney. He sets out its essential assumptions as follows: In Hobbes, language was made the servant of mind, and mind in turn was conceived as a kind of instrument of verbal computation, which adds and subtracts names until the object of thought is “produced.”

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In Vico the matter is entirely reversed, and herein we have the most fundamental novelty of all in his work. Mind does not precede language, but arises with it, and both in turn are the necessary outcome of social urgency, the result of a spontaneous attempt, gradually made conscious, to grasp a startling experience through images that are familiar. At first mere gestures, or actions taken in common, the ordering images become in time articulate and complex, even as the institutions from which they are initially indistinguishable grow large and diverse. This elaborate universe of meaning, always restless and changing, remains intact so long as those who inhabit it continue to have a common sense of things; indeed whole areas of experience may in the process achieve the status of refined, quasi-independent arts and sciences. But let the founding sense of things be overturned by events, or let the struggle for a public consensus give way to a tyranny of private opinions, and the structure will weaken and totter, and possibly collapse. (1985: 261f., emphasis added)

Thus in this chapter, in resituating rhetoric out in the dynamics of ordinary people’s everyday activities, I want to an extent to follow Vico. But the task of noticing the nature of events and expressions only fleetingly present to us in our daily transactions is not, of course, easy to do, nor was it for Vico. For, given the Cartesianism of his time—which has only grown more intense in our own—the tendency of rational, modernist thinkers is not to take our spontaneous bodily responses as playing any part at all in our inquiries. They do not tend to respond to events occurring around them in spontaneously expressive “poetic” and “moving” ways, i.e., rhetorically, in order, perhaps, to gain a better understanding of them. Their first step is to treat the Others and othernesses they encounter as presenting them, as expert individual thinkers, with a problem to be analyzed and solved. Indeed, to go further, we now feel obliged to follow a method that, as René Descartes put it, is to be likened to those “long chains of reasonings, quite simple and easy, which geometers are accustomed to using to teach their most difficult demonstrations” (1968: 41). The steps involved are well known: (1) treat the newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved; (2) analyze it into already known elements; (3) find a pattern or order amongst them; (4) hypothesize a causal agency responsible for the pattern (call it, say, “the mind” or some other such entity—in other words, introduce an agency, what we can call, as we shall see, a “god-idea”); (5) find further evidence for its functioning; (6) enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system;

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(7) manipulate the strangeness (now known within the terms of the theory) to produce outcomes advantageous to us; (8) call the theory “the explanatory solution” to the problem, and turn now to “apply” the theory elsewhere.

Rhetorically, the consequences of these moves, especially in those aspects of our lives in which we conduct academic inquiries into living activities, is perhaps surprising in that it leads to conflicting experiences when actually meeting with another person: First, we should note, that rather than with the personal presence of an author, a reader’s transactions are with whatever exists within the imaginary “reality” created in their reading of the author’s text—the facts, it is said, should “speak for themselves”; a new (fictitious or theoretical) “space of interaction,” i.e., a “space” (but not a “time-space” with a developmental dimension to it) is created in those transactions; and what cannot be transported into (and out of) that space cannot be treated as having a real, “objective” existence. Clearly, what cannot be transported into (and out of) such a space are the temporally unfolding, living processes of everyday activities, including the everyday rhetorical practices by which that space itself is created. This is because, in their essential nature, both the subject of these moves and the moves themselves, are inextricably embedded in a social, historical, political, and cultural context. And in the moment-by-moment unfolding of their execution, they take the specific, local contingencies present in that context at every moment into account. This context is an “otherness” to which the subject of these moves, and these moves themselves, are responsive; it presents, moment by moment, different opportunities for and barriers to our living, human activities.2 This vital otherness, and our vital responsiveness to it, is (seemingly) ruled out of existence, however, by the “arts of theoretical explanation” (outlined above) that we apply in our attempts to “discover” an order or pattern in people’s lives. Or, at the least, if it is not actually eliminated, the introduction of a supposed theoretical source of the supposed order observed logically inverts and relocates, so to speak, what the first move seemed to eliminate. So that what is in fact being done by people themselves is represented as being done by a mysterious agency in its own right, divorced from the actors’ lives. It is now said to be the cause of, or mechanical reason for, why they act and talk as they do. People’s spontaneous bodily responses to each other and to the othernesses in their surroundings have been eradicated from consideration3. If we turn now to the kind of self assumed by investigators in this process, we can find that both it, and the effects of this process of inquiry upon it, are equally well known.

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(1) The self is a disembodied or disengaged, isolated, self-contained, purely cognitive self—a disembodied subjective mind, set over against an objective, external world; (2) ontologically, it remains unchanged in the process, only its “content” is changed; (3) in not being engaged or involved with the Others or othernesses around it, as a static, atomic, timeless self, it remains outside or separate from the Other or othernesses around it; (4) it does not “enter into” any special types of engagements or involvements that in any way can “transport” it into a “new world”; (5) this disembodied mind-self only acquires knowledge of an Other or otherness in the form of data or information, inner representations of outer facts; (6) our aim in acquiring this knowledge is, as Descartes put it in 1637, to be “masters and possessors of Nature.”

Thus, as I see it now, there is much fundamentally missing in this whole, Cartesian-based approach. But its greatest failing is in its treatment of language. In treating language as an object of thought, external to our being, and in emphasizing only its representational function, not only does it ignore its rhetorical functions of disclosure and persuasion, its creative, constitutive aspects, but it also ignores the capacity of people’s utterances to “move” us, bodily. For example, if I report that “things are both black and white,” from an information transmission point of view, I am being illogical; but poetically, I am telling you that things are more complicated than at first thought. In other words, this academic picture of language ignores the two-way, dialogically structured, reciprocally responsive nature of our ordinary, everyday social practices (upon which it in fact relies for its functioning). Indeed, it does more. In representing language as simply a monological, one-way, mechanical cause-and-effect process of information transmission, it eradicates these dialogical, two-way, living, responsive features of language from rational view. In short, many of our current accounts of the nature of language, structuralist (and post-structuralist) accounts in particular, ignore the following five features of our communicative activities: (1) Our spontaneously expressive bodily responses to striking (or startling) events in our surroundings (for example, Vico’s account of people’s fearful fleeing from thunder into the caves; 1968: para. no. 379); (2) the spontaneously expressive responsiveness of the others around us to our expressive movements; (3) which leads us to ignore a whole third realm of dialogically structured human activity—that realm of activity that is neither action that can be ex-

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plained in terms of reasons, nor behavior that can be explained in terms of causes; (4) which also leads us, most importantly, to ignore our creation within this third realm of dynamic agentic spaces or situations, to which we “belong” as participant parts, i.e., not as independent, self-contained beings, but as contingent beings, partially dependent for our being on our “placement” or “position” within the whole ceaseless flow of temporally unfolding activity within which we are embedded; (5) so that, overall, we are lead to ignore the importance of, as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, the importance of “what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (1989: xxviii).

These are important omissions. But it is the last that I especially want to emphasize: genuinely novel changes in our lives do not occur as a result of any of our individual plans; they are “just-happening” events. Indeed, like Vico, Ludwig Wittgenstein finds the beginnings of our being able to mean anything to each other in such striking events, events that can compel our attention. For him, “the origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language—I want to say—is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ [Goethe]” (Wittgenstein 1980a: 31). The events need not be as startling as Vico’s thunder, for a person’s reaction to our reaction of puzzlement to their statements may be sufficient to start off a whole new line of interaction—“Why do you find my talk of Vico in these modern times so puzzling?” I might ask, seeing the look on your face. “Let me explain,” I would then say. But what is most important, is the omission of what I called the third realm of agentic spaces or agentic situations, and the fact of our nature as contingent beings, i.e., that we take on a situated identity in such circumstances as a certain kind of person with “fitting” abilities. For instance, to take Charles Taylor’s example of two people sawing a log. It is not a matter of first one pulling the saw and then the other, with one watching to see when the other stops his or her exertion—i.e., it is not mere matter of coordination. As Taylor notes: “At a certain point the ‘semantic turn’ passes over to the other by a common movement. The appropriate moment is felt by both partners together in virtue of the common rhythm” (1995: 171f.). Thus, as he goes on to say: “An action is dialogical, in the sense I’m using it here, when it is effected by an integrated, non-individual agent. This means that for those involved in it, its identity as this kind of action essentially depends on the agency being shared” (1995: 172). This is why in the list above I call us “contingent beings,” and say that the space in question is an “agentic space,” because, as participants within it, we have a sense of an “it”—of an invisible but “real presence” (Steiner 1989) within

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it—which exerts (in Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1993 terms) “compellent” calls upon us to which we feel ethically obliged to be “answerable.” We sense ourselves as living in a space in which—just as when we are driving within a whole gaggle of other cars on an interstate or autobahn—we are afforded a “shaped and vectored” sense of where (ethically) we might next move within it. It is a space in which objectively invisible relations give shape to what is visible in our lives.

Wittgenstein This is what I take to be the importance of Wittgenstein’s remark quoted above—that meaning is a physiognomy. I want to suggest that, like gestures, like facial expressions, like smiles or frowns, like exclamations of delight or outbursts of dismay, our utterances “point outside [themselves] to a reality beyond” (Wittgenstein 1981: no. 236), either like an indicatory finger, pointing to an important “this” in a shared situation, or, like a Marcel Marceau mime—in which he gives visible shape to an invisible colossus in his mimetic attempts to surmount it. I want to take these “invisible but sensed somethings”—which only make their appearance in our living, spontaneously responsive relations to each other—seriously, as a central aspect of our being able to communicate with each other. Indeed, as we have seen, Wittgenstein finds, not only our ability to use and to understand words as emerging out of our natural inclination to be influenced by the gestures of others, but also in our responses to them, the beginnings of possible new ways of acting and thinking. About the “primitive” origins of a language game (in the remark already quoted above) he asks, “what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?” And he replies, “presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (Wittgenstein 1981: no. 541). This, I take it, is a most crucial remark. It is akin to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comment that more “clearly (but not differently) in my experience of others than in my experience of speech or the perceived world, I inevitably grasp my body as a spontaneity which teaches me what I could not know in any other way except through it” (1964a: 93, emphasis added). In our everyday coping, we don’t just want simply to understand a present situation or the person as just another repetition of one already known to us; we need to understand it, or them, also in their own first-time uniqueness. As Harold Garfinkel (1967: 9) puts it in one of his characterizations of our everyday methods of our “accounting practices,” that on each occasion of their use, they are always used for “another first time.” With this new concern in mind— a concern not with patterns and regularities, or with repetitions and rule-

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governed orderliness, but with unique, first time moments, with, as James Joyce called them, “epiphanies of the ordinary”—let us follow Wittgenstein further, to see how he can help us in our aim of setting rhetoric in motion. In connection with his explorations into the special nature of human expressions (Äusserungen), he comments: “Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think” (1953: 527). How can this help us? Well, as he sees it, a musical movement, its theme, points “outside itself ” in the following sense: “it makes an impression on me which is connected with things in its surroundings—e.g., with our language and its intonations. … If I say: Here it’s as if a conclusion were being drawn, here as if something were being confirmed, this is like an answer to what was said before—then my understanding pre-supposes a familiarity with inferences, with confirmation, with answers” (1953: no. 175). Indeed, it is in this sense, in the temporal unfolding of their embodied voicing, that all our living utterances are responsively shaped in accord with, in responsive connection with, the surrounding circumstances of their utterance. Think again of the Marcel Marceau mime here. In the temporal contour of my utterance as it unfolds—in the musical movement of my embodied voice as it moves you—you can sense the twists and turns I take, the moments of departure and arrival, the tensions, the changes of direction, the stress and the ease with which I “go on” with my expressions. Indeed, I want to claim that is precisely within the intricate “orchestration” of the dynamic interplay occurring in the living relations occurring between us—between our own outgoing (responsive) expressions toward the Other (or otherness) and their incoming, equally responsive expressions toward us—that the very special kind of practical understanding of agentic “real presences,” that I have already mentioned above, becomes available to us. Such an intricate interplay does not, of course, always occur. As Wittgenstein (1953) points out, as children, or as new participants in a new languagegame, we have to be trained into it. But to an extent—to the extent that you, as active participants in my speech are now following the unique meaning of my utterances, to the extent that you are sharing with me in an inner-felt sense of a temporally unfolding “shape” in my speech—such an interplay must now be occurring between us. And in the dynamic, dialogically structured space existing between us—if you are still actively and energetically following me, that is—such agentic real presences are at work in our currently shared situation. Like other actual personages around us, certain little “god-like” beings are “calling” us into action, issuing us with “action-guiding advisories,” functioning as “the witness and judge” (to use Bakhtin’s 1986 term), and so on. The situation is such that we feel judged by such “beings” just as we might by the “facial” and “vocal” expressions of actual other people.

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I have called such a form of understanding a rhetorically responsive or relationally responsive understanding to contrast it with the representationalreferential understanding more familiar to us in our traditional intellectual dealings. It is just in such a relationally responsive understanding that we experience the nature of such invisible agencies, not as passive and neutral objects, requiring interpretation as to their meaning, but as “real presences (as agencies)” (Steiner 1989). Indeed, from now on, utterances of this term will work like a little-god idea, an agency within us, exerting it’s own kind of influence on us, with its own “demands,” its own “callings,” its own “promptings,” “guidings,” “judgings,” and so on. To repeat, it is as the “time shapes,” the unique and singular “orchestration” of the unfolding movement of our spontaneously responsive reactions to the complex shape of the other’s expressions—moments which, given our training, we experience as perhaps linking present to past, as looking for a moment out to an event shared in common, as stopping to evaluate what has been achieved so far, and so on—that such momentary agents, such real presences, exert their influence upon us. It is this aspect of language—what is present in its rhythms, its physiognomy, or simply, following Merleau-Ponty (1962), its style—that is completely missed in cognitive, intellectualized accounts of the nature of language. Yet it is this, the “saying” of our words, that sets the context within which our more intellectual understanding of what is “said” occurs. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: As in a foreign country, I begin to understand the meaning of words from their place in a context of action, and by taking part in communal life—in the same way an as yet imperfectly understood piece of philosophical writing discloses to me at least a certain “style” … which is the first draft of its meaning. I begin to understand a philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner [its “existential inscape,” quoting Steiner], by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. … There is thus, either in the man who listens or reads, or in the one who speaks or writes, a thought in speech, the existence of which is unsuspected by intellectualism. (1962: 179, emphasis added)

Modes of Inquiry: A Dialogical Self, Concerned with a Dialogical Truth To seek such a relationally responsive form of understanding as this, however—a form of understanding which, as Wittgenstein puts it, “consists in ‘seeing connections’” (1953: no. 122)—is very different from that which we have sought in the past in our academic inquiries.

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Until very recently, three major themes in Western philosophy have dominated our attempts to understand ourselves and our surroundings, to understand the supposed “problem” situations we confront: that to understand something is to have a view of it, a picture, a representation, a “correct” representation in the sense that every element in reality, and the relations between them, are matched by elements in the representation in such a way that others can find no ways in which to criticize its veracity; that the representation be of a kind in which, as Heinrich Hertz put it, “the consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured” (1956: 4)—i.e., it must be in the form of an “explanation”; and where such explanatory representations have been arrived at by the academic ritual of theory-criticism-and-debate, with the Neo-Darwinian–like aim of eliminating any errors that there may be within them. However, as children, we could not possibly have developed our first, ordinary, everyday way of understanding each other and the world around us—as little Americans, Germans, Dutch, Danes, English, French, Russians, Chinese, or Indians, etc.—in this way, i.e., by making claims and using continuous argument and debate to establish which “explanatory understandings” might most effectively be implemented. It is not through the ritual of criticism and debate that our first understandings emerge; they develop in quite some other way. If we are interested, not merely in acquiring new information, but in a developmental change at the very heart of our being—a change, to put it simply for the moment, not just in the “content” but in the “style” of our mentalities—then as already well-developed academic arguers and debaters, we arrive on the scene too late, and then look in the wrong direction, with the wrong attitude. If we are, as Vico suggested, to reckon as if there were no books in the world, then we must think about speech communication in a way very different from the Frege/Saussure structuralist approach we currently adopt. Rather than on finished, already spoken patterns of words, viewed as if by an external observer—as one does in linguistics—we must focus on the actual activity of speaking, from within our own involvement in it. We must focus on words in their speaking, and it is this that characterizes Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the work of the whole group of philosophers and psychologists to whom he is also related—Vico, Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, Bakhtin, and MerleauPonty. They all situate us in what we might call “the primordial,” the prereflective, universal, poly-potential fluidity within which we are all now, at this very moment, immersed—not an immersion that we once had, in the past, but the immersion in our surroundings that, as living, embodied beings, we still luxuriate in now. In line, then, with Vico’s no-books-in-the-world suggestion, Wittgenstein states his stance thus: “When you are philosophizing you have to descend into

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primeval chaos and feel at home there” (1980a: 65). Our philosophy must, Merleau-Ponty suggests, “recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over,’ that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ both existence and essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them” (1968: 130). To talk of action and reflection, of perception and memory, of attention and intention, of seeing and speaking, etc., as all already distinct and separate mental functions, as all connected with each other in certain, already known ways, and as all already well-known to us as the basic terms in which we must conduct our intellectual inquiries, is to foreordain or predetermine their results. We need to rediscover, from within our ordinary, daily, spontaneous activities, in which we talk of “seeing” and “speaking,” some of the rich, living, responsively related activities, from out of which such functions—as we now perceive and talk of them as being—have emerged. If we consider our spontaneous, living, bodily responses, both to the Others, and to the othernesses around us, we find first that we cannot not be responsive; only by an effort of will can we cut ourselves off from them. We find that in such a spontaneously responsive sphere of activity as this, instead of one person first acting individually and independently of an Other, and then the second replying, also by acting individually and independently of the first, we act jointly, we co-act as a unitary-we, and we do this bodily, in a spontaneous “living” way, without us having first “to work it out”—indeed, every response we make to another’s activity is, often, a poetic response, in the sense that it is a uniquely new, creative linking of familiar utterances into unfamiliar combinations, as an expression of a unique circumstance. As a consequence of us so co-acting, when someone acts, their activity cannot be wholly accounted as their own—for one person’s acts are partly “shaped” by those of the others around them; hence, our actions, in being neither mine nor yours, are truly “ours.” This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins. It means that, first, because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, yet still has an expressive or intentional structure to it, the “dialogical space” or “reality” constructed between them is experienced as an “external reality” or a “third agency” (an “it”) with its own (ethical) demands and requirements. Secondly, “our” activity is a very complex mixture of not wholly reconcilable influences—as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both “centripetal” tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as “centrifugal” ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins. Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any predetermined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those involved in them, in practice—while usually

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remaining quite unaware of having done so—that is their central defining feature. It is only from within a living involvement in such an ongoing flow of dialogical activity, that we can make sense of what is occurring around us. These are not understandings of a situation, which allow it to be linked to realities already known to us, but new, first-time understandings that are constitutive for us of what later we account as the significant, stable, and repeatable forms within that flow. Indeed, this is what Merleau-Ponty means by “the Invisible” in his talk of the way in which “it” is constitutive for us of the “things” visible before us: “It is … not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being” (1968: 151). They are invisible because, as Bakhtin makes clear, they exist not at all as static forms (that could be represented on or in a page of print), but as expectations and anticipations aroused in us by our living, embodied expressions: “All real and integral understanding is actively responsive. … And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth” (1986: 69, emphases added). Thus, among the many other features of such responsive talk is its orientation toward the future: “The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word. … Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation of any living dialogue” (1981: 280, emphasis added). Hence, the expectant waiting for an answer after the asking of a question and the disappointment when what we hear fails to answer it. Hence, also, our waiting, however much they may pause to think of appropriate words, for a person’s utterance to form a unitary whole, and our disorientation if they stop before it does and thus seems to lack a “point.” But how are we to inquire into the nature of such real but invisible presences shaping the things and events visible to us? We can come to an understanding of a dead form in terms of objective, explanatory theories representing the sequence of events supposed to have caused it, but a quite different form of engaged, responsive understanding becomes available to us with a living form. Indeed, because of the responsivity of growing and living forms, we can get to know them—just as we do with those with whom we have a “personal” relationship—by “entering into” a living relationship with them. This possible because they can call out spontaneous reactions from us in way that is quite

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impossible for a dead form. It is this that makes these two kinds of understanding so very different from each other. In other words, instead of seeking to explain a present activity in terms of its causes in the past, we can understand it in terms of its meaning for us—i.e., in terms of our spontaneous responses to it, its “point” for us. Here are some of steps involved in “entering into” such an exploratory relationship with an Other: We must begin by treating the Other or otherness, not as a recognizable problem to be solved, but as still radically unknown to us. To “enter into” a dialogically structured relationship with “it,” we must become involved or engaged with it, we must “open” ourselves up to being spontaneously “moved” by it, we must relate to it responsively and responsibly—this is crucial; we always know when a person is “with” us or not, whether at a party they are responsively “following” us, or whether they are looking over our shoulder to find others they want to be with (Goffman 1967). This sense of contiguity, of contingency, of the other’s responses to us being contingent on our own, is very basic—it is even present in newborn children. In our interactions with them, we must not only “follow” the other, but also provide opportunities for them to “follow” us, if our dialogue with them is to be free and open. However, as our task is to let them teach us of themselves, we must help them lead us around “inside” their world. As we do this, as we enter into the third realm of dialogically structured activity with them an agentic presence appears between us, an “it” with its own requirements—there is poiesis at work between us, the sensed creation of a form, a form with an existence only in the dynamics of our interactions. Merleau-Ponty discusses the nature of such special kinds of form in relation to our experience of paintings. They are not simply objects to be looked at: “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I look at a thing; I do not fix its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (1964b:164). In other words, paintings can sometimes have the character of leading us to discover more of the world around us, giving us a new way of looking. Such dynamic forms, as we have seen, can have a shaped and vectored sense to them that can guide us in our next actions. Thus as we “dwell on,” “dwell with,” or “dwell within” the Other, there is a gradual growth of familiarity with its “inner shape”; we can begin to gain a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects—the prospects it offers us for “going on” with it—such that, finally, we gain orientation, a sense of being “at home” with it, so that we can find our “footing” with it, or to know our “way about” in relation to it. In other words, rather than a difficulty that we can formulate as a problem requiring a solution (i.e., a cognitive difficulty), we can see ourselves here as facing an orientational or relational difficulty requiring an exploratory resolu-

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tion (i.e., a perceptual difficulty). Perceptual difficulties cannot be (re)solved by our merely thinking about them; new bodily “skills”—new ways of looking, listening, communicating, acting, etc.—must be developed. In submitting oneself to this process, certain steps are crucial: First, we must allow ourselves to spontaneously react to crucial events4—“once-occurrent events of Being” (Bakhtin 1993), single, unique events that make a difference that we are “struck by.” Second, as we accumulate experiences with such fragments—like walking the streets of a new city—we can begin to establish a multiple, complexly ordered sense of connectedness among the fragments so experienced. About this second step, Wittgenstein (1980a: 26) remarks: “What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities.” Finally, we must note that our familiarity with the Others and othernesses that face us in our inquiries (unlike the sudden insights associated with problem-solving) grows only gradually and is never finished. It grows at the boundaries between the realm of unknown and that of the known to expand its boundaries.

Conclusions: A New Self in an Old World Above, I described in outline the kind of disembodied, disengaged, socially isolated, deliberately acting self assumed in Cartesian, modernist thought, concerned with knowledge aimed at mastery. Here I would like to conclude by outlining the very different kind of self possessed by those engaged in the kind of dialogically structured inquiries I have just outlined above. From within such processes, we can come to see ourselves, not as isolated self-contained beings, but an integral part of a “we,” a dynamic “participant part” in a larger dynamic whole, a community with its own history and culture. As such, we cannot be wholly self-acting, willful agents, but are prone to compulsions, urges, obligations, etc.—we feel ourselves to be “at the service of,” say, the requirements of our discipline; our culture calls to us like a “Thou,” we are the beneficiaries of events that just happen to us (Gadamer 1989). As a consequence, I do not merely coordinate my actions in with those of others—in a linear sequence of separate acts—but I act in accord with such momentary “real agentic presences” that exert quite local, specific, and timely “calls” upon me. I do not experience my language as merely a code in which to express already wellformed experiences, but as an activity that, in my expressions of it, can not only organize my experience (Voloshinov 1986: 85), but can also arouse in me action guiding anticipations of where to look and how to act next.

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Thus, my self is not a mere “container” of new information, but a dialogically structured self, that can be changed in its encounters with the Others and othernesses surrounding it, especially when “struck” by, or “called” by such events. Indeed, I can come to embody such changes, and to able to recall such previous “callings” as resources in those moments when, under special promptings, I can pause and turn myself from the immediate “callings” of the moment to consider other “calls.” As such a being, as a part of one or another “we,” we can become immersed in the different “inner lives” of different “we’s,” for everything we do is partly shaped by “their” callings. At first wholly “bewitched” by their “voices,” as our familiarity with them grows, the voice of each “it” becomes one voice among the many other voices within us; but besides knowledge of its nature, we also gain orientation in relation to it—i.e., we grasp how to “go on,” or “not to go on” with it—although we can never gain mastery over it. All this occurs, not so much within us as individuals, but within or “inside” our relations with the Others and othernesses around us, “inside” the dynamics of those relations as they unfold in time. Indeed, this is what Wittgenstein shows us in his philosophical investigations: If we pay close attention to particular details noticeable in particular concrete circumstances—to tones of voice, bodily movements and gestures, facial expressions, eye direction, and so on—and thus place our everyday utterances back into the circumstances of our everyday lives, then, rather than bewildering us, the detailed relations between particularities within the complexity can arouse quite specific responses in us. He describes our changed way of attending to relevant phenomena thus: “We are tempted to say ‘only this can be really seen’ when we stare at unchanging surroundings, whereas we may not be at all tempted to say this when we look about us while walking” (1965: 66). In other words, what Wittgenstein (1953) is doing in his grammatical investigations—in getting us to consider our use of words “from within” the movements involved in our saying of them, rather than from the outside when we look only at the static forms of the words, i.e., at what we said in our utterances—is to display to us how we do in fact achieve a resolution of all the myriad forces that could be at work in influencing us in what we do: “The use of the word in practice is its meaning” (1965: 69). This is true also of the use of language, rhetoric, and in motion. Let me finish as I started, with a quote in which Michael Mooney describes the nature of Vico’s world, for as I see it, it is just some details of that (old?) world that I have tried to articulate in this chapter: Still audible in these ideas are the principles of rhetorical theory and practice from which they ultimately derive, yet in them as well are the unmistakable beginnings of a tradition of speculation on culture and society that

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would gain in force and sophistication over the next two hundred years. … Often crude in its statement and underdeveloped in its parts, Vico’s work was nonetheless right in its essential assumptions, a monument to his age if not a legend in its time. That language has primacy in human life; that poetry is prior to prose, and image to concept; that society takes form as a growth of human senses; that human actions and arrangements are the first statements of ideas, and that mind and society, with language as a means, share a common history—these and other lead ideas of Vico’s science, startling in his own day, have lost none of their luster in ours. … That society is a structure of sentiment and thought as well as a cluster of rites and forms, and that its gods and heroes, its customs and laws, its words and its sciences depend for their plausibility as much on the common and collective sense of the people as on the refined ideas of intellectuals is as golden a principle today as when Vico urged it in the eighteenth century. (1985: 262f.)

And this, I think, is unfortunately the state we are in today, in which “the refined ideas of intellectuals” have come to replace “the common and collective sense of the people.” It is a circumstance that I think we, in the Rhetoric Culture project, have something of a chance to reverse.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogical Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. and notes by Vadim Lianpov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and Other Writings. Trans. and intro. by Frank E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Frazer, James G. 1890. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. Vols. 1–2. London: Macmilan. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd revised ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Goffman, Erving. 1967. “Alienation Form Interaction.” In Interaction Ritual, ed. E. Goffman. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hertz, Heinrich H. 1956 [1894]. The Principles of Mechanics. New York: Dover. Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1926. How Natives Think. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. London: George Allen and Unwin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels 1971. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1964a. Signs. Trans. and introduction by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964b. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. Ed. with an introduction by James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mooney, Michael. 1985. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steiner, George. 1989. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strecker, Ivo, Christian Meyer, and Stephen Tyler. 2003: “Rhetoric Culture: Outline of a Project for the Study of the Interaction of Rhetoric and Culture.” http://www.rhetoric culture.org/outline.htm, accessed 17 January 2010. Taylor, Charles. 1995. “To Follow a Rule.” In Philosophical Arguments, ed. Charles Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vico, Giambattista. 1968. The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Eds. and trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Voloshinov, Valentin. N. 1986 [1929]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1965. The Blue and the Brown Books. New York: Harper Torch Books. ———. 1980a. Culture and Value. Introduction by Georg H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1980b. Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–32. Ed. Desmond Lee. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1981. Zettel. 2nd ed. Ed. Gertrude E. M. Anscombe and Georg H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1993. “Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough.’” In Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions, eds. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordman. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Notes 1. Wittgenstein remarks in this respect: “The very idea of wanting to explain a practice— for example, the killing of the priest-king—seems all wrong to me. All that Frazer does is to make them plausible to people who think as he does. It is very remarkable that in the final analysis, these practices are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity” (1993: 119). 2. “But tradition is not simply a process we learn to know and be in command of through experience; it is language, i.e., it expresses itself like a ‘Thou.’ A ‘Thou’ is not an object, but stands in a relationship with us” (Gadamer 1989: 358). 3. See Marx and Engels (1971: 57) for an account of “three tricks for the construction of ruling illusions,” in which they also outline how real people’s activities are ignored and replaced by a personified agency said to be responsible for why they behave as they do. 4. See Wittgenstein’s remark quoted above (1980a: 31), about the origin and primitive form of the language-game being a reaction.

CHAPTER 2

Co-Opting Intersubjectivity Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self John W. Du Bois








If [the individual] does not somehow act to tell himself (as his own audience) what the various brands of rhetorician have told him, his persuasion is not complete. —Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in the technologies of individual domination, in the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self. —Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self ”

Just as the role of subjectivity in language is attracting increasing attention from an array of disciplines ranging across linguistics, communication, anthropology, history, philosophy, and others, the thrust of this interest appears to be headed in the opposite direction from an agenda that would place rhetoric at center stage. Rhetoric in its conventional guise has been deemed a quintessentially public enterprise, oriented to the marketplace of propositions projected to appeal to others. In the market square of civil discourse, sellers of ideas invite prospective buyers to critically test the proffered wares for plausibility and persuasiveness. In contrast, subjectivity as popularly con-

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ceived makes its home in an interior personal world of unassailable privacy. In this quiet realm, the individual reigns alone, with no one to please or persuade but oneself. The ancient critique of rhetoric as appeal to base emotion seems dated now, as rhetoric and subjectivity in the modern world are pulled apart by centrifugal forces tending to divergence, polarization, even alienation. The last place one would expect to witness a meeting of public rhetoric and private subjectivity is in the intimate realms of the self. But from another point of view, a rhetorical path from sociality to self is just what we should have anticipated all along. The individual encounters sociality in daily life, and must come to terms with its demands, on both personal and ideological levels. Conversely, sociality is reproduced in and through the individual, within whom the two poles must be brought into some meaningful relation. To discover how this works in practice, it is necessary to develop a strategy for navigating the difficult domain of sociocognitive relations, where complex processes linking subjectivity and intersubjectivity construct the sociocultural frameworks that mediate the individual’s cognitive-affective participation in sociality. To locate the nexus of self and sociality is to identify the individual’s private terms of engagement with the public project of constructing intersubjectivity (defined roughly as the relation between my subjectivity and your subjectivity). By taking a sociocognitive perspective on this traditionally psychological domain we advance the view that the subjective cannot be defined in relation to the self alone, nor alone to the objective. Rather, subjectivity must be framed from the start to include reference to intersubjectivity as well. Going a step further, it is only when intersubjectivity is itself examined in light of its relation to concrete practices of face-to-face interaction that a realistic analysis of the construction of sociocognitive relations can begin to emerge (Du Bois 2007, 2009; C. Goodwin 2007; M. Goodwin 2006; Kärkkäinen 2006). For the sociocognitive project to achieve its potential, it is necessary to challenge the casual invocation of intersubjectivity as a given on which the foundations of social life rest—neatly, peacefully, effortlessly. The time has passed when intersubjectivity could be assumed as a passive, taken-for-granted attribute of the static cognitive organization of whole classes of persons, whether configured in social groups, memberships, classes, communities, or cultures (Schegloff 1992). Rather, intersubjectivity must be problematized from the beginning as a contingent achievement of social actors engaged in interaction and, potentially, contestation. Drawing on their strategic capacities for dialogic engagement, social actors strive moment by moment to connect and contend with one another, thus linking modes of interpersonal organization to motivating forces from the personal realms of feeling and being, among others. Intersubjectivity must be recognized as a challenge involving the dynamic construction of the sociocognitive relations, including subjectivity, that bind

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social actors and their motivations (Tyler 1978: 148). Only then will we be able to appreciate the work that participants, and theorists in their wake, must perform to come to terms with the meaningful organization of the sociocognitive arena of sociocultural life. Still, what role the self should play in this process remains a puzzle. One clue comes from the suggestion, persistent in Western intellectual history, that the self is itself forged in sociality (Bakhtin 1981; Dewey 1925; Hobson 2002; James 1950; Mead 1934; Peirce 1931–1958; Tomasello 1999; Voloshinov 1973; Vygotsky 1986). The social formation of the self contributes in turn to its inbuilt readiness to re-enter the social fray at any time, as an active participant shaping at once the world of social consequence and the sociocognitive environment within which it must live. Pursuing public projects of social action, the self plays the card of its own subjectivity. But this is a subjectivity already calibrated in public space, framed to engage with the displayed subjectivities of co-present Others. To bridge the apparent gap between self and sociality, it is evidently necessary to get beyond a purely interior conception of subjectivity (Mead 1934; Voloshinov 1973; Vygotsky 1986). The construction of sociocognitive relations must be resituated in relation to the active sociocultural practices of calibrating subjectivity in relation to intersubjective engagement. This points to a central concern with the dialogic practices by which individual social actors expose and modulate their respective subjectivities, as they mediate the ongoing public production, calibration, and contestation of intersubjectivity in interaction. Reversing the trajectory, the individual in solitude also confronts issues of subjectivity and even intersubjectivity when she directs her attention inward, attending to the management of her own sensibilities. Among such inner-directed practices, Foucault has called attention to what he calls “the technologies of the self,” which are brought into play in “the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself ” (Foucault 1988: 225). Left unresolved by Foucault is the question of how these selfdirected actions relate to Other-directed actions as realized in public contexts, such as the pursuit of intersubjective alignment in conversation. In coming to terms with the role of the self in interaction, a critical issue to be addressed is the possibility of identifying techniques for crossing the boundary between inner and outer embodiments of sociality: for projecting subjectivity into the public arena, where intersubjectivity apparently holds sway, and for projecting intersubjectivity back into the private realms of the self. A further challenge, as articulated in the present volume, is to frame these issues in terms of the oft-overlooked connections between culture and rhetoric (Burke 1950; Heritage and Greatbatch 1986; Miller 1994; Plett 1999; Potter 1996; Riffaterre 1990; Shoaps 1999; Shotter 1993; Tyler 1987). If rhetoric is to rise beyond its popular reputation as a matter of mere sleight-of-words, it must

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be by way of acknowledging its fundamental role as a mode of sociocultural action, with enduring consequences for social life. The same issues that concern rhetoric culture define critical parts of the context within which stance is realized (Du Bois 2007). Specifically, the rhetorical implications of prior discourse accumulate to produce the historical layering of intertextuality that plays a significant role in defining the sociocultural field (Ochs 1996). This sociocultural field in turn functions as a contextualizing frame that shapes the interpretation of every act of taking a stance. The role of rhetoric in constructing the sociocultural field for stance becomes evident once we look at how stance is realized as social action (Du Bois in progress-b). Stance invites analysis as social action because it entails asking how the dialogically engaged structures of evaluative action in discourse contribute to organizing the joint construction of both the enduring cultural frames that organize our lifeworld and the local ephemeral moments of intersubjective alignment that motivate our affective engagement with it. Within the broader purview of rhetoric culture, the present work calls attention to a domain that has been relatively neglected until now, concerning the embodied dynamics of social interaction. Projecting the questions posed by rhetoric culture into the dynamic flux of interaction, it is stance-taking that most effectively encompasses the moment-by-moment interplay of persons and values, persuasions and convictions, acts and consequences. If anything, it is against the background of rhetoric culture in its public manifestation that the links between stance, intersubjectivity, and the dialogic self come to the fore. In the unavoidable human condition of rhetoric culture, the production of discourse is always framed within rhetorical practice, and always realized dialogically. This conjunction suggests the utility of examining the issues raised by rhetoric culture from a dialogic perspective. A dialogic rhetoric is called for not only because speakers sometimes cajole one another via verbal moves manifestly designed to motivate the other’s convergence to one’s own stance. More subtly, even the mildest and most innocent utterance acts may activate the issue of stance alignment between dialogic co-participants. The ever-present orientation to intersubjective alignment unleashes a cascade of consequences, intended or not, that ultimately frames the positioning of all co-present participants within the sociocultural field. What is surprising, perhaps, is that the compulsion to rhetorical relevance is felt even when no one else is present. In the privacy of thinking or speaking in solitude, we answer the objections of those who are not there. More surprising still is that in these very circumstances, intersubjectivity too remains a live issue. This chapter begins with the consideration, below, of the relation between the self in sociality and the self in solitude. The two terms of this opposition, often taken to represent opposed or even antithetical domains, have been ad-

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vanced by different groups of authors as candidates for a locus of social reality. One group of theorists advocates for the exterior sociality of the public situation (Goffman 1964, 1974; Sacks 1992), while another group acknowledges the interior sociality of the dialogic self (Mead 1934; Vygotsky 1986). To evaluate the respective roles of sociality and solitude, the chapter takes up the analysis of some instances of recorded discourse in which these issues become relevant. It then proceeds to examine one instance of discourse that seems to combine aspects of speaking in interaction with aspects of speaking in solitude. The empirical question addressed here is whether discourse in private may resemble, in certain key respects, the public discourse of conversational interaction. The line of argument then moves to a more theoretical level to consider what it would mean to co-opt intersubjectivity, and what the implications are for the attempt to construct a dialogic perspective on rhetorical aspects of the self. Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the theoretical consequences of linking dialogicality and intersubjectivity, seen as two facets of a common analytical enterprise, and an evaluation of the potential of this approach to clarify specific processes of the construction of sociocognitive relations.

Sociality and Solitude One can talk to oneself.—If a person speaks when no one else is present, does that mean he is speaking to himself? —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

What makes the social situation social? Specifically, are you social when you’re solitary? The conversational situation is commonly conceived as inherently public, requiring two socially engaged persons as its minimum criterion (Clark 1996; Goffman 1964). In contrast, the situation of an individual alone in a room, engaged in thought (or even in speaking), is typically imagined as starkly isolated, withdrawn from social engagement. As opposed to multiparty speaking, single-party thinking is construed as taking place in a private psychological domain, hidden from public view in a world apart from overt displays of sociality, isolated from social others. For the outside observer it appears as opaque and even, perhaps, ultimately unknowable. But this is not the only way to imagine the individual in solitude. There are in fact two prevalent views on the matter, equally widespread if sharply at odds with each other. In contrast to the view just described, holding that the social situation is constituted only when social others are co-present, the opposing view holds that sociality penetrates even into the interior of the individual, ef-

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fectively shaping the structures and processes that govern a person’s thinking and acting even when alone. The following sections take up in turn the two opposing perspectives, which we may gloss as exterior versus interior sociality.

Exterior Sociality: The Public Situation The exterior view of sociality is built into the deepest assumptions of some of the most influential observers of social life, including Erving Goffman, Emanuel Schegloff, and others. Commitment to the fundamental role of publicly observable behavior (aka conduct) is so strong that it is introduced at the foundational moment, as the stage is being set in the very definition of the initial context for inquiry into human sociality: the social situation. In Goffman’s (1964: 135) seminal words, “I would define a social situation as an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities, anywhere within which an individual will find himself accessible to the naked senses of all others who are ‘present,’ and similarly find them accessible to him. According to this definition, a social situation arises whenever two or more individuals find themselves in one another’s immediate presence, and it lasts until the next-to-last person leaves.” Mutual monitoring is conceived literally as involving the sensual perception of and by other co-present bodies (Clark 1996: 9–11), leaving little room for extending the conception to what happens when a fully socialized individual is alone in a room. Interestingly, Goffman goes on to connect his framing of the social situation to the organization of talk through turn-taking: “I am suggesting that the act of speaking must always be referred to the state of talk that is sustained through the particular turn at talking, and that this state of talk involves a circle of others ratified as coparticipants” (1964: 135). In positing turn-taking as a paradigm criterion of the social situation, Goffman sets the stage for a form of sociological inquiry that would be embraced by later workers in sociology and beyond, coming to fruition especially in Conversation Analysis. The emphasis on co-presence and mutual monitoring as defining the “state of talk” leads Goffman to specify certain exclusions from the norm: “(Such a phenomenon as talking to oneself, or talking to unratified recipients as in the case of collusive communication, or telephone talk, must first be seen as a departure from the norm, else its structure and significance will be lost)” (1964: 135–136). While Goffman’s goal of distinguishing normative from deviant forms of speaking may have some merit, it is curious to see telephone conversation treated on a par with “talking to oneself.” The evaluation of telephone talk in subsequent research has generally been less dismissive, and this form of electronically mediated interaction has at times been elevated almost to a defining context for talk in interaction (e.g., in Conversation Analysis; see Schegloff

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1968, 2007). But Goffman’s frank assessment underscores his insistence on the co-presence of persons as a fundamental criterion of the prototypical social situation, assigning a critical role to the potential for full mutual monitoring. Goffman’s reliance on the criterion of mutual monitoring by co-present others has been endorsed by a number of other social scientists (e.g., Clark 1996). Coming from a rather different place, a prominent linguist arrives at a similar assessment, stating, “talking to yourself … [is not an instance] of communication” (Blakemore 1992: 33). The issue of telephones aside, the focus on publicly accessible speech by multiple interactants has effectively been promoted to a central principle for delimiting the analytical and theoretical scope of Conversation Analysis. Laying out the scope of the research enterprise, Schegloff begins with an explanation of a shift in the very name that defines the identity of the field: “[Instead of the word ‘conversation’] … we have begun using the more ample and neutral term ‘talk-in-interaction.’ This is an empirically and analytically bounded domain, generous in its inclusiveness, yet not including everything, and thus not a merely terminological convention” (1999: 408). Like Goffman, Schegloff delimits the boundaries of “talk-in-interaction” to effectively exclude speaking in private: “On the other hand, not all talk falls within this boundary [of talk-in-interaction]. For example when I read out, in my study at home, a draft of the text of a talk which I am scheduled to deliver so as to hear what it sounds like and to ensure that it fits within my assigned time limits, this is not talk-in-interaction, although it is surely talk” (1999: 408). This seems reasonable enough on the face of it. Why should talk performed alone in a room be deemed to involve interaction? All the more so if it is being rehearsed just “to hear what it sounds like.” But we might well ask whether that’s all that’s going on in that room. The solitary speaker’s concern with what the utterance sounds like (to whom?) may offer a clue to what kind of activity is likely to be in progress. Here it is useful to consider possible parallels with face-to-face interaction. One such parallel might arise if the solitary speaker gives evidence of attending in some way to the potential response of imagined social others. For example, listening to oneself as a prelude to speaking before an audience may trigger certain purposeful activities, such as last-minute corrections in which the speaker pauses while deploying the editorial blue pencil, with the goal of heading off potential objections from future audience members. The imagined audience may be more or less vividly conjured up, complete with names, faces, and indeed facial expressions, not to mention attitudes; and the solitary speaker’s text may be reframed accordingly. In such a (self-generated) context of virtual interaction, the rehearsing author’s seemingly solitary activity of self-editing can be considered a form of self-repair in anticipated response to the (potential) critiques of imagined social others. In dialogic terms, this is what Bakhtin calls ad-

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dressivity (1981). As an empirical project, such a study would naturally invite comparison with the forms of repair established in research on face-to-face conversation, in which social others are actually co-present (Fox et al. 1996; Hockett 1968; Jasperson 2002; Schegloff et al. 1977; Schegloff 1992). Though obviously speculative, this scenario is only one example of the possible contexts for the use of language in solitude that have suffered empirical neglect, in part for theoretical reasons. While there are obvious methodological challenges to be met in order to gain access to private events, they are not insurmountable. What is intriguing is the potential for parallels between solitary speaking and the more familiar organization of discourse in face-to-face interaction. A key question to ask is: Does the discourse of solitude display the same structures as have been identified in the benchmark case of conversation with co-present others? If not, this would tend to argue that speakers in solitude are in a novel environment that is sufficiently unlike that of dialogic interaction to preclude the use of the forms of sociality that operate in face-to-face conversation. But if similarities are found, this can be argued to reflect the existence of fundamental commonalities between the public and private practice of discourse.

Interior Sociality: The Dialogic Self While the obvious appeal of an “exterior sociality” grounded in public interaction makes it a perennial favorite in the history of social science (enhanced presently by the attractions of straightforward access to repeatable observations by way of audio or video recordings of public behavior), equal importance has been accorded by other scholars to the dimension of “interior sociality.” Interior sociality may be defined, provisionally, as a set of practices taking place within the limits of the individual psyche that are similar in some way to the kinds of interactions that characterize exterior sociality.1 Many scholars have recognized a role for interior sociality, whether explicitly or implicitly, in taking the position that the capacity for interior dialogue derives from prior experience with exterior dialogue. Milton Singer refers to “the so-called monologue, which is always a dialogue with an imagined other” (1984: 80, cited in Attinasi and Friedrich 1995: 34). Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, referencing Roman Jakobson, state, “The traces of dialogic interaction so permeate the structure of language that they are present even when people talk to themselves” (1995: 7). Even Herbert Clark, who stands with Goffman and others in vaunting the priority of face-to-face conversation, observes, “In talking to ourselves, we are making as if we were talking to someone else. Private settings are based on conversational settings” (1996: 11).

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Indeed, the idea that public dialogic exchange precedes inner dialogic thought has a long history, extending back at least to Socrates (see discussion below). Any number of modern philosophers, social scientists, and literary theorists have registered their awareness of the actively dialogic processes of the cognitive interior, and some have treated it as quite central to their theory and even their methods of inquiry (Bakhtin 1981; Dewey 1925; James 1950; Mead 1934; Peirce 1931–1958; Voloshinov 1973; Vygotsky 1986). John Dewey succinctly sums up the basic version of this position: “Soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others” (1925: 170). But once we admit the reality of “the virtually constant inner dialogue experienced by virtually everyone” (Fields 2002), we must go on to ask: What consequences follow from the individual’s capacity to manage on the interior both sides of a dialogic engagement? Despite widespread convergence on the basic idea that at least some forms of thought involve inner dialogue, modeled on prior experience of exterior dialogue, the theoretical conclusions that are to be drawn are diverse, and not necessarily agreed on. For the present enterprise, the kinds of implications that will most concern us are those involving the dynamics of rhetorical relations among the utterances, so to speak, that alternate within interior dialogue. These issues arise especially in relation to what look like stances taken by contending voices, raising further questions as to the nature of the voices that (seem to) articulate the stances, and the stance acts of (interior) positioning that may construct some kind of authorial identity (Foucault 1977). But before even attempting to arrive at such a catalog of voices, it is preferable to focus first on understanding the dynamics of inner discourse. The vitality and social character of inner discourse is reflected in the first place in a pervasively dialogic discourse, raising the question of how the various voices—disregarding for the moment their origins and identities—interact and contend with each other. As Michel de Montaigne observes, “There is as much difference found between us and ourselves, as there is between ourselves and others” (1603: 196–197), and it is the dynamics of the organization of interaction that a dialogic model is best equipped to address. How does dialogicality see the rhetorical dimension of developing textual experience, the possibility of difference and change in a contested field of meaning? The dialogic conception of discourse is one that refuses to be reduced to a mere registry of neutralized particles of information, without consideration of ideology (Crapanzano 1990; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998). Discourse comes in voices, and those voices are able to say different things, and say them from different positionings. If such a diversity is present among the voices which speak within us, this implies a powerful role for a rhetoric within. If a repertoire of voices inhabit our inner sociality, this is fertile ground for a rhetoric of the

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self, to sort out the stances proposed by contending voices speaking from their distinctive positionings. Kenneth Burke, attuned to the normative socializing forces that rhetoric at times seek to harness, put his finger on the problem thus: “If [the individual] does not somehow act to tell himself (as his own audience) what the various brands of rhetorician have told him, his persuasion is not complete. Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (Burke 1950: 39, emphasis added). Recognizing the caution of the well-defended individual who must contend with the rhetoric of public discourse, Burke argues that social theorists need to recognize the critical connection of rhetoric to issues of moral socialization. He points to “the ingredient of rhetoric in all socialization, considered as a moralizing process. The individual person, striving to form himself in accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways of his society, is by the same token concerned with the rhetoric of identification. To act upon himself persuasively, he must variously resort to images and ideas that are formative. Education (‘indoctrination’) exerts such pressure upon him from without; he completes the process from within” (Burke 1950: 39). Among the questions to be mastered by the rhetorician of the self is how the dialogic processes of internally distributed cognition can be mobilized to control the alignment of stance and voice, and affect and identity, through processes that link the individual to the social. This must be addressed alongside the more inward-looking questions posed by Foucault in his later writings, especially in his discussion of the “technologies of the self ” as a kind of moral work that the individual performs to shape himself in relation to the cultural codes of morality that govern the individual in society (Foucault 1988; Robbins 2004). These observations point to a multi-faceted role for the dialogic self, embracing cognitive, affective, and moral dimensions. These are large questions, to which we will return in due course. But none of this work will get very far until we first address some basics, which must include the seemingly simple, yet absolutely fundamental, task of identifying voices.

Whose Voice? What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking. —Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing

One of the routine but indispensable facts about speaking, to which participants regularly attend in any conversational interaction, is the question of who says what. (To whom they say it is surely also a question of legitimate interest,

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but specifying a definite recipient for an utterance in a multi-party conversation is often far more elusive for both participants and analysts than determining the speaker, due to ambiguities in the constitution of the addressee role that we need not go into here.) Participants monitor the apparent speaker (i.e., the animator, who is usually also the author) of each utterance using a variety of means, which may include not only the obvious task of identifying the speaker’s distinctive quality of voice, but also observing lip movements and any other visible movements of speech articulators, coordinating visible peaks of hand or head gestures with audible peaks of vocal prosody, locating spatial coordinates for the source of the sounds being made, and so on. As relevant as it is to participants in conversation, nailing down the identification of speaker attribution is equally important to analysts, who necessarily approach the task on a more conscious level. Not surprisingly, most scholarly traditions that take seriously the task of representing conversational discourse have found it salient and indeed inescapable to specify, in their conventional transcription practice, how each utterance is to be attributed to a particular speaker. But the practice of identifying voices—attributing words to the speakers who speak them—is about more than getting the transcription right. On a deeper level it is about attributing the stances that are embodied in the words to the social actors who enact them and bear the responsibility for them. Identifying voices is an issue not just because two or more different people are speaking, each of whom deserves to have their words rightfully credited to them. It is because the participants are engaged in all kinds of delicately coordinated social actions, in which the identity of social actors matters. Some coordinated actions are performed simultaneously, others in structured alternation. Some actions are crucially dependent on being performed by a particular social actor, while others can only be achieved through joint action by certain configurations of actors. Participants are engaged in more than merely speaking in sequenced turns, one after the other. Given the sequential structure of conversational activity, for example, the speaker who initiates a sequence finds that she is already effectively constrained by the larger activity so evoked, to the extent that she must orient in advance to how the next speaker is likely to respond to her utterance (Goodwin 1981; Schegloff 2007; Vygotsky 1986). Introducing a dialogic perspective (Bakhtin 1995; Voloshinov 1973), the matter becomes still more complex. In dialogic terms the question of how voicing is to be interpreted and attributed encompasses a recognition that at any moment a multiplicity of voices may be brought into play, in one way or another. This complex interaction and even lamination of voices within a single individual is a decisive indicator of what is meant by dialogicality. Dialogic engagement is

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a two-way street, in which the author of any utterance endeavors to articulate relevant connections between their words and the words of other speakers. But this dialogic engagement can be seen as a practice that points in two directions at once—extending out from the present moment of discourse towards the past, to the horizons of prior discourse, but extending also into the projected future, in anticipation of how one’s current utterance will fare when it has left one’s lips and is subjected to the unpredictable contingencies of its dialogic reframing by the next speaker. As social actors, conversational participants continually manage their response to the structure and content of the prior and subsequent utterances, whether audibly realized or only potential. These dialogic processes operate through the realization and interpretation of meaning, form, and social action that at times depend on the personal identity of the speaker, but at other times blur or erase it. At any moment the current speaker may need to frame their next utterance to respond to the utterances with which it engages dialogically. As they speak, social actors both presuppose and indexically create aspects of their vocal identity (Agha 2005; Bucholtz and Hall 2004, 2005; Günthner 1999; Silverstein 1976). To manage this kind of multidirectional engagement along retrospective and prospective directions, participants need to know who said what, but this means more than just knowing names. It is prudent to know not only what kind of social actor one is engaged with in the socially risky game of discourse, and what is understood as the identity of the actors, but also the character of the voices they invoke. Different voices can engender seriously different social consequences (Agha 2005; Rampton 2006; Shoaps 1999). We get some sense of the importance of speaker attribution when the labels representing it are left out of a transcription. Sometimes this is done purposely, for example in certain kinds of transcription of a monologue or an interview in which the applicable ideology of discursive representations treats the identity of the speaker as obvious (or alternatively, assumes that recipients will arrive at the relevant identity based on contextual cues such as a familiar face in a photograph, or a name in the caption beneath it). At other times the omission is more careless, as when speaker identity is simply treated as unimportant, e.g., when the name of a sociolinguistic interviewer is elided as if they were not a consequential participant. (Ideologies of transcriptional representation [Bucholtz 2000] are in play here too, of course.) To ground our discussion of these issues, it is useful to take up some simple instances of dialogic exchange. As noted above, the question of who is speaking is naturally of perennial interest, and in the following examples we follow the typical analytic and representational practice of attributing each utterance to a particular speaker.2

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1. (SBC045: 1613.017-1616.343) CORINNA; Ugh, so nasty. PATRICK; Why is it nasty. 2. (LSAC 1432-01) DANA; I don’t know if it actually ate it or what. LOU; Yeah it’s hard to know. 3. (LSAC 1658-01) ALEX; I make them uncomfortable. KIM; Gee, I wonder why.

In 1, the first speaker voices an evaluation of something as “nasty,” to which the second speaker responds by asking why it is so. In 2, the first speaker voices uncertainty about a state of affairs, while the second generalizes about the difficulty of answering such questions. In 3, the first speaker describes a problematic social situation, to which the next speaker responds by asking why. (Though the two why cases exhibit different interactional framings, this need not concern us here.) If we venture to generalize across the three cited examples, we might note that in each case the second speaker finds something in the prior utterance that warrants, indeed elicits, a response. For example, a prior speaker who issues a strongly affective evaluation may be asked by the next speaker to provide an account of the basis for the evaluation; or a speaker who describes a problematic situation may find that the next speaker expresses curiosity about why the situation is that way. In such cases it has become commonplace to point out that part of what is at issue for the participants is what kind of action can be projected to be appropriate as the next action, given the discourse trajectory of the interactional sequence up to this point (Goodwin 1981; Lerner 1991; Schegloff 2007). And along with the projected framing of an appropriate paradigmatic class of next actions comes the question of who the next actor ought to be. Absent any speaker labels, we may be left wondering who did what, or we may try to reconstruct for ourselves the missing information about the voices we hear, drawing on our intuitions about how the utterance we encounter is most likely to have come to its present form. The effect can be interesting. As a kind of exercise for the reader, all speaker attribution labels have been suppressed from the following three excerpts. (The excerpts are drawn from my own transcription of a not-yet-published recording, destined for a future volume of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois/ Englebretson 2005), titled Strange Dreams.3 The transcription is considerably simplified here, for expository purposes.)

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4. Needed that. Hard to know what you need. Very hard to know what you need. 5. Oof, horrid. Can’t imagine why it was so horrid, really, there was nothing bad that happened.

Despite the fact that the speaker attribution labels have been (temporarily) suppressed here, we feel we can almost “hear” the alternation of voices. In example 4, the first voice evaluates something as needed, setting up the basis for the second voice to counter this with a generalization that it is difficult for anyone to be sure what they need, by implication challenging the prior utterance. In example 5, the first voice emits an expressive “oof ” and evaluates something as “horrid;” in response, the second voice questions why the evaluated entity should be experienced as horrid, given the absence of negative consequences. At this point it is necessary to introduce a key piece of information about the discourse under examination, which I have been withholding until now. All the voices in examples 4 and 5 belong to one person. In other words, this is the discourse of a man who “talks to himself,” in the commonplace but limiting cliché. Speaking in solitude—the formulation I prefer—is for this individual a regular practice. Elsewhere I have analyzed at some length an event in this same recording in which the same individual performs a private devotional ritual (Du Bois 2009). I made this recording for the Santa Barbara Corpus, with the full consent and cooperation of the speaker. I set up the tape recorder in advance, using a portable digital tape recorder that would record for four hours without stopping. I asked the speaker (who I will call Daniel) to turn it on by himself, since I would not be present, and to wear it as he goes about his daily business. He followed this procedure three times, on three successive days. On the eve of the first day of recording, I carefully explained the sequence of buttons to be pushed to begin the recording. But at the end of the day, when Daniel brought the recording device back to me, there was nothing at all on the tape. For a second time I went over the procedure. The next day, the result was the same: a failed recording, for technical reasons. On the third day, the recording succeeded. The result was a verbatim documentation of the beginning of Daniel’s day. Ironically, it is partly due to the initial failures, I believe, that the recording in the end achieved a fair degree of naturalness. By the third day he had become habituated to the presence of the recorder, and was presumably somewhat desensitized to the process of being recorded. As the recording begins, Daniel has just awakened from a night’s sleep, at an hour which he considers late. He comments on how much he needed the rest. Among his first utterances are those presented in examples 4–5, repeated now with speaker labels in 6–7. The speaker labels come with a twist, how-

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ever. They are not yet the conventional ones (e.g., with the name “Daniel”), but instead try to capture a more general aspect of the dialogic differentiation of alternating voices, as deployed in turn by the speaker. (The examples are given in a slightly less simplified transcription, now with the intonation units marked. As in the usual convention, each intonation unit is here written on a separate line by itself.) 6. (Strange Dreams 48.065-60.299) 27 ME; Needed that. 28 (2.7) 29 ME2; Hm. 30 #@Hm. 31 #Hard to know what you need. 32 Very hard to know what you need.

I have somewhat irreverently introduced the speaker labels “ME” and “ME2” to distinguish the two voices. George Herbert Mead speaks broadly of the “I” in dialogue with the “me” (1934), but in his scheme it is not always clear how to tell which voice is which (Caton 1993). Really what these labels indicate are two facets or phases of the same self, rather than audibly distinct voices as such: listening to the recording reveals no consistent difference in voice quality. It is rather the point of view taken in the two utterances that distinguishes them as indexing two different self-positionings. In effect they presuppose different voices belonging to two somewhat distinct personae, or phases of the self. The next example (in somewhat simplified transcription) again documents two distinct stance positionings, perceived as coming from two voices or aspects of the self: 7. (Strange Dreams 64.897-69.817) 36 ME; Oof, 37 horrid. 38 (0.3) 39 ME2; Can’t imagine why it was so horrid, 40 really, 41 there was nothing bad that happened.

The first voice is vivid, laconic, and emotionally transparent in its affective subjectivity. It expresses a direct evaluation of an unmentioned experiential situation, first via an expressive sound (“oof ”) and then via a single evaluative adjective (“horrid”), but still without introducing any grammatical apparatus to index the personality of the speaking subject. Containing no first-person

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pronouns, no tense, no negation, and no inflections of any kind, these utterances are reminiscent of Lev Vygotsky’s “speech almost without words” (1986, cited in Cohn 1978: 96), and of Gregory Bateson’s “primary process” language, largely bereft of indexes of a self-conscious personality (1972). In contrast, the next utterance, as produced by the “responding” voice (ME2), reflects a more sophisticated and nuanced metapragmatic take on the previous evaluation, reframing the claims of the prior voice as too simplistic. This utterance is clothed in the full raiment of grammar, including verbal inflectional morphology, negation, and most of the other standard indexes of a full-blown grammatical apparatus, eliding only the first person pronoun at the beginning. It is noteworthy that, because language and thus stance are inherently reflexive, the use of language and the taking of stances always carry the possibility to extend the complexity of dialogic organization by drawing on the potential of reflexivity (Lucy 1993). In both (6) and (7), Daniel exploits the reflexive potential as he embeds elements of his own immediate prior utterance into his meta-stance commentary. It is important to notice that Daniel has first created a separation of voices (whether “ME” and ME2,” or Mead’s “me” and “I” voices), before bringing them back together in the structure of a dialogic engagement. Sometimes differentiation at a basic level is precursor to unification at a higher level (Hobson 2002). Once the multivocal splitting of voices can be discriminated within the discourse of a single individual, the further possibility arises that the two voices may be brought together again, now in the alternating turns of a dialogue. For the private individual, dialogicality represents a way to reflect the multiple voices of individuals back upon themselves. In seeking a way to observe and analyze this process, we hope to witness the voices rhetorically engaged, fulfilling reciprocal roles as co-participants in a discourse. Each voice expresses a distinct and even contending rhetorical stance. It is in this capacity for the re-engagement of the differentiated voices of a single individual that we see the possibility of apprehending the impact of rhetoric in a new domain. If the self can differentiate its voices, and can take the further step of organizing them in dialogic-sequential opposition to one another, it may thereby establish the conditions for the interiorization of rhetorical engagement. For the social actor faced with a problematic question to be resolved, the sorting-out process may on one occasion take the form of a public dialogic interaction with face-to-face collaborators, while on another it unfolds in private, in the interior realm of the psyche (Du Bois 2009). This alternative makes sense only if we recognize the cognitive interior as differentiated along personal lines, populated with contending voices capable of representing differentiated points of view. New dialogue can be generated within the individual, where it is encountered always in a condition of rhetoric.

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Returning to the examples we have been discussing, it will be instructive to look at the above utterances in a larger context. We go back a few moments to start from the beginning of the recorded excerpt, shortly after Daniel has awakened and turned on the tape recorder. Rather than attempt to sort out the complexities of the various voices in play, all the utterances below are labeled simply “Daniel,” acknowledging his animating voice. (The transcription is presented here in a simplified version.) 8. (Strange Dreams 0.000-70.820) ((SIMPLIFIED)) 1 DANIEL; (YAWN) Oh, 2 boy. 3 (YAWN) 4 Ah, 5 Jesus, 6 (1.0) 7 (YAWN) 8 um, 9 (2.1) 10 Well, ((8 LINES OMITTED)) 19 #I’m amazed that I could have slept that long. 20 Boy. 21–22 (3.1) 23 #It’s like it’s the middle of the damn day. 24–26 (5.4) 27 Needed that. 28 (2.7) 29 Hm. 30 #@Hm. 31 #Hard to know what you need. 32 Very hard to know what you need. 33 (0.5) 34 Strange dreams. 35 Man oh man. 36 Oof, 37 horrid. 38 (0.3) 39 Can’t imagine why it was so horrid, 40 really, 41 there was nothing bad that happened. 42 (0.7)

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That such an “interior dialogue” should be voiced upon awakening is perhaps no accident. It brings to mind the observation of St. Augustine: “And there is yet so much difference between myself and myself, in that instant wherein I pass back from waking to sleeping, or return from sleeping to waking!” (Confessions, Book 10, chap. 30, para. 41). The immediate juxtaposition of these “differences between myself and myself ” in this waking moment seem especially conducive to the elicitation of self-dialogue. As Daniel wakes, among his first sounds is the autonomous bodily response of yawning; orienting to the implications of his own actions, he then responds by making on observation on how long he as slept (line 19). This is followed first by the exclamation “boy” (line 20), then by a more self-consciously evaluative commentary (line 23). Skipping over some developments already discussed above, we come to further developments of the just-wakening state, as vivid memories of the recent dream state assert themselves (“strange dreams,” line 34). This elicits an immediate affective expression (“man oh man,” line 35), followed by an abrupt evaluation of the dream (“oof, horrid,” line 37). This is followed in turn by a more sophisticated philosophical commentary, which goes so far as to imagine an alternative emotional response to the same experience (39–41). While it is tempting to sort all these utterances into stances and counterstances, and more importantly into the various voices implied by the authorial positionings (Foucault 1977), limitations of space preclude going further with this than what has already been presented in the discussion of examples 6 and 7 above. I will only observe that these two examples, now situated in their larger discourse context, can be recognized as by no means atypical. The pattern they display, of a cycle of voices alternating between greater and lesser subjectivity, is one that recurs again and again. First the self, in one of its phases, makes an immediate, direct, often affectively loaded response to some experience (or memory of an experience). Then another phase of the self responds to this expressive contribution, usually in a more reflective commentary, with a greater use of the grammatical apparatus that is distinctive of human language. Seemingly, the dialogic self manifests itself in alternating phases, in recurring cycles of subjectivity and objectivity, with observable consequences for linguistic and dialogic-sequential realization. The alternation of what look very much like turns reflect, apparently, different phases of the dialogic self. But this dialogicality cannot for long remain interior, nor can it remain exclusively in the realm of the subjective—or even the objective. Intersubjectivity cannot be denied, whether the speaker is alone in a room or not. At some point it is necessary for interior and exterior dialogicality to come into contact, and for subjectivity and intersubjectivity to come to terms with each other. The linking of interior and exterior sociality is a fundamental problem. Its implications are only heightened by the further realization that intersubjectivity does

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not only travel from exterior sociality to interior psyche, but must make the return trip. This is the problem I take up in the next section.

Co-Opting Intersubjectivity If the intersubjectivity that is supposed to characterize public relations among co-present, sociocognitively organized persons is somehow captured by the dialogic self, brought into the psychic interior, and put to its own uses, this might seem to qualify for the term “co-opting intersubjectivity.” But that is not yet all there is to it. To understand what is at stake in the business of co-opting intersubjectivity, it is necessary to follow the dialogic self as it navigates between the world of solitude and the world of public interaction, traveling in both directions. To illustrate this kind of development I turn to a different discourse, this time drawn from a more obviously rhetorical exchange. The scene is a lively intellectual debate between a man and a woman, a couple who are conversing in bed. The two are discussing a book about death that she is reading with interest, while he questions whether anything of value can come of reading such a book. In an attempt to defend her position, she invokes an apparently telling argument—which unfortunately she soon realizes is a two-edged sword: 9. (A Book About Death SBC005: 227.59-233.99) ((SIMPLIFIED)) 53 PAMELA; You haven’t read the book, 54 one. 55 You haven’t read the book, 56 so you don’t know. 57 (0.3) 58 (H) (0.3) [I haven’t read the book so I don’t know, 59 DARRYL; [Yeah but I do know, 61 it’s it’s an awfully presumptuous thing, 63 to sit down and write a book about death, 65 when you haven’t died.

In his rush to respond to Pamela’s critique of his ignorance, Darryl seeks to change the terms of epistemic evaluation by emphasizing what he does know (that “it’s an awfully presumptuous thing to sit down and write a book about death when you haven’t died”). But in the process he overlooks a key concession by Pamela, which she has uttered in overlap with him (line 58). Pamela effectively counters her own earlier argument (“You haven’t read the book, so you don’t know,” line 55–56) with the acknowledgment that she herself can be challenged on this point (“I haven’t read the book so I don’t know”). The latter

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point is certainly inconvenient for her rhetorical agenda, but she may conclude that it is better for the critique to come from her than from Darryl. (In any case, she loses no practical advantage because Darryl, preoccupied with other points of his own, takes no note of her concession.) To represent the dialogic interplay of voices within Pamela’s own turn, we can construct a diagraph, a type of representation drawn from the theory of dialogic syntax (Du Bois 2007, forthcoming). The diagraph displays the structure of resonance (Du Bois, forthcoming; Maranda, this volume) between corresponding elements in dialogically juxtaposed utterances, as the resonant elements are aligned vertically in columns. (Interestingly, the concept of dialogic resonance applies meaningfully both between speakers and, as here, within the speech of single speaker. In the latter case, the practice may be termed auto-dialogicality.) Using the diagraph framework, we can effectively display the relation between Pamela’s two voices, the protagonist voice (PRO) and antagonist voice (ANT), as follows: 10. Diagraph 55–56 PAMELA=PRO; you have n’t read the book |so you do n’t know 58 PAMELA=ANT; I have n’t read the book |so I do n’t know

Pamela effectively mobilizes two voices here. The protagonist voice advances arguments in support of her position, while the antagonist voice critiques it. At first glance this might seem like a self-defeating strategy, but a moment’s reflection reveals the nature of its strength: better that Pamela should discover the weak points in her argument than Darryl. The phenomenon can be related to what Bakhtin calls addressivity, the speaker’s tendency to respond in advance to the imagined, but unspoken, objections of his or her interlocutor (Bakhtin 1981), and to prolepsis (Oakley, this volume). Drawing on resources characteristic of the dialogic self speaking in solitude, Pamela takes the intersubjectivity she has co-opted and made her own—a domestication in the psychic interior—and projects it back into the public social arena. What the dialogic self has practiced in privacy serves it well in the context of public engagement with another. In the heat of a rhetorical contest with her partner, Pamela exploits her own array of co-opted intersubjective voices in the rhetorical service of her public discourse. As I use the phrase here, the idea of co-opting intersubjectivity refers to speakers’ strategies of appropriating the intersubjective organization of dialogic interaction in order to put it to use in their own projects. As noted earlier, one context for co-opting intersubjectivity involves an individual alone in a room, speaking in solitude. Here the practice may be reflected, for example, in a speaker performing an expressive evaluation of an affectively loaded ex-

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perience, followed by a response by the same speaker to their own prior utterance. This kind of evaluative embedding of prior affective stance in a reflexive meta-stance was illustrated in the discussion of examples 4–8 in the previous section. A second type of context for co-opting intersubjectivity is the one evidenced in example 9 of this section. Here the speaker’s strategy of managing both sides of a dialogic exchange is pursued even in the presence of others. In this example, the motivation for auto-dialogicality appears to be the strategic assessment of rhetorical risk, as Pamela pre-empts the rhetorical potential of a rebuttal by Darryl. In my use of the term, co-opting intersubjectivity represents the strategic capacity of individuals to mobilize the structure of dialogic interaction in the service of their own projects, with consequences for the management of subjectivity and ultimately intersubjectivity. Dialogic structures otherwise requiring the participation of multiple parties engaged in interaction are appropriated as resources to be deployed by a single individual, who effectively animates multiple roles within the relevant dialogic structure. Often, a single individual alternately animates two distinctive voices, each expressing a distinct subjective positioning. The two voices may express, for example, contrasting affective self-positionings of their implied speakers. Since many of these resources are the same as are used in public contexts for intersubjective alignment, the individual’s capacity to mobilize these resources on their own has profound implications for understanding the interplay of personal subjectivity with the social dimensions of empathy and other intersubjective processes. The individual’s ability to mobilize alternative subjectivities and project them into distinctive voices organized in dialogic relation to one another raises more questions than it answers about the individual’s capacity for participating in intersubjective processes. These issues remain largely mysterious, and invite further inquiry. For now, it can be acknowledged that co-opting intersubjectivity represents an important capacity of socially adept actors, allowing them to assert a degree of control over the expression of dialogic engagement and intersubjective alignment, projecting the mobilized structures at will into the domains of interior or exterior sociality. In describing the practice of co-opting intersubjectivity, we recognize an impressive achievement of the socially organized individual. But in another context, it must be acknowledged that the idea of co-opting intersubjectivity might not always be thought of as a good thing, depending on who’s doing it and why. In the academic world, current developments suggest that intersubjectivity is sufficiently attractive as a concept that the temptation arises to co-opt it in an entirely different sense—to appropriate the word without fully coming to terms with its implications. The idea of intersubjectivity has long elicited conflicting reactions from social scientists, attracted on the one hand by its apparent foundational status as a way of accounting for shared

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knowledge between socially organized persons, but repelled on the other hand by the fact that intersubjectivity seems to require acknowledgment of—well, subjectivity. Recently, the rising market value of intersubjectivity in interaction has attracted the attention of scholars pursuing a variety of agendas, not always compatible with the dialogic vision of intersubjectivity advanced here. For example, Nick Enfield and Stephen Levinson (2006) have recently been promoting an approach to face-to-face interaction that privileges the somewhat mechanistic concept of a universal human “interaction engine” (Levinson 2006). Curiously, the list of claimed universal features of sociality offered in support of this mechanism is limited almost entirely to the behavioral surface, focusing on cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of structured conduct such as turn-taking systems, to the neglect of the open-ended interpretive processes by which participants negotiate the meanings of actions, evaluate objects, invoke sociocultural values, and so on. Once the scope of human sociality is opened up to include the processes of navigating the situationally and socioculturally variable domains of meaning, interpretation, affect, and value, interaction takes on new dimensions of subtlety and power. This suggests the need for a theory adequate to the full scope of human sociality, including a more sensitive approach to the dynamic construction of intersubjectivity. A more promising approach might be to dispense with the mechanistic imagery and deal more subtly with the task of describing the complexities of managing sociocultural value within a dynamically adaptable array of practices of social interaction. (One candidate would be the dialogic model of stance and intersubjectivity in interaction [Du Bois 2007, 2009, Linell 2009], but there are any number of other ways to pursue a more inclusive approach to integrating interaction, interpretation, and intersubjectivity.) Intersubjectivity gets co-opted in other ways than mechanizing it, of course. A more banal and ultimately debilitating move is to assume that intersubjectivity must by its very nature be shared uniformly among all members of a social group, as a pre-condition of communication. Though this position evidently glosses over the process whereby intersubjectivity gets dynamically constructed (e.g., within heterogeneous communities), to bank on intersubjectivity as a device for guaranteeing in advance the supposed commonality of member knowledge in social groups is to subvert the inquiry into intersubjectivity before it even begins. Intersubjectivity must remain a questionable construct until there is a way to investigate the means of its construction in social life, as well as its defense (Schegloff 1992). Presupposing it as always already there, or as a pre-condition of membership in a group, only postpones the task of developing an empirically viable theory of intersubjectivity. To make the dynamic construction of intersubjectivity visible, what is needed is to attend to participants’ overt practices of dialogic interaction, including the stance-

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taking processes of evaluating objects, positioning subjects (including the self and others), calibrating and contesting intersubjectivity, and invoking systems of sociocultural value (Du Bois 2007). From a dialogic perspective, all of these social practices are compatible with the challenge of analyzing the intersubjective dimensions of active contestation by contending parties in ideologically heterogeneous communities. What matters in the pursuit of social life is not only the formal organization of interaction, but also the construction of meaning and sociocultural value. The dynamic construction of intersubjectivity is as social as it gets, and calls for a correspondingly dynamic place in social theory.

Towards a Dialogic Rhetoric of the Self Paradoxically, to gain perspective on the task of constructing intersubjectivity, it is useful to return to the situation of the individual in solitude. In such circumstances, the individual is by no means relieved of the condition of sociality. But there are differences: for example, the tempo and urgency of social demands are likely to be experienced differently, given the fluidity of social imagination and memory. And the individual in solitude may have more latitude to choose her own company, as by selecting what to read. One kind of solitary reading practice that can activate fairly definite social relations, eliciting the expression of subjectivity and indeed intersubjectivity in response, is the reading of a religious work such as a daily devotional text. Elsewhere I have analyzed one such reading, by the same speaker on the same morning represented here (Du Bois 2009). In that case, the other voices involved in the dialogic engagement can be given names; for example, Daniel engages dialogically with the represented voice of the apostle Paul, as occasioned by the devotional text for the day, scripted by Oswald Chambers. This kind of discourse alone in a room, actively sought by many religious individuals, parallels in certain respects the discourse of solitude described in examples 6–8 above, and broadens the scope of implications for intersubjective linkages between interior and exterior sociality. Sometimes, as in the cases presented in this article, the company one keeps in solitude is casual, making its presence felt with impromptu realizations of alternative voicings that emerge in situated response to local affective developments. At other times, the dialogic structure is more formal, with voicings organized partly in advance by the sociocultural constructs of ritual discourse. Either way, the solitary individual is implicated in the dynamics of constructing intersubjective relations, and the experience of emerging sociality goes on.

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One way to think about the implications of such discourses is in terms of “the mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself,” as Foucault put it (1988: 225). In his later writings, Foucault became particularly interested in what he called the “technologies of the self,” representing the means for such self-forming action. He assigned this category a key place in his typology of the technologies of practical reason, treating it as one of four fundamental categories, on a par with the more widely recognized technologies of production, power, and sign systems (i.e., the use of systems of signification and meaning). Foucault acknowledged the potential for interinfluences between the various classes of technologies, but showed little interest himself in pursuing, for example, the interaction between the technologies of signification and the technologies of self. Foucault’s decision is the more understandable if we accept his assessment of the semiotics of his day as fixated on the synchronic sign system as a complete, stable, and invariant structure. The paradigm of such a seemingly intractable, totalizing sign system could be found in a certain reading of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916)—though this is far from the only reading possible.4 But if instead of the structuralist conception of language as a fixed system we adopt a dialogic approach to discursive practice, we gain access to a more appropriate set of resources for addressing the issues Foucault raised. Central to these is what Foucault called the “forms of subjectivation,” by which the individual manages at once the “relation to oneself ” and the ethical relation to generalized moral codes of behavior. (For a valuable discussion of Foucault’s ideas in this arena, see Robbins 2004: 216–219.) Though Foucault focuses on subjectivation as a component of private acts of self-directed moral work, this work can also be considered to involve a kind of moral self-calibration with reference to external sociality as registered in culturally articulated codes of conduct. This is in line with Burke’s principle that the rhetoric of external sociality must be seconded by the rhetoric of internal sociality: “Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (1950: 39). This is where discourses of the kind we have been analyzing may usefully enter the picture, as they mediate the discursive processes by which subjectivation is brought into relation to intersubjectivation. A paradigm instance of the technology of the self must be the realization of a devotional ritual in solitude (Du Bois 2009), and here the dialogic engagement of voices is in full bloom, vividly linking the subjectivity of the current speaker to the subjectivities articulated in voices from the past. But even secular moments of discourse in solitude (e.g., as illustrated in examples 6–8 above) have their subjective and even moral ramifications, as the speaker engages in evaluations that implicitly invoke sociocultural systems of value. Through acts of evaluative stance-taking, whether public or private, ritualized or spontaneous,

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self-directed or other-directed, individuals link their subjectivities to others’ as they perpetuate the ongoing dialogic construction of intersubjectivity. In considering the sociality of the self by the twin lights of dialogicality and rhetoric culture, a prior question arises: What is cultural about rhetoric culture? Reframing the question from the perspective of sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz/Hall 2005; Du Bois in progress-b), we can ask: How can a sociocultural framing of rhetoric practice play a meaningful role in understanding the linking of personal realms of subjectivity to generalized constructions of intersubjectivity? The scope and power of such sociocultural ramifications is well attested in Joel Robbins’s rich ethnographic study of the appropriation by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea of Christian technologies of the self, through which they pursue a preoccupation with moral self-evaluation that is of long standing within Urapmin culture (2004). The capacity for such intensive moral self-work to dominate the activities of a community for long periods of time attests to the broader sociocultural ramifications of the linking of personal subjectivity to public moral codes via technologies of the self. Another example comes from Robin Ann Shoaps, whose ethnographic research on the Sakapultek Maya of Guatemala documents the verbal articulation of moral codes via the use of directives as embedded in public discursive practices such as wedding counsels (2004, 2007). On a smaller scale, Shoaps’s ethnographic research on a US evangelical Christian church documents the role of public prayer, at once personally individualized and interpersonally coordinated, in organizing expressions of subjectivity that yield intersubjective alignment along culturally validated lines. Taken in conjunction with my own studies of private devotional discourse (described above and in Du Bois 2009) and of secular rhetorical contestation (illustrated in examples 9–10 and in Du Bois in progress-b), the picture of the technologies of self that emerges is a diverse one. Ranging in scale from individual to mass, in context from private to public, the technologies of self can be practiced whether you are alone in a room or in the presence of others. Either way, you are not really alone: in the memory and practice of dialogic modes of discourse, you carry an intersubjective array of voices that partakes of both personal subjectivation and generalized systems of sociocultural value. Linking the perspectives of Rhetoric Culture and dialogicality, to complete the picture of the technology of self calls for a dialogic engagement between internal and external sociality. More generally we can observe that in any community of discourse, the experiential history of rhetorical activity establishes a set of continuities and possibilities that project outward along the dimension of intertextuality to the discursive horizons of the community of discourse. But the intertextual dimension subsumes as well a broader array of available forms of dialogicality, not only prior texts but also prior voices. From the point of view of the creative

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individual, which is to say everyone, this is experienced as open-ended rhetorical potential, the cultural offering of a repertoire of dialogically organized voices ready to be deployed as part of the collaborative construction of emerging intersubjectivity in the moment. In the continual circulation of rhetoric, intersubjectivity confronts a dialogicality that is projected simultaneously along dimensions of then-and-now and I-and-thou. The self, to the extent that it is organized already around a dialogically intersubjective rhetoric, internalized through the ongoing formative experiences of dialogic engagement, is constituted in advance to be capable of truly intersubjective engagement with the social other—who is, after all, another being like ourselves, articulated through processes of co-opting intersubjectivity at the deepest levels of individuality.

Conclusions There is much to be learned by examining what happens when discourse crosses boundaries: between two voices dialogically juxtaposed; between two stances in opposition; between two ideologies confronting each other in rhetorical contestation; between two subjectivities that, if bound together, may articulate an intersubjectivity; between public and private arenas of social life; and between exterior and interior sociality. Via reflexivity the boundary-crossing is pushed further and deeper, propelled by rhetorical and dialogic processes capable of embedding a prior discourse into a new discursive, cognitive, affective, and interactional framing. Ultimately it is intersubjectivity itself that is co-opted, as it is appropriated from a public process of correlating subjectivities between socially engaged co-participants, to be projected into the myriad private spaces where the individual constitutes herself as a self, organized not only subjectively but intersubjectively. The discursively socialized individual lays down her own autobiography in the inscription of stances taken, yielding a developmental history that constructs a fundamentally dialogic self based on the sedimentations of co-opted intersubjectivity. In return, the processes of dialogic production that mediate the socialization of the self can be recycled and projected outward again into the arena of public discourse. In the dialogic moment of interacting with social others, the imperative to engage mobilizes internal dialogic structures, drawing on the organization of interior intersubjectivity to construct an effective response to the task of exterior intersubjective alignment as it arises dynamically in real-time face-to-face interaction. This completes the circuit of dialogically engaged voices, crossing the boundary from public to private—and back. One context where the dialogic circulation of discourse may sometimes be observed occurs, paradoxically, when the individual is alone, left to her own

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resources, as it were. Despite obvious challenges of empirical observation, the practice of speaking in solitude, as evidenced in this chapter, is anything but unknowable. Though grounded in psyche, talking to oneself is not crazy, not mystical, nor is it merely metaphorical. Speaking in solitude is real, constituting a small or large part of the everyday lives of many individuals. Not only is speaking in solitude a reality, it is a practice that can be subjected to empirical inquiry by ordinary means, given the will to document it effectively. Armed with such evidence, it is possible to move beyond a priori assertions to identify the observable properties of the practice of speaking in solitude (at least for the specific forms of this practice documented in this paper). Most importantly for present purposes, speaking in solitude is revealed as firmly grounded in sociality. Speaking in solitude exploits the same practices of everyday life that organize social interaction in public, but with the difference that one person controls both sides of the dialogic engagement. Paramount among the features are: the mobilization of distinctive voices capable of representing distinct rhetorical stances; the systematic juxtaposition of utterances in dialogic engagement, one with another; the organization of sequentiality in turns, or turn-like increments of verbal interaction, expressing the alternation of distinctive stances; and the mobilization by the isolated individual of dialogic structures otherwise used by multiple parties engaged in the management of intersubjective alignment. I have invoked the phrase “co-opting intersubjectivity” to refer to processes by which individuals take personal ownership of the capacity for dialogic engagement, internalizing not just specific representations but fully generalized practices of engagement between persons and voices, as they manage both sides of a creative dialogic engagement within their own psychic sphere. What is the more remarkable is that individuals show a capacity to mobilize the creativity of their own inner dialogic productions as they project them outward again into the public arena of social interaction, in the service of rhetorical projects of the moment. Mastery of the dialogic principle means the capacity not only to construct and manage structured arrays of engaged and interacting voices, but to project these arrays in two directions, transferring them fluidly between the public, interpersonal domain of exterior sociality and the private, psychic domain of interior sociality. I have sought to illustrate the power of these dialogic processes by presenting a series of examples documenting the engagement between voices differentiated within the discourse of one individual. I have supplemented this argument with one suggestive instance of the projection of interior dialogicality back into the public sphere. In the sense I have used the term, co-opting intersubjectivity must be considered a breakthrough achievement of the individual, who transforms the structure of intersubjective engagement into a resource that can be projected inward or outward as needed.

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Social scientists widely acknowledge that they are dealing with socially organized persons, individuals who have been shaped in some way by their experience of sociality. What is not so widely agreed on is how to understand the nature of this experience, and how deeply its consequences penetrate within the individual. On the present view, the penetration is profound, and deeply consequential. The socially organized individual takes the experience of dialogic engagement with other persons and makes it personal, projecting it into the private realms of the self. In this way the self becomes fundamentally dialogic. This fact is perhaps most transparently expressed in such practices as speaking in solitude, once this practice is recognized as organized dialogically and hence implicitly a form of social action. But the impact of the dialogic self is evident also in the more typically social environment of face-to-face interaction, where it contributes to the organization of social action in public. This is visible, for example, in the self ’s mobilization of its own self-critique as an outwardly projected dialogic structure participating in the public engagement of rhetorical interaction. It is a rich territory for future research to identify the many further aspects of social interaction that build on the dialogic organization of the self, and in return contribute to its formation. What is common to all this cyclic boundary-crossing in both directions between public interactions and private selves is the link that is established between the personal dimension of subjectivity and the interpersonal dimension of intersubjectivity. The intersubjective linkage is at once intimate and robust, constituting a fundamental and pervasive condition of human sociality. Crucially, intersubjectivity in this sense must not be conceived as a static, automatic birthright of the members of any social group. Such assumptions fail because they presuppose a totalizing, hegemonic imposition of intersubjectivity, obliterating the potential for difference and contestation between differently situated parties and classes within a community. There is no need to accept such uniformitarian assumptions, given a dialogic understanding of the construction of intersubjectivity. In this view, intersubjectivity represents the calibrated relation between one person’s subjectivity and another’s, and thus requires only commensurability, not commonality. Participants have the possibility in principle, whether they exercise it or not, to contest and recalibrate the sociocognitive relations of intersubjectivity. The social practices linked to the negotiation of contested intersubjectivities cry out for more study, alongside the more normative reproduction of equilibrated intersubjectivities. In this respect, the attunement to conflict implicit in rhetoric culture provides a useful intellectual framing. The importance of the dialogic dimension in this chapter is to argue that the rhetorical realization of intersubjectivity points in two directions at once: extending now outward to organize the structures of interpersonal engagement, now inward to mediate the relations among the contending voices that

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populate the inner domains of the psyche. The two moves must be well coordinated, taking into account the dialogic mode of circulation of discourse, which continually cycles between the engagements of inner and outer sociality. There is room in this approach to accommodate the power, subtlety, and vitality of intersubjective meanings as they are negotiated and contested in the dynamics of interaction between socially organized persons. The intention, ultimately, is to imagine a dialogic rhetoric of the socially potentiated self. References Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15: 38–59. Attinasi, John, and Paul Friedrich. 1995. “Dialogic Breakthrough: Catalysis and Synthesis in Life-Changing Dialogue.” In The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, eds. Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 [1934]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1995. “The Hero’s Monologic Discourse and Narrational Discourse in Doestoevsky’s Short Novels.” In Bakhtinian Thought, an Introductory Reader, ed. Simon Dentith. London: Routledge. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Beckett, Samuel. 1974. Texts for Nothing. London: Calder and Boyars. Blakemore, Diane. 1992. Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. “The Politics of Transcription.” Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1439–65. Bucholtz, Mary, and Hall, Kira. 2004. “Theorizing Identity in Language and Sexuality Research.” Language in Society 33: 469–515. ———. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: a Sociocultural Linguistic Approach.” Discourse Studies 7: 585–614. Burke, Kenneth. 1950. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Caton, Steve C. 1993. “The Importance of Reflexive Language in George H. Mead’s Theory of Self and Communication.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. John A. Lucy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1990. “On Dialogue.” In The Interpretation of Dialogue, ed. Tullio Maranhão. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, John. 1925. Experience and Nature. LaSalle: Open Court. Du Bois, John W., et al. 1993. “Outline of Discourse Transcription.” In Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research, eds. Jane A. Edwards and Martin D. Lampert. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Du Bois, John W., and Robert Englebretson. 2005. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Part 4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium. ———. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. Robert Englebretson. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Notes 1. A critical challenge, of course, is to say just what the nature of this similarity is: whether the interior processes are supposed to model, reproduce, select, imagine, echo, or simply continue the external processes in a different medium. This is a vast issue, and will not be directly addressed here, though the evidence and analyses to be introduced below may give some hints as to the direction a dialogic approach would pursue. 2. In general, the transcription practices used below follow the revised Discourse Transcription (“DT2”) conventions (Du Bois in progress-a), representing an updated version of the earlier conventions originally used in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois/Englebretson 2005), as described in Du Bois et al. 1993. However, the initial examples in this section (i.e., examples 1–5) are presented in a simplified transcription, for both ease of reading and simplicity of exposition. In particular, examples (1–5) do not indicate the boundaries of intonation units, except indirectly as implied by the presence of punctuation. 3. The recording was made on 23 March 1995 in Houston, Texas, by the author (remotely). 4. For a recent reading that brings out the rich potential for a sociodynamic (re)interpretation of Saussure’s ideas, see Thibault 1997.

CHAPTER 3

Echo Chambers and Rhetoric Sketch of a Model of Resonance Pierre Maranda








A Medieval philosophical apophtegm: Omne quod recepitur recipitur sub modo recipientis. (Contents are shaped by their containers, messages take the meaning that recipients given them.)

This chapter sketches a resonance model that bears on rhetoric culture theory in that it deals with “echo chambers” as the substrata on which rhetoric operates. Culture-specific semantic fields reverberate on each other. They bounce back and forth in the minds and feelings of people that share homologous representational backgrounds pre-stressed along probabilistic vectors, i.e., along expectations stemming from previous experiences. Indeed cultures and sub-cultures make available to, and impose to a certain degree upon, their carriers the lexicons and semantic grammars without which they cannot communicate, without which people cannot feel that they belong together. Thus, both constraints and prescriptions impinge—differentially—on the use of the resources we have in order to think and act. In terms of social grammars, taboos and other prohibitions are factors of cohesiveness as much as approved and conventional thoughts and behaviors. Overall compliance rests on shared semantic universes, on evocation chambers that give us the impression that we understand each other when we interact. If we “resonate” in unison or at least in some sort of harmony, if we think that we feel approximately the same “vibes” as our interlocutors, we maintain and reinforce positive relationships.

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Orators work on such dynamics when they aim at consolidating cultural inertia. On the other hand, when they disrupt inertia through defiant or rebellious speeches, dissonance arises, consensual vectors are no longer operational, and dissent or even conflict may ensue. This chapter proposes an approach to explore some dimensions of resonance theory as it may bear on rhetoric culture theory. The chapter unfolds in four sections. First, short notes on the Chinese concept of “resonance” and on resonance theory in different fields. Then, a brief presentation of the theoretical basis of the proposed model: cultural universes as rhetorical echo chambers. Thirdly, vectors of cultural universes: memory organization packages and imagination structuring processes as basic components of speeches. The fourth and last section attempts to show how an adaptation of category adaptive resonance theory may be useful as an operationalization of some aspects of rhetoric culture theory.

Some Inputs to a General Theory of Resonance A concise statement of the resonance model can be found in the work of a specialist of Chinese culture and society, Charles Le Blanc, at the Université de Montréal. In his paper “From Cosmology to Ontology Through Resonance: A Chinese Interpretation of Reality” (1995), Le Blanc focuses on the concept of ganying, which he develops in his paper and which I have used as a basic leitmotif to connect the different chapters of the book in which his essay belongs (Maranda 1995). Ganying is a compound or binomial expression. Each of its composites may function grammatically and semantically as an independent word, for ancient Chinese was, basically, monosyllabic. Gan has as its semantic field the notion of affect, feeling, stimulus and may syntactically function as a verb, … a substantive, … or an adjective. … The meaning of ying focuses on the idea of response, reaction, reflex, effect. Ying may also function as a verb, a noun, an adverb, and an adjective on the strength of word context. … The expression was first applied … to the study of musical and acoustic phenomena. … Therefore, in the light of its initial usage, ganying is better translated by the expression ‘resonance.’ (Le Blanc 1995: 59)

More recent considerations of resonance theory, several of them converging with the Ancient Chinese one, come from different fields. Let us summarize a few of them. Quantum resonance theory (Keener 1999) is an esoteric and mystical theory. It holds that any reality is virtual—plants, people, quantum particles,

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supernovas, etc. Life itself is a virtual reality that consists of a vast and dynamic network of interconnected virtual realities. Accordingly, we are all quantum resonances and, like all other realities, we are like the dream of a dreamer. In physics, resonance refers to an abnormally large response of a system (analogically, an audience) having a natural frequency to a periodic (analogically, rhetorical repetition) external stimulus of the same, or nearly the same, frequency (analogically, common, unison “vibes” in an attraction basin—see below). The prolongation or increase of a wave occurs by the sympathetic vibration of other bodies (see Durkheim 1912 on great collective effervescence). Resonance is used to describe an atom that gives off rays (analogically, persuaded audience, having become contagion agents) of the same length as it has absorbed. Hence, relays propagate resonance. In linguistics, C. F. Hockett (1987) has proposed a connectionist “Resonance Theory of Morphology.” It implies “recognition units,” a concept that overlaps and “resonates” with MOps (Memory Organization Packages—see below). Such recognition units are clusters of meanings—cf., attraction basins in my terminology (Maranda 2007)—of different sizes that trigger reverberations in the internalized system (Lee 1993) in a way somewhat germane to category adaptive resonance theory. As for category adaptive resonance theory, it proposes a neuroscience model that may be adapted to bear on rhetoric culture theory as I show in section 4.

Theoretical Basis of the Proposed Model: Cultural Universes as Probabilistic Echo Chambers A cultural universe is like a dictionary. Dictionaries provide lists of predetermined units available in a given language, “words”—i.e., condensed representations of components of the world as well as of feelings and of thoughts on that world. When one looks up a word in a dictionary one just finds other words, and one may have to look up all those other words one after the other before looping back to the first word at the beginning of the search. And the same holds true for cultural representations: cultures, like dictionaries, are circular. The arrays of representations they make available to their carriers hang together in clusters (cultural Memory Organization Packages, MOps—see below) and can be disconnected and reconnected—their meanings can be revamped—through creative processes such as metaphors (Fernandez 1977, 2009; Maranda 1979, 1980, 1997, 2008), viz., Imagination Structuring Processes, ISPs (see below, section 3). To respect the dynamic nature of cultural representations, modeling must remain flexible and open—hence the challenge of building dynamic relational data bases.

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The model we have developed (Maranda/Nze Nguema 1994; Maranda et al. 1999; www.oceanie.org) rests on the assumption that cultures can be represented as non-linear associative worlds of symbols more or less pregnant as sources of actions (Fernandez 2009: 172–77). Our approach is congruent with Yuri Lotman’s concept of “semiospheres” (1990), the domains in which the subjects of a culture experience meaning. Their shared semiotic experience lays the ground for discourse production as its prerequisite. Semiospheres typify cultures as they provide the necessary conditions of their members’ self definition with respect to the worldviews of other cultures and consequent intercultural communication. Clusters of meanings intersect, rebound on each other, and may prevent further developments, all that along probabilistic vectors. (More boldly, let us say that, technically, we can map cultures as Markovian universes.) Partial congruence as well as partial dissimilarity—associative propensity or repulsion—both result from historical accretions, personal experiences, stereotypes, prejudices, and diverse pragmatic factors. In other words, cultural syntaxes—ideological and pragmatic—rule compatibilities (thinkable and possible links) and incompatibilities (unthinkable and impossible links). Thus, it is unthinkable and therefore impossible for a devout Christian that God be the cause of human suffering and of other evils. But it has become thinkable and also possible—because the Anglican and other churches do it—that women be ordained priests while it remains unthinkable and therefore impossible for the Pope to raise them to priesthood in the Catholic Church. It is “unthinkable” because the Pope cannot even imagine or conceive of Eve’s daughters as capable of performing the Eucharist. In another order of congruities and incongruities, it might become thinkable but unlikely to see English cuisine based on frog legs. Thus, in a given cultural universe one may establish a scale ranging from the unthinkable through the impossible through the non plausible through the unlikely or improbable through the plausible through the probable to the certain (when p = 1,00), as when it is a definite fact that we will all die or when we fully and unquestionably trust a friend. Be it in the realms of religion, cuisine, or other things such as gender relationships, many clusters of meanings rebound on each other. But some clusters are “absorbing nodes” (in Markovian terminology) in a cultural network, or “sinks”: the Pope responds with a definitive “no” to repeated proposals suggesting that Catholic priests may marry. It remains a socio-semantic dead end. Likewise, we would not want to share a delicious roast of dog meat offered by Chinese friends, etc. Other clusters are “reflecting and diffracting” nodes in a cultural network, the latter opening up new paths: we rejoice at the idea of going on a vacation or on a trip to an unfamiliar destination because it may be full of exciting new encounters and adventures. Whereas “sinks” are condens-

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ing nodes (they do not allow their inputs to go further), reflecting nodes can be simple relays or diffraction sources. Sinks—cultural dead ends—stifle thoughts and actions. In contrast, relays and sources—cultural highways—open up all sorts of round trips within the borders of a circular cultural universe. They consist of prototypes, stereotypes, clichés, and other routines that give a society its ballast, i.e., the inertia that enables people to steer their thoughts and lives according to stock expectations (probabilistic empirical assumptions). As for sources and new cluster connections, be they new metaphors or scientific breakthroughs, the innovations they generate broaden cultural universes and individual minds as well. Let us loop back for a moment to the analogy between a culture and a dictionary. We can say that some “words” have a condensation power and are terminal sinks: individual plant names, individual proper names, etc. Similarly, in cultures, we find such sinks, for example, widowhood in some Indian societies (the widow must sacrifice herself on the pyre where her husband’s corpse is being burned); menstruating blood in others; the case of the long penis in still others, as I have shown elsewhere (Maranda 1981). Other “words” have a vast diffraction power—e.g., to run, in English: run away, run for election, running nose, etc.; they behave like polygyny in some cultures, levirate in others, etc. Such nodes are multipliers, they are deployment operators in a network of experiential or conceptual signifiants (signifiers). And their deployment power can be increased through creative metaphors (vs. “dead” metaphors like the legs of a table). Creative metaphors may override sinks and borders by connecting theretofore unrelated domains between which they make us discover new connections and open new horizons for thought and action: “All our closures are but possible openings” (Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler 2003: 8). And some metaphors are so powerful that they produce metamorphoses. Indeed such metamorphic metaphors are “resonant” to the extent that their impacts produce personal or social transformations: they implement the representations that they configure (Fernandez 1977; Maranda 1997, 2008). More specifically, as regards personal relationships, degrees of trust play an important role. Indeed, an orator must generate confidence to bring his convincing power to bear on an audience. But trust is based on an intuitive knowledge of probabilities. It rests on expectations stemming from experience—from pragmatics. Social life requires reasonably accurate predictions of the conformity by most if not all members of a group, to accepted rules and conventions. When we drive a car, cross a street, or tell a secret to a friend, we trust that, in a highly probable way, other drivers will abide by normalized standards. Likewise when we step on a pedestrian crosswalk, or when we confide in a friend, we deem it extremely probable that we will not be hit by a car in the first example, or that our friend will not betray us in the second. It is the same in terms of speaker-hearer interaction. Evocation of a subject will trig-

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ger positive, indifferent, or negative resonance, and we all know that if we take up one topic with a familiar person, she or he will respond—in all likelihood (probability)—in this or that mood or fashion. That is why, instead of moving to another sidewalk upon seeing an acquaintance coming our way, we may opt to have the encounter while still taking the initiative of uttering a few wellchosen words so as to avoid raising echoes that may become either dissonant or obnoxious. To trust someone, or to think that we know a person well, means that we can predict that person’s behavior or reactions without erring off the mark, i.e., with a high level of probability. Divination and weather forecasts rest on and play with probabilities. And when experience belies expectations one has to revise degrees of trust and readjust one’s “anticipation engine.” In cultural universes, consolidated high transition probabilities make for routines (stable compatibilities, i.e., inertia); low transition probabilities make for innovation possibilities (breakthroughs) or may develop into conflicts. Null transition probabilities reflect indifference or vacuity. Cultural grammars can be modeled as the dynamic templates on which orators work with greater or lesser skills to achieve the results they target: the molding of fellow humans’ thought and behavior. In that respect, orators are not substantially different from narrators or storytellers. As Ivo Strecker, Christian Meyer, and Stephen Tyler put it, “Here [in RCT] the ideas of story and exempla are of key concern, for when we understand something, it is probably because it is embedded in a story or in examples which as particulars portend the whole” (2003: 8). To illustrate this approach, take the template of Russian folktales as algebraically defined by Vladimir Propp (1928) in the terms of a narrative grammar (Gaudreault 2001) and which I have recast in terms of a probabilistic network (Maranda 1985). The rhetoric of a storyteller depends on his and his audience’s Memory Organization Packages (MOPs) and Imagination Structuring Processes (ISPs—see below, section 3). The teller’s intuitive knowledge of rhetoric—like that of any politician—will enable him to structure his yarn along a concatenation of effective relays, diffracting and condensing nodes in a plot that he will engineer according to a limited, culturally specific, number of acceptable scripts in order to bring the trajectory to the close he has in mind. Note that C acts as a condensation node and DT as a diffraction one. A skilled teller will know how to navigate along more or less expected paths to bring his story to an expected or surprising end. An unskilled one will take a direct line to RT or to K and come up with a simple-minded plot, the close of which will leave his audience disgruntled. And the same applies to rhetors. To take the case of an incompetent orator: one former prime minister of Québec, whose speeches consisted mainly of commonplaces stringed on threadbare paths, was declared by the British journal The Economist to be the “most boring statesman in the world.”

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Figure 3.1. A Digraphic Probabilistic Network of the Corpus of 100 Fairytales as Modeled Algebraically by Vladimir Propp (1928) A summary legend to figure 3.1. Capital letters refer to broad categories of actions, viz., Propp’s “functions.” In the network, lower case letters and numerical subscripts stand for more specific functions (subsets of the major ones; for a full description and analysis, see Maranda 1985, 1992, 2005). Transition probabilities from one node to another figure at the arrow heads (first-order Markov chains). A = lack or mischief of some sort J = victory of hero over villain B = plan to counter lack/mischief K = lack liquidated C = start of counteraction N = completion of difficult task F = acquisition of magical agent by hero RT = return of hero DT = hero departs on mission W* = wedding and accession to the throne H = hero fights villain I = victory over villain

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Each Proppian “function” is actually a culturally pre-stressed Memory Organization Package (MOP), and the performance of a teller along the Russian fairytale generative network depends on his Imagination Structuring Processes (ISPs). The same holds true for any orator: the topics he will broach will evoke memories (MOPs) in the minds of his hearers. A clever orator will select carefully, use skillfully, and maneuver adroitly MOPs in his speech, playing on his hearers’ imagination. He will aim at convincing them by influencing the structure of their own imagination processes as replicas of the ones he puts forward in his speech.1

Memory Organization Packages (MOps), Memory Organizational Processes (MOPs), Memory Organizational Nets (MONs), and Imagination Structuring Processes (ISPs) as Basic Components of Cultural Grammars I hypothesize that the basic components of cultural universes consist of MOps and ISPs. I have defined those concepts in previous publications (Maranda 1989, 1993) of which I rephrase some pertinent passages.

Memory The concepts of MOPs and MONs develop and refine that of Memory Organization Packages (MOps; cf. Schank and Hunter 1985; Schank 1991; Maranda 1985, 1989, 1993). Their interplay generates dynamic processings of retrievals and routings of associative clusters of connotations/denotations. Such clusters, or MOps in Roger Schank and Larry Hunter’s terminology, store images/concepts2 that hang together by virtue of appetences (cf. Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of “paradigms” as “associative series”). Actually MOps, a term used in Artificial Intelligence, re-labels what Donald Hebb called “cell assemblies” in his classic theory of memory. As for appetence (a term proposed by Frank Harary 1965), it means an empirically grounded—i.e., pragmatic—tendency for an image/concept to “have an appetite for,” to attract other images/concepts in its gravitational orbit. The concepts of “attractor” and “attraction basins” develop and implement appetence theory (Kamp/Hasler 1990; Maranda/Nze Nguema 1994; Maranda et al. 1999; Maranda 2007; for hypermedia applications, see www.oceanie.org). Examples of MOps: MOps and MOPs: Memory Organization packages: the clusters of congruent ideas/images that a student or lecturer processes (MOPs), structuring them

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into higher-order networks through routings stemming from his Memory Organization Nets (MONs). Examples of MONs: MONs: Memory Organizational Nets: the set of ideas—dynamic template—a student has in mind when taking an oral exam or a lecturer when delivering a notes-free talk. In the first case, the activation of retrievals and routings depend on the questions asked by the examiner and on the student’s networking resources; in the latter, they depend on the routines the lecturer has developed through repeated performances. In both cases, new ideas may come up, i.e., connections that the student or lecturer had never imagined or thought about, and that their Imaginative Structuring Processes (ISPs) generate. Examples of appetence: The appetence of a postmodernist means an inclination/propensity to grope for concepts to deconstruct, and thus to consolidate a philosophical stand; likewise the appetence of an ideologue in a patrilineal society means to grope for consolidating images of the male power. Both are on the lookout to bring water to their mills.

Imagination But MONs and MOPs present a limited and partial view of cognition and of memory, as well. Indeed, MOPs provide basic data on which imagination works at the same time as it (imagination) feeds back and feeds forward on those data. We must therefore take into account what I call “Imagination Structuring Processes” (ISPs) when investigating how the mind works. Actually, both memory and imagination pertain to “social facts” in that they depend on representation systems, the elements of which—more specifically, bundles of which—have been internalized by the members of a society (Lévi-Strauss 1958: chap. XI, 1973: chap. VIII; not to mention his Mythologiques and the books that followed). In Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler’s words, “Rhetoric culture … seeks to give an accounting of the imaginative resources that ground our approximations and make our openings and closings. That is why Rhetoric Culture Theory pays as much attention to the ways of intuition as to the structure of proof, and attends so closely to those means of fabulation that become the instrumentalities of fact” (2003: 8, emphasis added). The management of MOPs is selective, some sent right away to the trash can—“Forget it!” “I don’t want to be reminded of that!” Some are un-erasable: they keep hunting the personal or collective memories, e.g., the death of a dear friend, McCarthyism in the USA, 9/11, etc. The Propp net shows MONs, and the itinerary between nodes depends on the teller’s ISPs. Only a very compe-

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tent teller will be able to navigate through sequencing the less probable nodes and still build a convincing story. (Based on our model, some computer-generated tales—with a success rate of around 60 percent—are sometimes considered “beautiful” by readers.) ISPs are based on MONs and they review (or even revise) them retrospectively, use them when prospecting ahead—Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler’s “openings”—before making a decision, or when inventing compensatory scripts. Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler’s “closings” and counterfactual daydreaming are recognized in all human languages: Examples of ISPs: An “opening”: What would I chose to be if I were cloned? A “closing”: I wish so much I could be legally bigamous and take my mistress as a second wife! A counterfactual: Had I taken a vacation instead of attending that conference, I would not have met that person, and my life would have taken a very different turn. Musing over a counterfactual: Would I be happier if I had studied law instead of anthropology?

When stuck, one has to be able to backtrack in order to survive mentally and emotionally, as well. Or else, one has to face a personality collapse or to resort to psychological help. In sum, ISPs are a function of and depend on pragmatics, hence on percepts and connotations: ((ISPs)*(MONs*(MOPs*MOps))))

where “MOPs” stand for “Memory Organization Processes” and “MOps” for “Memory Organization Packages.”

Category Adaptive Resonance Theory (Category ART) This concluding section draws on a neuroscience model to represent the interaction between an orator and his audience through his speech. Category ART, a neural network design, has shown great potential for complex vowel recognition tasks, with interaction between spectral cues and fundamental frequency, i.e., transition probabilities. The analogical use of the model that I adapt here to RCT aims at showing how resonance theory is effectively operational. First, two sets of definitions, the first one taken from Strecker, Meyer and Tyler (2003), the second rephrased from David Weenink (1997) in order to adapt it to RCT. The reader who shies away from technical approaches may want to skip this section and leap to the conclusion.

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First Set of Definitions In the diagram below (figure 3.2) we have, as in Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler (2003), “Hearer,” i.e., the “hermeneutic mode,” “Speaker,” i.e., “the oratorical mode,” and “Code,” i.e., “the structuralist approach.”

Test response U-V Tenor’s orienting subsystem F1-A TENOR

Failure: return to (a)

Success: return to (b)

Figure 3.2. An Adaptation of the “Category Adaptive Resonance Theory” to Rhetorical Performance (after Weenink’s figure 3, 1997: 53). Summary Legend: (a) Y: Hearer Attraction basins (MONs)¸ X: Speaker’s MOPs and ISPs S-T: Code (speech) (feed-forward) (c) RESET of speaker’s orienting subsystem and speech

(b) U-V: Hearer response (feedback) that impinges on speaker’s vigilance and attentional subsystems X*: Speaker’s response to feedback

(d) Y*: new hearer response

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Strecker, Meyer, and Tyler state that “Rhetoric Culture Theory does not abandon these loci, but it is not projected from any one of them as the dominant or origin or starting point of understanding” (2003).

Second Set of Definitions (bold letters stand for abbreviations in the diagrams below) In all four figures (a) to (d): “Input patterns” I: the orator about to utter a speech X. Target: Y is the hearer with Memory Organization Processes (MOPs) in his Long Term Memory (LTM) and Short Term Memory (STM). The speaker plans his code (speech) based on his experience and competence through his “Orienting subsystem” A (his MONs and ISPs). The orienting subsystem is necessary to stabilize the processing of STM (Short Term Memory) and his action on LTM (Long Term Memory) in the hearer’s mind. F1 stands for the speaker’s intended speech (“code”), F2 For the hearer’s reception system (Omne receptum recipitur secundum naturam recipientis), i.e., his LTM and STM, F2 is the way the code works out as it inputs the hearer’s associative memory (MONs and ISPs). “Specific STM (Short Term Memory) activity pattern”: Short term memory is associated with the pattern of activity that develops on a MON (Memory Organization Net) as an input pattern is processed. “Output signal pattern”: the code, intended as in figure (a) or as implemented as in figure (d): S. S-T is the intended effect of the code on hearer T. Self-monitoring: the speaker’s “vigilance” and “attentional subsystem” (VAS) operate continuous weighing of feed-forward and feedback connections. Heavy connection weights form the long term memory (LTM) components of the system and multiply the signals along the feed-forward and feedback connections In figure (b): “Signal pattern” U-V : the hearer’s response that inputs the speaker’s vigilance and attentional subsystems (VAS). The speaker does not achieve the expected result: the “–” sign coming from the U-V reaction. Because of the mismatch the speaker has to modify his speech: X → X*.

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Figure (c) shows the reset of the speaker’s orienting subsystem Y and U-V disappear. Figure (d) illustrates the successful impact of the speaker on the hearer; the latter’s response is symbolized by Y → Y*.

The speaker’s vigilance factor bears on associative memory and control signals that are both used to form predictive associations so that he can re-parameter (reset—figure 3.2 [c]) his speech to match. Match tracking means that a wrong prediction triggers the search mechanism anew to look for a better match or, if a better match cannot be found, for a new tack. Match tracking can reorganize speech contents and structure so that predictive errors will not be repeated on subsequent presentations of the same input by the speaker. In Weenink’s words, this matching leads either to a resonant state that focuses attention and triggers stable prototype learning or to a self-regulating parallel memory search. This search ends in either of two ways. First, if an established category is selected, then this prototype may be refined to incorporate new information in the input pattern. In this case when an input matches an established category, we speak of resonance. This resonant state persists long enough for learning to occur; hence the term adaptive resonance theory. Second, if the search ends by selecting a previously untrained node, then learning of a new category takes place. The criterion of an acceptable match is defined by a dimensionless parameter called vigilance. Vigilance weighs how close an input must be to the top-down prototype for resonance to occur. Because the vigilance parameter can vary across learning trials a single ART system is able to encode widely differing degrees of generalization. Low vigilance leads to broad generalization and more abstract prototypes than high vigilance. In the limit of very high vigilance, prototype learning reduces to exemplar learning (1997: 4f., emphasis added).

Conclusion Resonance within a cultural universe combines with inertia. A cultural universe reverberates like a soundboard the performances of orators—of “tenors” (Ivo Strecker’s metaphor). Competent singers of songs, skillful sophists, and orators of different venues can lull their audiences or trigger revolutions because they know—intuitively or reflexively—how to exploit some nodes in their cultural representation network while taking care to avoid touching on

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other nodes. Actually, “match tracking” through continuous feed-forward and feedback is constantly at work in the performance of a good speaker through his orientation, vigilance, and attentional subsystems. Keenly aware (by mainly intuitive monitoring) of his audience’s feelings as his speech progresses, he knows what nodes to play up and which ones to play down. He thus kneads and molds, so to speak, his audience’s MOPs, MONs, and ISPs. Accordingly, providers and developers of cultural scripts encode stories that increase or decrease the social meaning of nodes by increasing or decreasing their associative strength (transition probabilities). They do it in order to influence the behavior of the people they address, intruding into their consciousness to achieve specific ends. Political speeches, religious discourses and sermons, and other forms or orations (in literature, poetry, theatre, and other forms of art) trigger responses of indifference, fear, revulsion, or enthusiasm. Grounding their interventions on their—mostly subliminal and intuitive—familiarity with the diffraction and condensation nodes in the cultural network they impinge on, they consolidate stereotypes or prejudices or, if powerful enough, counter inertia by opening new, virtual horizons that may revamp cultural universes. Moving along well-trodden paths (MONs) or opening new ones (ISPs) in what was considered unknown or dangerous land, good orators work as representation engineers. The mental architectures they design and implement condition the lives of the inhabitants of their cultures as much as do the thatch, wood, or stone buildings in which they reside.

References Carpenter, Gail A., Stephen Grossberg, and John H. Reynolds. 1991. “ARTMAP: Supervised Real-time Learning and Classification of Non-stationary Data by a Self-organizing Neural Network.” Neural Networks 4: 565–88. Durkheim, Emile. 1912. Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse. Paris: L’année Sociologique. Fernandez, James W. 1977. “The Performance of Ritual Metaphors.” In The Social Use of Metaphor, eds. D. Sapir and D. Crocker. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2009. “Tropical Foundations and Foundational Tropes of Culture.” In Culture + Rhetoric, eds. Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. Gaudreault, Romain. 2001. “Formalization: A Tool for Semiotics.” The American Journal of Semiotics: Rhetorical Semiotics 17 (1): 123–33. Harary, Frank. 1965. Structural models: an introduction to the theory of directed graphs. New York: Wiley. Hockett, Charles F. 1987. Refurbishing our Foundations: Elementary Linguistics From an Advanced Point of View. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. Kamp, Yves, and Martin Hasler 1990. Réseaux de Neurones Récursifs pour Mémoires Associatives. Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes.

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Keener, Matt C. 1999. “The Quantum Resonance: A Theory of Life.” http://xmission.com/ ~mkeener, accessed 18 January 2010. Le Blanc, Charles. 1995. “From Cosmology to Ontology Through Resonance: A Chinese Interpretation of Reality.” In Beyond Textuality: Ascetism and Violence in Anthropological Interpretation, eds. G. Bibeau and E. Corin. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lee, Penny. 1993. “Hockett’s Resonance Theory.” http://www.umich.edu/~archive/linguistics/ linguist.list/volume.4/no.701-750, accessed 18 January 2010. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. Anthropologie Structurale. Paris: Plon. ———. 1973. Anthropologie Structurale Deux. Paris: Plon. Lotman, Yuri. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Maranda, Pierre. 1979 [1975]. “Myth as a Cognitive Map: A Sketch of the Okanagan Myth Automaton.” In Textprocessing/Textverarbeitung, eds. W. Burghardt and K. Holker. Hamburg, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1980. “The Dialectic of Metaphor: An Anthropological Essay on Hermeneutics.” In The Reader in the Text, eds. S. Suleiman and I. Crosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1981. “Semiotik und Anthropologie.” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 3: 227–49. ———. 1985. “Semiography and Artificial Intelligence.” International Semiotic Spectrum 4: 1, 3. ———. 1989. “Imagination: A Necessary Input to Artificial Intelligence.” Semiotica 77: 225–38. ———. 1992. “Mother Culture is Watching Us: Probabilistic Structuralism.” In Reader Response to Literature: The Empirical Dimension, ed. E. Nardocchio. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1993. “Imagination Structuring Processes.” In The Expert Sign: Semiotics of Culture, eds. L. J. Slikkerveer. Leiden: DSWO Press. ———. 1995. “Beyond Postmodernism: Resonant Anthropology.” In Beyond Textuality: Ascetism and Violence in Anthropological Interpretation, eds. G. Bibeau and E. Corin. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1997. “Metaforas Metamorficas: Operadores que Aplicam Cultura ao Comportamento.” In Comunicaçao na Era Pos-Moderna, ed. Monica Rector. Petropolis: Editora Vozes. ———. 2005. “Ethnographie, Hypertexte et Structuralisme Probabiliste.” In L’Analyse du social. Les modes d’explication, ed. D. Mercure. Québec : Les Presses de l’Université Laval. ———. 2007. “Peuple des Eaux, Gens des Îles: Hypertexte et Peuples sans Écritures, www .oceanie.org.” In Humanités Numériques I—Nouvelles Technologies Cognitives et Épistémologie, ed. Bernard Reber. Paris: Hermès-Lavoisier. ———. 2008. “Myth and Metamorphic Metaphors. Exchange and Sea-Land Synergy in Malaita, Solomon Islands.” In Exchange and Sacrifice, eds. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. Maranda, Pierre, Pierre Jordan, and Christine Jourdan. 1999. Cultural Hypermedia Encyclopedia of Oceania. 3rd ed. Québec, Marseille: Laboratoire de Recherche Sémiographique en Anthropologie—Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie. Maranda, Pierre, and Fidèle P. Nze Nguema. 1994. L’Unité dans la Diversité Culturelle: Une Geste Bantu. Québec, Paris: Presses de l’Université Laval et ACCT.

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Propp, Vladimir. 1948 [1928]. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Baltimore, MD: Port City Press. Schank, Roger. 1991. Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory. New York: McMillan. Schank, Roger, and Larry Hunter. 1985. “The Quest to Understand Thinking.” BYTE April: 142–55. Strecker, Ivo, Christian Meyer, and Stephen Tyler. 2003. “Rhetoric Culture: Outline of a Project for the Study of the Interaction of Rhetoric and Culture.” http://www .rhetoricculture.org/outline.htm, accessed 17 January 2010. Weenink, David J. M. 1992. “Introduction to Neural Nets.” Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences 15: 1–25. ———. 1997. “Category ART: A Variation of Adaptive Resonance Theory Neural Networks.” Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences 21: 117–29 (pages numbered here after the website http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/Proceedings/Proceedings21/DavidWeenink/ DavidWeenink.html, accessed 18 January 2010).

Notes 1. For a more developed modeling of cultural universes, the reader may wish to visit the site www.oceanie.org, where clusters of Oceanic meanings gravitate around major cultural nodes such as “Ancestors,” “House,” etc. Using the neuroscience concepts of “attractors” and “attraction basins” to represent those cultural universes in hypermedia mode, our modeling displays the sinks and multifaceted reverberations of MOPs and ISPs in the cultures of the Pacific Ocean. 2. Images and also concepts imply feelings. 3. Weenink’s original legend to his figure 3 (figure 3.2, above): Figure 3. ART search for an F2 code: (a) The input pattern I generates, after being properly normalized, the specific STM [Short Term Memory] activity X at F1 as it nonspecifically activates the orienting subsystem A. Pattern X both inhibits A and generates the output signal pattern S. Signal pattern S is transformed into the input pattern T, which activates the STM pattern Y across F2; (b) Pattern Y generates the top-down signal pattern U, which is transformed into the prototype pattern V. If V mismatches I at F1, then a new STM activity pattern X* is generated at F1. The reduction in total STM activity which occurs when X is transformed into X* causes a decrease in the total inhibition from F1 to A; (c) If the matching criterion fails to be met, A releases a nonspecific arousal wave to F2, which resets the STM pattern Y at F2; (d) After Y is inhibited, its top-down prototype signal is eliminated, and X can be reinstated at F1. Once again X generates the input pattern T to F2 and activates a different STM pattern Y*

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at F2 since Y remains inhibited. If the top-down prototype due to Y* also mismatches I at F1, then the search for an appropriate F2 code continues (adapted from Carpenter et al. 1991).

Weenink (1997: 13ff.) develops his model further through a fuzzy ART algorithm, a module that can also be useful to modeling speaker, code, and hearer interactions. I shall leave it out of this chapter so as not to introduce still more technical considerations.

CHAPTER 4

Discourse Beyond Language Cultural Rhetoric, Revelatory Insight, and Nature Donal Carbaugh and David Boromisza-Habashi








On a beautiful fall day in Cody, Wyoming, Scott Frazier, a member of the Native American Crow Nation, was discussing water and wind. As an educator, he had been invited to speak on these matters at a conference on Native Land and the People of the Great Plains. Mr. Frazier spoke energetically to his mostly Native audience about the importance traditional people place on watching and observing one’s surroundings. He summarized his point through a slowly paced, highly reflective, measured tone, in these words: Listen to the wind or water If we quit listening The spirits quit talking Then we stop We don’t want to stop

Indeed! As Mr. Frazier directed us, if we listen to wind and water, we can open our eyes and ears to the world around us. So opened, our minds can sense in the world its spirited nature, and learn from it. This deep process is identified by Mr. Frazier as “listening,” and through it, we are offered a way, not of stopping, but of keeping things going, becoming better educated, equipped with a proper knowledge that is more attuned to the world that surrounds us. We have placed Mr. Frazier’s words above in a particular format in an effort to capture some of their spoken qualities. Each line was spoken as an

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integral unit, with each being punctuated at the end with a slight pause; the first is a directive to his audience to “Listen”; the second identifies a suboptimal condition when the directive is not heeded, “if we quit listening”; the third and fourth elaborate the consequences of this suboptimal condition, “the spirits quit talking, then we stop”; the last makes the premise of the stanza explicit, “we don’t want to stop.” This kind of speaking is worth our attention for a variety of reasons. Note the complexity of it. First, Mr. Frazier’s words illustrate a way of speaking that is common among some traditional Native Americans. Second, words, like those used here, when properly understood, refer interlocutors to a kind of communication that is, in the first instance, a non-linguistic form of engagement. As he mentions, this form involves various nonverbal agents of expression, such as the wind and water. Third, and further, this way of speaking, and the events being referenced by it, are quite necessary for survival, for they bring into view powerful sources of rightful living. Words as these are deep rhetorical resources for, at once, they illustrate a way of speaking, direct us to “listen” in a proper way, thus referring to non-linguistic forms of engaging the world, while valorizing these as powerful, necessary practices. Some listeners, or readers of this chapter, perhaps like us, upon hearing this way of speaking for the first time, might puzzle over or even challenge it, saying, as one person did: “It is preposterous to listen to the wind or water. People determine what is said, not these forces of nature!” Others might wonder: How could I possibly listen in this way? What is it that I listen to? What is it that is getting said? The uninitiated are challenged to wrestle with the premise that there are agents in communication with humans that are otherthan-human. If able to entertain this possibility, they are eventually then led to the same questions. This chapter explores this way of speaking in some detail, through these questions, examining its cultural shapes and meanings for those who use it. What is this cultural form? What rhetorical force does it have as it draws people into its ways of being and dwelling in places? Through this form, what are the possible agents of expression, and its potential as a social and cultural practice? As we explore a Blackfeet practice of non-linguistic communication, we position at least some of our readers in a place to reflect upon conceptions of communication that may be partly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The typical presumption is that communication is, par excellence, a linguistically based action, and this has had (and continues to have) a profound role in shaping Judeo-Christian cosmology. This view might be broadly summarized as parsing up the world into three (or, for those who reject the existence of the supernatural, two) realms: (a) the human world (where we can interact with other humans and we can also experience them physically); (b) the non-

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human natural world (the realm of non-agents with which we cannot interact but that we can experience physically); and (c) the supernatural world (the realm inhabited by agents with whom we can interact but that we cannot experience physically). A Blackfeet form of “listening,” however, questions this Judeo-Christian conception of communication as linguistically based interaction because it problematizes the second one of the above three points. It suggests that humans, in some communicative moments, do not stand in opposition to a non-human natural world, but in fact belong to it as one among other members. It also suggests that communication is not the sole possession of the human and the supernatural realms, only, but infuses the natural universe as a whole. As a consequence, Blackfeet “listening” can largely embrace Judeo-Christian (Western) understandings of communication, yet in so doing, extends this entire cosmology into other realms, as well. How does it do this? We can illustrate the point, initially, with four lines of text (7–10) taken from Rising Wolf ’s characterization of Blackfeet listening, which is discussed in more detail below. In these lines, he introduces the cultural phrase, “actually listening,” which he contrasts with another “which is pretty common today.” This latter mode of listening to the natural world consists of two moves: “listen,” then “make up your own mind of what you heard.” In this latter mode, one gathers sensory data from nature and then proceeds to make sense of it in the privacy of one’s “own mind.” Rising Wolf, however, states that it is a mistake to deny the possibility of a direct communicative interaction with nature’s objects or processes. Why? Because one then misses the wisdom that is available through listening to those objects and processes directly; this can make the sources of this wisdom inaccessible, or at best secondary, especially when communication is confined to other humans only, or when “listening” is simply focused in the processes of one’s “own mind.”

An Exercise in Irony It has been our experience, when discussing this kind of study, that some have been distracted initially by an ironic dimension within it. So, to begin, let us admit that the examination of this way of speaking, through this printed medium, is to some degree an exercise in irony. The irony is apparent as we acknowledge that the way of speaking under investigation here is referring, in part, to a communication practice that is not itself speech, in its normal sense, nor is it linguistic, again, in the formal, technical sense of being linguistic. Note, then, that the way of speaking and communicating being examined here includes non-speaking, with this non-speaking being a way of communicating for some traditional Blackfeet people. The irony grows deeper. Our composi-

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tion, here, is a way of writing; the subject in this writing is a Blackfeet way of speaking; with this way of speaking, itself, being about a nonverbal, communication practice. In short, this research report places words upon words about non-words. In yet other words, the writing and the speaking are using words to say something about a process that is, in its first instance, according to those who live this way, a non-linguistic communication practice. This printed medium, then, is twice removed from its central subject matter. A worded world strives to capture a non-worded practice. And so we stand, ironically, poised to do the best we can, our language aimed at a non-linguistic action. More on this later.

A Perspective on Rhetoric as Cultural Discourse The perspective at work in this chapter treats communication generally, and the oral practices of people specifically, as partly constitutive of social and cultural life. Just as there is a political and economic ordering to social life, so there is a communicative one, a system of “sayables,” which serves as an expressive touchstone about social reality in scenes and settings of communal life. As we shall see, communication is what people make of it, with those coproductions being a formative part of who they are, how they act, how they relate to one another, how they feel about things, and how they dwell in nature (Carbaugh 2005; Katriel 2004; Philipsen 2002). This general program of ethnographic work traces some of its roots to the ethnography of communication (e.g., Hymes 1972), which is wide in scope (e.g., Carbaugh 1995; Philipsen 1997) and deep in its demonstrations of sociocultural lives (e.g., Bailey 2000; Basso 1996; Covarrubias 2005; Philipsen 1992, 2000). Of special concern in this report are a set of “cultural sayables” that are being used principally among Blackfeet people of the Northern Plains in Montana. These identify deeply important communication practices with nature. Such sayings bring into view local means of verbal and nonverbal practice, and the deep meanings active in those practices. Through prior studies of communication and ethno-rhetoric, a theoretical framework for such study has been formulated, based upon a comparative study of such phenomena (Carbaugh 1989, 2005). This has been used to investigate such sayables in several different languages and speech communities, including Israeli Arabic and Hebrew (e.g., Bloch 2003; Katriel 2004), US American English and Russian (Carbaugh 2005), Japanese (Hall/Noguchi 1995), and Finnish (Carbaugh 2006; Wilkins 2005), among others. The special focus draws attention to terms, like “listening,” above, that identify deeply coded cultural practices, treating them as rhetorical devices that shape practical action, mold cultural beliefs about com-

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munication itself, and, in the process, become inextricably tied to premises of personhood, social life, and dwelling in nature. The following analyses will introduce several utterances made in the first author’s presence over the past twenty years by Blackfeet colleagues and consultants. Each is presented with attention to the context of the utterance, followed by observations about such an utterance, focused upon the specific theme of “listening to nature.” After examining several such utterances, we will explore an excerpt from a critically acclaimed novel by a Blackfeet author, in which this way of speaking is inscribed. The analyses of this and the prior utterances are summarized, then, as a “Blackfeet discourse.” This discourse will be treated a bit more abstractly, as an instance of a general discursive form that cultivates revelation and mystery. Summary comments present a cautionary tale for the treatment of all cultural discourses.

Two Bears Speaks about “Writing on Stone” At the same meeting in Wyoming where Mr. Frazier spoke, Two Bears, a former director of cultural affairs for the Blackfeet Nation, was discussing a form of communication that is widely known among traditional Blackfeet people. This form was inscribed in the title of his talk, “Writing on Stone.” There is a place near the Sweet Grass Hills in northern Montana where such writing is evident and centuries old. Some of the writing there appears where it seems impossible for normal human beings to reach, way up high on cliff walls. The writing includes symbols and images difficult to see, let alone interpret or understand. The place thus assumes an aura of considerable mystery in the placement, design, and rendering of the writings. As Two Bears explains, “writing on stone tells stories to us in mysterious ways.” Part of the mystery is the presumed source of the writing itself. While apparently etched by specific human authors, the enduring meaning is beyond normal people. When properly understood, this medium is spirited and material, with the source of the messages—if not the animator, in Erving Goffman’s terms—being the Great Spirit who makes mysterious things happen. When appropriately reflected upon, these things, the rocks along with the wind and water, can reveal deep insights for living, omens of bad luck, or of good fortune. One doesn’t know exactly what will come in such places, through such various media, but to be sure, it can be powerful and enduring, if mysterious. Just as these “writings on stone” are considered material instruments of the Great Spirit’s communication, so too is “the world,” its objects, and creatures. As Two Bears put it:

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We live by paying attention to the things around us Coyotes teach us to take a second look Ants teach us cooperation If we don’t pay attention Bad things happen We lose wisdom

One must keep one’s eyes and ears open, “paying attention” to the coyotes, ants, the wind, water, and trees, just as to the etchings in the stone. While many people may see the Great Plains as places of vast, empty space—one book refers to this region of the United States as “the empty quarter” (Garreau 1981)—to Blackfeet, as Two Bears said on this occasion, “there are no such things as empty spaces.” All spaces are part of the created world, are to be understood as part of the creation, for all were made by the Great Spirit: the world thus includes, in its various and particular parts, agents of the Creator’s messages. Attending to “the world” in this way offers sacred and powerful, if mysterious, teachings. Not paying attention to this results in “bad things” happening, and ultimately, to a “loss of wisdom.”1

Rising Wolf on “Communication” and “Listening” Let’s listen to another Native American speak about “listening” and the features it involves. These words come from Mr. Rising Wolf, who was raised in a traditional Blackfeet family, deeply knowledgeable about the ways of his ancestors. A highly respected tribal member, he was kindly taking some of his time to help me understand various practices that, to him, characterized proper Blackfeet living. One of these had, at this point in his life, become a challenge. He described it in this way: 1) 2) 3) 4)

It’s the hardest thing to concentrate on what you really believe in It’s the hardest thing to listen

5)

It’s one of the hardest things I think human beings have

6)

is to listen

7)

And actually listen and hear what they listen to

8)

not listen and then make up their own mind

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9)

of what they heard

10) which is pretty common today 11) But to actually listen. 12) and you start hearing the spirits talking 13) and they communicate with people like bigfoot, the eagle, elk, deer, the rocks, water 14) When these spirits come in 15) you can feel, or 16) you can hear those spirits and 17) you can feel them doing things to you. 18) Say if an eagle came in 19) you could feel the breeze of that wing as he flies by 20) you can feel it when he comes and puts his head by you 21) Same with an animal that has hair 22) you can feel the hair 23) you can feel the difference in hair too 24)

if you’re born in the mountains

25)

been around mountains

26)

been around animals

27) you’ve always touched the animals, so 28) you can tell the difference 29) you can close your eyes and 30) you can almost say 31)

this is a dog

32)

this is a deer

33)

this is an elk

34) So you can tell that 35) in the ceremonies. 36) By going through those there 37) it rejuvenates your spiritual, spirituality 38)

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39)

and that it’s still alive and strong

40)

and no matter how far back East in some city you might be

41) you know that nature and the communication 42)

between the animals and man is still there.

43) it makes you feel spiritually strong 44)

to the point that you just want

45)

to jump with cheer and joy.

46) And you go back to your city life with that energy.

This brief oral text is rich in many ways. For our purposes here, notice, according to Mr. Rising Wolf, that listening is difficult (lines 1–6); one reason it is difficult for many is that they “make up” things they have heard “in their own mind” (lines 7–10), rather than really listening to what is in the world, and thus “hearing the spirits talking” (lines 11–13). Mr. Rising Wolf elaborates how “bigfoot, the eagle, elk, deer, the rocks, water” can “come in” and “communicate with people” (line 13). When this happens you can “feel” or “hear those spirits … doing things to you” (lines 14–17). Mr. Rising Wolf gives several details of how the closeness of contacts between an eagle, animals, mountains, and people can help us not only “hear” but “feel.” Results of this process are a rejuvenation of spirituality (line 37), renewed confidence (line 38), spiritual strength (line 43), even exhilaration (line 45). And further, the value of this communication practice itself has been renewed, making it all possible (lines 41–42). Note the careful wording by Rising Wolf in the second stanza (lines 7–13). There is a shift in consciousness here from one’s own self, and mind, to the world of which one is a part. The former can easily obscure the latter, imposing self onto the world where it does not really belong. The “really” here expresses the Blackfeet premise that spiritual reality is adamantly real, around us for scrutiny, and we should not let our own minds get in the way of that. The domain of concern, then, in this type of listening is erected upon an accessible reality of which all can partake, and from which all can gain insight and renewal.

Communicating with Raven, among Others In his celebrated novel, Blackfeet author James Welch composed a conversation between a key character, White Man’s Dog, and a Raven (chap. 6, 56–57).

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The drama carries forth as White Man’s Dog (WMD) was searching for his way in the world. He was awakened one morning by a raven, and after eating, followed it. As he moved along following the raven, he realized he was going to a far-away place where he was being asked to perform a needed task. He approached a wooded area where the raven had landed in a tree, and while resting, he was startled when the Raven spoke: 1) Raven: You do not need your weapon young man. There is nothing here to harm you. 2) WMD: [His eyes widen; his heart races.] 3) Raven: It surprises you that I speak the language of the two-leggeds. It is easy for I have lived among you many times in my travels. I speak many languages. I converse with the black-horns and the real-bears and the woodbiters. Bigmouth and I discuss many things. … I myself am very wise. That is why mik-api [an elder] treats me to a smoke now and then. 4) WMD: [Drops his weapon and falls to his knees.] Oh, pity me raven. I am a nothing-man who trembles before your power. I do not wish to harm my brothers. I was afraid of this place and what I might find. 5) Raven: It is proper that you humble yourself before me, White Man’s Dog, for in truth I am one of great power. [Raven allows himself a wistful smile.] But my power is not that of strength. Here you see your brother skunk-bear [a wolverine] is caught in the white man’s trap and I have not the strength to open it. In all of us there is a weakness. 6) Raven and WMD move to the trapped Skunk Bear. 7) Raven: So you see how it is. He has been trapped for four days, and now he is too weak to cry out. You may release him. 8) WMD: He will not bite? 9) Raven: [laughing, caw! caw! echoing around] You are his enemy for sure, but even Skunk Bear has a little common sense. 10) WMD: [carefully releases Skunk Bear while noticing he is very weak and tried to chew off his leg] 11) Raven: Throw him some of your real-meat, for it has strength in it to fix up this beast. …You see, this animal has a weakness too—he is a glutton and cannot live long without food. 12) WMD: [Gives Skunk Bear meat.] 13) Raven: And now you must get down the mountain.

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14) WMD: [Thanks the raven and glances at the wolverine as he turns to leave.] 15) Raven: By the way, when you enter your close-to-the-ground house tonight, lie on your left side away from the entrance. Dream of all that has happened here today. Of all the two-leggeds, you alone will possess the magic of Skunk bear. You will fear nothing and you will have many horses and wives. But you must not abuse this power, and you must listen to Mik-api, for I speak through him, that good many-faces man who shares his smoke.

This story exhibits many of the qualities we have noticed so far. We will use it to demonstrate a system of nine Blackfeet premises about this type of communication event. Each is formulated from the traditional Blackfeet view, as a belief and/or virtue that is presumed for this kind of event to be intelligible and efficacious. Together, the system captures some of the distinctiveness and power in so acting, and being. 1) In Blackfeet reality, there are multiple human and non-human agents that are active together; in this excerpt, that includes White Man’s Dog (a man), and the raven (a bird). In earlier utterances this has included the wind, water, writing on stone, coyotes, ants, bigfoot (caribou), the eagle, elk, deer, the rocks, water (again). Human beings are sometimes startled into this realization, as White Man’s Dog has been here (in the first and second stanza). This startling realization can open one’s senses to insights otherwise left hidden (see premise 6 below). 2) Each agent, as the man and the raven on this occasion, has status as a communicant, can express things, and should be considered as such. This is demonstrated in the 15 stanzas of dialogue, above. All such agents have this status, and hold the potential to be communicants, along with people. 3) Agents such as man, raven, black-horns (buffalo), real-bears (grizzly and black bears), wood-biters (beaver), and bigfoot (caribou) can also converse with each other (in stanza 3). This can occur in “many languages,” such as the Raven’s caws, the wind’s sounds, the ants’ movements, and so on. Each is a source of wisdom. 4) Wise people, like mik-api [the elder], have learned to listen to various agents in the world, to be humble in their presence, to respect what each has to teach, and to learn from them (stanzas 3, 4, 5). In this sense, one can listen, hear, and feel through the various languages of these agents, including the assembly of all beings, from raven to rocks, wind, and water. 5) The most wise, like the raven and mik-api [the elder] can, at times, through this process, gain access to what some Natives have called, “the language of

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the universe” (stanzas 1, 3, 4, 15, and throughout). This is a grand conversation among all the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, and all that the great Creator has made. 6) Expressions from other agents can occur in surprising and mysterious ways, such as a raven speaking “the language of the two-leggeds.” The elements of surprise and mystery can create awe, and insight, in the presence of such mysterious powers. Powers of these kinds, of the various agents, are deeply potent, varied, and unpredictable. These powers are benevolent and to be respected (stanzas 2–5). 7) Recognizing the inherent power of agents in the universe, like those of the raven and the skunk bear, can, in turn, cause us to reflect upon the weaknesses in ourselves (e.g., stanza 4). This is virtuous, for all beings should exercise proper modesty and humility in the presence of the creation. 8) Understanding our weaknesses can, in turn, reveal our strengths (stanzas 11, 12, 15). These help us get through our lives, and should also be used in service of others. This is the process through which White Man’s Dog understood the weakness (of gluttony) in the typically fearless Skunk Bear. The process also exhibits White Man’s Dog’s weakness, his fear of the unknown (e.g., the Raven talking), but also his strength as he helped skunk bear, and eventually others, through physical and spiritual aid. 9) The lessons presumed and taught here rely on listening to the agents in the world who speak, through various languages, as the raven, the Skunk Bear, and others have done.

A Summary of Some of the Qualities in these Instances of Blackfeet Discourse The segments of Blackfeet and Crow discourse included above create a particular cultural stance for dwelling in nature, for becoming attuned to its spirited qualities, all the while listening to what it has to say. This discursive stance is filled with anticipation as various agents may speak at unexpected times, in unexpected ways. This type of event is not a function simply of one’s will, but involves a shift in the locus of attention from one’s self-will, to the elemental energies in the world that are in all things. When focused on the spirited energy in things, a traditional Blackfeet practice becomes active, a way of communicating with the real world (not with some fanciful disembodied spirits). Knowing in this way involves the primary nonverbal acts of watching, hearing, feeling, or listening to all of one’s surroundings. Through these acts, multiple

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senses are activated as portals into reality: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Through these multisensory acts of attentiveness, the world becomes known through its own ways of expressing itself, through its various means. When engaged in the world through this stance, one can become better attuned to it, resonant with it, and know things about oneself and the world that otherwise remain hidden. This largely non-linguistic communication process equips one with knowledge, and thus positions one in a place better to speak, verbally, using language. Yet one should never mistake the linguistic reports about this stance, and these events, for the non-linguistic events, themselves, for the linguistic report is always a faulty and secondary version of the primary stance at work in these non-linguistic events.

Dangers in Not Listening: Percy Bullchild’s The Sun Came Down Just as one is directed to listen properly by Scott Frazier, Two Bears, James Welch, and the Raven, so the pitfalls of not listening are discussed as a kind of counter-discourse. The following four excerpts from the teachings of the late Blackfeet elder, Percy Bullchild (1985), serve to demonstrate the point. 1) For many eons of time the snakes flourished, increasing by manyfold. In fact, they had filled this mud ball and they were still coming. There were certain commands given them by Creator Sun to follow. As time went on, the snakes forgot all about the commands of their Maker. They weren’t listening, they took everything in their own way. (6f., emphasis added) 2) At this time the Snake family still abounded on this land, the body of Mother Earth. These snakes were still trying their best to rule their own ways while Mother Earth was suckling them. From their wickedness, these snakes had become many—they were in many forms because of their crossbreeding with one another. Some were beginning to have legs, but they still looked like a snake. And because of no discipline or not wanting to listen, many of them became overgrown. Big, big in their form. Tall and long. The life of reptiles, dinosaurs. Again these reptiles reproduced many, manyfold. In fact, too many again roamed this land. So many of them again, they wouldn’t listen to their Creator Sun’s rules, but would rather have their own way. (36, emphasis added) 3) Napi [the disciple of Creator Sun] was alone again and started back towards his camp. But along the way towards the camp, he would stop and climb a limb to play the eye game of happiness [as played by the little birds, the chickadees). He played the game in excess, leading to his blindness. Napi

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was just one of those people that listens, but never uses what he hears. Too often, he climbed on a limb to play. (157, emphasis added) 4) Through with his meal, Napi folded his leggings up neatly and was soon ready to leave. Before he went out of the tipi, a strange man motioned to Napi to wait, and then he spoke: “I am the Sun, Creator of all things. Creator of this Earth you are one of the many forms of life here. Any place here on this Mother Earth is my tipi, which you were trying to run away from. You were only running inside of my tipi all the time you were running, that’s why you always woke up in that bed you slept on. [Napi was then instructed on the proper wearing of the leggings.] Napi was listening, but the words of this strange man were going right through Napi’s ears. He didn’t hardly hear a word of the words that were spoken by this strange man. All Napi had in his mind was to get a-going so he could try those red-winged woodpecker feather fringed leggings on, they looked so neat the way they were made. (195, emphasis added)

Based upon these teachings, we can formulate a set of lessons related to proper listening: Not listening implies breaking rules. Not listening is a fault, or a breach. The fault is a failure in resonance, of becoming attuned with the deep wisdom in the world. This deep wisdom is available to all who watch and listen appropriately. These rules are the rules of a spiritual power (Creator Sun in instances 1, 2, and 4) or the rules of a game played by agents with spiritual energies (chickadees in instance 3). Not listening leads to the agent’s destruction. The snakes don’t listen and are destroyed by Creator Sun (in instances 1 and 2). Not acting upon what he heard gets Napi into trouble (he loses his sight after instance 3, and embarrasses himself after instance 4). This contributes to his final fall from Creator Sun’s favor. Not listening is detrimental to well-being; it can result in various kinds of symbolic and/or physical death. As Rising Wolf points out above, not listening properly involves “having things one’s own way,” or following one’s own desires against the ever-present power of the spiritual world. There are typical qualities of not listening properly. These involve the privileging of self, and one’s own mind, over place, and others; or, being preoccupied with one’s immediate concerns over enduring or ancient wisdom. As a result, the lessons teach: When listening properly one has access to traditional and enduring knowledge; this is revealed as one becomes attuned to the spiritual reality in the world; and when one acts in accordance with that reality. To listen properly is to be vigilantly attentive to the spirit-natured world in which one acts. All beings have access to this, should listen to it, and learn from its deep wisdom.

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Communication with Nature and Revelatory Moments: Comparative Discourse Analyses Michelle Scollo Sawyer (2004) has presented a comparative study about “nonverbal ways of communicating with nature.” It is a “cross-case” analysis, focused on five different practices through which people use nonverbal communication in order to connect with, or listen to the natural world. Through her analyses, she identifies the following qualities as active across these social practices: Each, according to participants, linked the sacred to material being, connecting spiritual and physical life; each practice, when done, was believed to improve the quality of life; each practice, while nonverbal, was identified linguistically, and in most cases, could be taught to others; each included agents in communication that were human and non-human (e.g., as the wind, ocean waves, lions); each involved a multisensory way both of knowing and being within the natural world; through each, nature “spoke” in revelatory ways about “the sacredness within and the connections between all living things.” The findings of these cases, combined with the analyses above, suggest that there is, in many expressive systems, a general form of practice through which humans learn from the non-human world, and enhance their senses of that world of which they are a part. Across the cases, we realize there is nontrivial convergence, and cross-cultural evidence that communication practices of this kind exist, are valorized, and used to improve practical ways of dwelling in the world. But further, these are difficult means of communication to inscribe, especially in expressive systems that privilege print, writing, selfconsciousness, and linguistically bounded knowledge.

Reflections on Revelatory Discourse as an Un-Binding Form of Expression In a second comparative study, Michael Sells (1994) explored “mystical languages of unsaying.” He explored qualities of discourse that seeks to express transcendent knowledge, yet acknowledges the limits in its ability to do so. For our purposes, we can notice a set of common qualities among Scollo’s, Sells’s, and the present study. These identify a general discursive form through which revelatory insight is gained by listening to nature. A first quality is an expressive coexistence with nature, albeit one of an unnamable kind. The experience fills one, like White Man’s Dog above, with awe and inspiration. In the case of traditional Blackfeet, this involves, when occurring properly, in the first instance, listening to nature, hearing animals, the wind, water, and so on speaking. This experience is, according to Blackfeet, adamantly real, if in some ways ineffable and transcendent.

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A second quality is the desire to name the experience, thus making it known to others. This effort to communicate seeks to identify, through language, a phenomenological world of being-in-nature. For Blackfeet, this can involve snippets of discourse as those inscribed above. For others, this can involve, as Scollo (2005) and Sells (1994) describe in detail, verbal descriptions of activities like “sauntering” and “getting out into nature” (Scollo 2005), or metaphors of emanation and overflowing (Sells 1994: 6f.). A third quality exists in the play between the expressive coexistence (quality one) and the verbally expressive (quality two). The desire to verbally express the transcendent and ineffable experience creates a dilemma that cannot be entirely resolved, verbally. How does one name the unnamable, or discuss what is beyond words? Yet strive to do so, we do. The dynamic consists in the play on the validity of both qualities: One knows the coexistence cannot be captured adequately in words; yet one should seek to put one’s important experiences into words. From a Blackfeet view, this involves speaking about these experiences, yet doing so in a way that knowingly does not capture, adequately, the reality of those experiences. Both dimensions of the practice—the nonverbal coexistence and the verbal expression—are accepted as valid, with a play between them being acknowledged. In the process, one finds oneself using a discursive form that grants through verbal expression, yet at the same time takes away, the reality of the nonverbally, transcendent coexistence. This discourse, as it seeks to name the unnamable, can exhibit an irresolvable dilemma and a regressive quality. The irresolvable dilemma involves vain efforts to express verbally what is beyond verbal expression; it is regressive as one hears validity in such expression, yet also fault with it, thus needing correction; the effort to verbally correct the expression is inevitably flawed; this discursive dynamic is unstoppable. This point is frequently acknowledged among those wise in traditional Blackfeet ways. When asked, what does the crow say, or what is the wind saying, or what does the rock say, one is sometimes met with the wry response: “The listener decides.” In short, the wise sage says: Something has been said, we know that, can say some things about that, and this is as far as we can go, together, linguistically, for now. And we also know that what was said, non-linguistically, is more than what we have, for now, said, linguistically, about it. This kind of discourse, as such, when understood, has a deliberate and open quality about it, constantly seeking improvement and self-correction. It is unbounded by its own current terms, and seeks outwardly beyond itself. In this sense, the discourse presents, yet at the same time solves, a dilemma: We cannot, or should not, act as if we have had a final say in the matter. The virtues of modesty, vigilance, open-minded access to the world’s expressions, and all that this has to say, are kept in view. These words lead explicitly beyond themselves, into a realm of deeply non-linguistic practice.

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Of course, efforts at identifying this discourse places one squarely in the dilemma discussed above. How does one name such a discourse that cannot be adequately named? How does one name the un-nameable? We have come to think of this as an “M?”-discourse. Following Sells (1994), traditional Blackfeet, and building with Scollo (2005), we can dub the discourse as in some sense saying something important about the mystical and mysterious (M), while still immediately knowing that that saying is inadequate and must be questioned (?). Through the discourse, we draw to our attention a feature of the world that we somehow know, for it has made itself expressively available to us, yet knowingly we cannot address this adequately with our words. For Blackfeet, this involves speaking about agents who both speak and, in another sense, do not. Yet speak they do. It is the simultaneous granting of mystery, naming it, yet searching beyond it, that keeps the discourse explicitly unbound by its own terms, seeking beyond itself, transcending the very linguistic form used to express it. Five qualities of this M?-discourse can be summarized here in the abstract: an ineffable yet expressive coexistence, linguistic expressions about it, a spiraling form (the dialectical play between the coexistence and the linguistic expressions), its irresolvable and regressive qualities (in efforts to express what cannot be adequately expressed), and its necessity to be unbound by language. And thus we return to where we began, to an ironic place, writing about a way of speaking that identifies a non-linguistic practice that cannot adequately be expressed, through words.

M?-Discourse and Irony: With a Hint of the Comic To begin, we introduced our investigation as one using language to target a non-linguistic practice, using language about a Blackfeet way of speaking about a non-linguistic practice. We have found it necessary also to consider this ironic dynamic in reverse, starting with the originating practice of “listening,” moving to ways of speaking about listening, of which we then write. When we trace the ironic quality in this latter direction, prioritizing the nonverbal expression over its verbal expression, we can capture the following Blackfeet premise: Based upon nonverbal expression and practice, we know we can “listen” to “the wind”; as a result, we struggle to speak in the light of this experience; about which we write. The nonverbal expression of spiritual reality is given priority over its verbal expression. This general discursive process can, of course, be understood recursively, as a doubly constituting relationship between so listening (to the world express itself) and what is said about it (expressively through language), each having a

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hand in creating the other. We want to argue, however, that the cultural ontology—to use Richard Shweder’s (1991) phrase—that is in place for the practice draws a more causal link: listening necessarily precedes what is said about it. And not only that, but “listening” must go beyond the speech about it for it to be indeed what it is. This, we have seen, is necessary for several reasons if one is to live a kind of “realism” insisted upon in these Blackfeet practices. This, also, does not prohibit a recursive quality in the process. With this line of thinking, then, we can conclude by asking, first: How does one listen in this way? What possibilities exist when we listen in this way? Then, after so listening, what indeed can we say about it? What can be written about the process? And so we end, for now, teetering on the brink of the absurd, as we write about ways of speaking about things that cannot be said through language; speaking about listening, writing about the wind and animals speaking, and the like, through a language not their own. The ironic dynamic seeps through every line of this chapter, as it wrestles variously with linguistic characterizations of non-linguistic entities, verbal modes of nonverbal communication, channels of communication that can be given a linguistic voice but which are largely outside “the prison-house” of that language. How does one render such a nonlinguistic practice linguistically without defying the very practice of concern? When we further couple this irony with a cultural premise that, at times, privileges the nonverbal channel of communication over the verbal, and envisions that channel as a primary mode for communication, we have magnified the dynamic, and the dilemma, thus accentuating the very ironic exigency that M?-discourse addresses, and creates. In terms of a reflective Native American discourse: It is not just that the literal wind is not a word, but that the wind without the word has much more to say to us, beyond these words we speak about it. Indeed, what can we say about that?

References Bailey, Benjamin. 2000. “Communicative Behavior and Conflict between African-American Customers and Korean Immigrant Retailers in Los Angeles.” Discourse & Society 11: 86–108. Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bloch, Linda-Renee. 2003. “Who’s Afraid of Being a Friere? The Analysis of Communication through a Key Cultural Frame.” Communication Theory 13: 125–59. Bullchild, Percy. 1985. The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as my Blackfeet Elders Told It. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Carbaugh, Donal. 2006. “Coding Personhood through Cultural Terms and Practices: Silence and Quietude as a Finnish ‘Natural Way of Being.’” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 25: 203–20.

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———. 2005. Cultures in Conversation. Mahwah et al.: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ———. 2001. “‘The People Will Come to You’: Blackfeet Narrative as a Resource for Contemporary Living.” In Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self, and Culture, eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. ———. 1995. “The Ethnographic Theory of Philipsen and Associates.” In Watershed Theories of Human Communication, eds. D. Cushman and B. Kovacic. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1989. “Fifty Terms for Talk: A Cross-Cultural Study.” International and Intercultural Communication Annual 13: 93–120. Carbaugh, Donal, and Karen Wolf. 1999. “Situating Rhetoric in Cultural Discourses.” International and Intercultural Communication Annual 22: 19–30. Covarrubias, Patricia. 2002. Culture, Communication, and Cooperation: Interpersonal Relations and Pronominal Address in a Mexican Organization. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield. Garreau, Joel 1982. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston: Avon Books. Hall, Bradford J., and Mutsumi Noguchi. 1995. “Engaging in ‘Kenson’: An Extended Case Study of one Form of Common Sense.” Human Relations 48: 1129–147. Harrod, Howard. 2000. The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Katriel, Tamar. 2004. Dialogic Moments: From Soul Talks to Talk Radio in Israeli Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. McClintock, Walter. 1992 [1910]. The Old North Trail: Life, Legends, and Religion among the Blackfeet Indians. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press. Philipsen, Gerry. 1992. Speaking Culturally. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1997. “A Theory of Speech Codes.” In Developing Communication Theories, eds. G. Philipsen and T. Albrecht. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2002. “Cultural Communication.” In Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, eds. W. Gudykunst and B. Mody. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Sawyer, Michelle Scollo. 2004. “Nonverbal Ways of Communicating with Nature: A Crosscase Study.” Environmental Communication Yearbook 1: 227–49. Sells, Michael A. 1994. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Shweder, Richard. 1991. Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America. Trans. R. Howard. New York: Harper Perennial. Wilkins, Richard. 2005. “The Optimal Form: Inadequacies and Excessiveness Within the ‘asiallinen’ [matter-of-fact] Nonverbal Style in Public and Civil Settings in Finland.” Journal of Communication 55: 383–401.

Notes 1. Historical bases of this way of speaking, and living, are discussed in Harrod 2000; McClintock 1992: 167, 335–51; and in a different way in Todorov 1984.

CHAPTER 5

The Spellbinding Aura of Culture Tracing its Anthropological Discovery Bernhard Streck








Die “scheinbare” Welt ist die einzige: Die “wahre Welt” ist nur hinzugelogen.1 —Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aphorismen zur Lüge”

This blow by the “philosopher with the hammer” (Nietzsche himself) strikes at least two thousand five hundred years in which, after the discovery of the “naked” truth, it was contrasted with merely fictional worlds—and with the consequential demand that they should disappear. Jacob Taubes dubbed this program Abendländische Eschatologie (1991) and spoke in his last work of the prophetic dictate to replace “speaking” with “saying” (1995: 109)—the Yiddish “tachles,” or the truth of the word standing here in contrast to the Zarathustra as a parody of the Bible and other works of art. “Poets lie,” say intellectuals since the very beginnings of science, which has systematically differentiated and secularized this program of revelation. Only sometimes do cultural scientists, such as the recently deceased Dietmar Kamper, appear and tell us that appearances are not only deceptive but also stabilizing.2 This is nothing new for anthropologists, even if the “rhetorical turn” (Simons) needs an essentialist, substantivist, or fundamentalist contrast for its self-styling. Homo rhetoricus is a relatively young form among the homunculi—the self-made models with which the anthropological disciplines are working since their conception. It stands on the other hand for the well-known

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method of speaking that does not achieve its ends by means of truth but by means of overwhelming. But this immaterial power—so the hypothesis of this chapter—has always been the central theme of anthropology since its very beginnings and lies in the initial contacts with the “cultural other” (K. H. Kohl). Ivo Strecker has described in The Social Practice of Symbolization (1988) how impressive power in the field stems from a not- or little-understood language. Thus, the truth of appearances that anthropology, following Nietzsche and disdaining Jacob Taubes, tries to prove, needs not be tied to the word, at least not to its semantic meaning or verifiable content. Rhetorical anthropology has also managed to practice silence and discovered its extraordinary power (e.g., Hall 1959). But this lies precisely in its restrained message or—cum tacent, clamant (when they remain silent, they cry out, i.e. their silence speaks louder than words)—in its underarticulation. Thus, non-understood rhetoric and veiled truth join in the great pantheon of unknown cultural traits that dance around an anthropologist in the field and that can only be mastered with difficulty—in the course of, with luck, a succesful scientific domestication and translation process (see Maranhao/Streck 2003). Even then, when he believes to have understood an unknown world, an anthropologist will not say he has been convinced; rather, he will say he was persuaded. In the former case, he would become a convert and his “going native” would not allow his return to objective science. Unknown cultures do the same thing as good speakers: they persuade more than they convince (see Tyler, chapter 15, this volume). Their power is not so much in their consequence or logic as in their perplexity and ambiguity. The gesticulative speeches of leading men and the figurative formulations of storytellers in an oral culture have this in common with the architecture of the wood or mud houses and the ornamentation of weapons or subjects for daily use: they radiate a fascination that an outside observer in particular cannot resist. There is no specific term for this extraordinary power of attraction by the Other. Here, I want to christen it “aura” and with it name the genuine object of anthropology. The colorful term aura has variously and successfully been used outside our own discipline of cultural difference, in art history in particular. Rhetoric as the art of persuasion is very closely related to the other artistic forms of expression and was already being compared to the fine arts in antiquity. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus described in his Institutio Oratoria the speaker as a sculptor who does not produce his artwork for himself but for the public. A statue is like a speech, a piece of exhibited culture, created to impress others, to delight, to educate or to agitate. If the spectators succumb to the power of the artifact, then the goal of this “social act” has been achieved.

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But the effect of rhetoric and other works of art can only ever be imprecisely defined. The intent of the artist as well the work’s reception is multilayered and ambiguous. This differentiates the creative oral culture from the world of writing—of laws, for example, that need to be specific or unambiguous in their meaning. Lawmakers, law followers, and law breakers behave in more transparent ways than do speakers and listeners; more conviction than persuasion is at play here. The letters of the law are immovable, and in Jacob Taubes’s above-mentioned prophecy the solemnity of the courtroom takes all the fun out of the game. Rhetoric is useless on Judgement Day; but before that time, it is part of all culture, it is a work of art that ties people together and challenges social scientists. Spoken language is the best-known aspect of a culture, the contents of which reveal as much as they hide. The images created by means of speech, the techniques of onomatopoeia and rhetorical tropes including metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche occupy rhetorical anthropology, but this does not embrace the whole spectrum of an exhibited culture. Even that which is silently demonstrated needs, in course of the ethnographic process, to pass through the channel of speech and translation, where diversity and ambiguity of expression suffer. This impoverishment is much esteemed in scientific cultural description. Hans Staden, one of the first ethnographers, was much praised for his “einfältige Weise” (simple-minded method) of description (see Münzel 2001: 437–40)—in a period that had newly discovered the rhetoric of antiquity. If anthropology was to become and remain a science, it had to resist the temptation of rhetorical recapitulation of field experience, of ornamentation. Only with the coming of the writing culture debate was this prohibition against re-ornamentation eased—whether ethnographies have thus won in quality cannot be answered unequivocally. The opposition between the aura of the experience of the Other and the sobriety of the description of that same Other can be traced through the whole history of the discipline. In what follows, I much less want to describe the different ways of reducing aura, or ambiguity, or the magic that the Other emanates and the danger of being overwhelmed by it, than to thematize that feeling for the irreducible and inaccessible essence of anthropological questioning. Prerequisite for such a sensibility was anthropology’s repeated emancipation from neighboring disciplines, which was often only achieved in the twentieth century. This is particularly true for geography and human biology with their hard facts and positivist methods. It is also true for the program of a modernity constituting development ideology and its principle of a reversed proportionality between aesthetics and ethics: children and primitives decorate everything but have no morals. Modernity reduces the ornamentation in favor of rational utility.

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Aura beyond decoration Adolf Loos, one of the most important rationalizers of the visible in modern life, spoke in 1908 of a “Kulturentartung” (cultural degeneration) and meant the exuberant ornamentation of the Belle Epoque in fashion, commodities, and facades of houses. He called for logos instead of pathos in the world of forms just as Karl Kraus or Ludwig Wittgenstein did for language, Arnold Schönberg did for music, and other members of the avant-gardist cleaning committee did in other areas of culture. Walter Benjamin also deserves to be mentioned in this context. He advocates the replacement of “auratic” with “experimental” perception and a “human” in place of a shown culture. From this “Entauratisierung” (de-auratization) of the world was to follow the renewal of humanity. Objects and relationships were to be freed from their aura so that their full utility, their use, and their functionality could be made available (Peplow 1996; Bolz/Van Reijen 1991). Although many anthropologists felt a subjective obligation toward this modernist program, their discipline was from its very origins on a different track. The confrontation with another culture that was all at once a science confirmed its own truths but could shatter them just as often. On the whole, the confrontation with the “scandal of the other culture” (Hauschild) was a shock, which often developed into sensitivity for evocative and communicative cultural elements. In this intellectual tradition a new definition of aura needed to be developed, one that no longer called for measures to expose its false appearances but that demanded respect for it as an always-ubiquituous covering. These are the first steps in the history of the discipline of anthropology that today has been dubbed rhetoric culture. Just as the peculiar relationship between the said and the unsaid makes out the magic of speech, the aura in anthropology is constituted in the disparity between the revealed and the hidden. Benjamin was likely right to denunciate aura as an application since his interests were more of an eschatological nature. But most anthropologists are ontologically interested and can hardly do without the párergon, the accessoires or the extras. Erga, works or creations, are, in their social context, not unintended objects or things as such, and the objects and relationships are, without their coverings, not anthropologically interesting. Silent objects have this in common with spoken words: they are intended for an audience, address it, and mystify the message. Only deaf and unfeeling rationalists are immune to this auratic magic of all perceived and thus interpreted things. Many poets and philosophers have spoken about the magic of the veil: Martin Heidegger recognized in Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (“The Essence of Truth,” 1954) the priority of the hidden and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer

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localized here his famous “Appell” (call; Gadamer 1993, II: 64) as the beginning of the process of understanding. Objects, artifacts, and relationships speak without being subjects in the dogmatic Cartesian sense of being. It is their aura that is speaking, not their nature or their structure. The voice wanting to be understood comes from the outer surface, from the facade or ornamentation, from the purposeful covering. Novalis found a simple formulation for this: “Das Äußere ist ein in Geheimniszustand erhobenes Innere”3 (in Klages 1922: 102). Anthropologists deal almost exclusively with such things. Their interior is hardly ever revealed but the exterior is mystery enough and the truth of social relevance, since it is directed at others, those in their own community as well as to outside observers. Ludwig Klages, with the same line as Walter Benjamin, but arguing in the other direction, meant to recognize the intensified presence of aura in the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century (Klages 1981: 918). Such an intensification in the mystification of culture, that by no means ended with the halo as the aura of the head, was likely there one hundred years later in the so called neo-romantic period to which Klages himself belonged, as well as Alfred Schuler, Stefan George, and other Nietzsche disciples who in anthropology were interested in mana as the indefinable in religion and brought the idea of Gestalt into cultural theory. This was repeated in contemporary postmodernism in an intensified sensibility for auratic culture. Religion was discovered in politics, habitus as a social signal, and mysterious flows in the network of communication or discourse in what had until then been a rationalizable cultural field. But even in more rational periods of the discipline history, anthropologists understood culture as a place for aura production, by the very fact that anthropologically interesting societies were so much dependent on visualization and theatricality, on their myths and rituals so drastic and impressive in form. The difficult field of sexuality, for example, demonstrates how a wrapping can effect intensification and, as Hans Peter Dürr has demonstrated in his massive collection of material (1988–95), that no culture has been able to forgo an embarrassed denouncement of sexual lust. In this respect, the aura includes the disguised speaking of, as well as the exercise of excess. Again, the most different of observers such as Georges Bataille (1994) and Ludwig Klages saw in the orgiastic excesses of foreign cultures the highest form of aura production (see Streck 1997: 181–93).

Language of Forms In the twentieth century, an anthropology of aura had to distance itself from modernism and the social and cultural sciences that paid tribute to it. In this

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difficult way the historistic streams of the nineteenth century were helpful with their relativistic (Ranke) and hermeneutic (Dilthey) approaches as well as the previously mentioned “reverser of all values,” Nietzsche. Interestingly enough, it was in Germany and the United States where this anthropology of apparent trivialities of forms and form combinations, such as aura and culture application, could flourish, while in France and particularly in England, modern anthropology with its functionalist perspective and its distaste for unclear terms such as culture and aura spread. The practical needs in the administration of huge colonial empires were probably responsible for this, but particular idiosyncrasies in national mentalities also had a role to play. For central Europe with its history of catastrophes, the key terms have just been mentioned. The difference between eschatological modernism and ontological romanticism escalates here to a Kulturkampf and dogma controversy on the question of the “Verträglichkeit” (tolerability). Modernist ideologists rigorously demanded a unity of culture that they termed concurrence or contemporaneity. Symbolic statements had to be in harmony with societal needs and technical possibilities. Where this was not so, an obscuring “false sense” or “aura,” in Benjamin’s terms, would develop. The German and US historical schools of anthropology showed much more tolerance for non-concurrence, even if they often used denunciating terms such as cultural lag (Ogburn) or survival (Tylor) to describe it. Even more radical were the diffusionists who considered culture a random conglomeration of independent and autonomously shifting elements. That these complimented one another at any given point in time was an exception. Friedrich Ratzel began in the 1880s to reconstruct migration routes that only affected single cultural traits to prove this potential diversity of combinations of elements (Ratzel 1887). His so-called “form criterion,” in which the exterior of appearance was more significant for diffusionist anthropology than the interior or functionality, was later adopted by Leo Frobenius and Fritz Graebner, later by Wilhelm Schmidt and Wilhelm Koppers in a refined form to be combined with other “criteria” (see Zwernemann 1983). That the exterior of appearance could also speak and persuade was soon lost in these statistical reconstructions of “Kulturkreise.” But the morphological schools are particularly productive in the search for traces of an anthropology of aura, because culture was understood here as a Gestalt that was communicating in a certain “language of forms,” or style. It is not a functional structure or a social coherency that gives a common form to elements that come together over time. Culture in and out of itself creates a certain uniformity of form. In the work of Leo Frobenius this became a nearly ethno-plastic power that he called Paideuma (Frobenius 1921). This was the neo-romantic

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equivalent for Johann Gottfried Herder’s “Volksgeist” (folk spirit) and like it, of a particularly metaphysical nature. In the United States, where Franz Boas had already begun to examine ornamentation in 1908 (“Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases,” see Feest 2001: 54), the reflection on “culture configurations” remained more sober, even if Ruth Benedict’s style system left nothing to be desired in plasticity (1934). In the three cultures she compares—Kwakiutl, Zuni, and Dobu—a deeply irrational will to form expression becomes the integrative moment that forces the carriers of that culture to pathetic poses and gestures. At least Benedict let herself, after reading Nietzsche in this way, be spoken to. Other Nietzschean scholars may well have subsumed all three cultures under the raging Dionysos because Apollo, god of temperance, stood for rationalization and the reduction of waste that even in Ancient Greece announced the coming of modernism.

Blinding Culture Ivo Strecker characterized the goal of the rhetorical speaker as “to spellbind the listener” (1998: 1436). Those people who have been thus subjected can hardly find words themselves, and when, they carry the stamp of the spellbound. In the cultural morphology of Frobenius and Jensen this state of mind of the overpowered was described as the way from “Ergriffenheit” (i.e., a kind of existential seizure) to its expression. But a spellbound listener is like the blinded seer. In culture, in every culture, the spellbound and the blinded speak. Ethnography means thus, that a new subject, an outsider, a scientist has been drawn into this “Verblendungszusammenhang” (literally, “blinding context,” commonly translated as “false consciousness”). The term “Verblendungszusammenhang” comes from Theodor W. Adorno and was meant in the Dialektik der Aufklärung (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969) to be denunciating, in the way Benjamin understood aura. For the “critical theory of society,” the exchange between rhetoricians and their victims, just like the ornamentation of facades, is a prison of obsolescence because the trickery, obstruction, and blinding involved evoke the thirst for truth and clarity. The eschatological point of view of the Freudo-marxists from Frankfurt does not have to irritate us further; in any case they made quite clear that culture means a mutual spellbinding and blinding; whereby the question of the distribution of these communicative skills needs to be put aside for the moment. Important for an anthropology of aura is that the ethnographer, using the standard method of participant observation, is forced above all to take part in this blinding game and that the end product, the ethnography, is unavoid-

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ably inscribed by the spellbinding and blinding of the aura of culture. This can easily be demonstrated in many examples in the history of the discipline. Take, for example, the, even beyond the borders of the discipline, wellknown ethnography of the Australian Aranda. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen (1899) focused, for reasons of language, on the observation of rituals; Carl Strehlow (1907–20), who could speak the language, concentrated on the mythology. Both worlds, the spoken and the gesticulated, spellbound their cosmographers, and this internationally known ethnography, with its methodology debate (see Van Gent 2001: 459–65) and its typical contradictions, best documents the process of ethnographic evocation I am speaking of. The newly spellbound and blinded are wringing for words that they can only find, or can only articulate understandably, when the shine of the aura in the cultural experience of the Other begins to fade. In the case of the Aranda it was so strong that their culture is still discussed today. While older ethnographers readily admitted that they were drawn for the most part by strange customs, that is, it was the auratic experience that they sought in the field, this existential connection to the object of research has been rationalized away in modern anthropology. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss himself admitted in his Tristes Tropiques (1955) his sadness about the loss of the blinding effect in the course of advancing civilization. As it is well known, this affected the material culture in particular and similar laments were heard in all ethnographic fields. The visible blinding and seduction through body art, fantastic costumes, and voluminous ornamentation disappeared at a rapid rate, to be replaced by a culture of rags and rubbish without decoration or enveloping refinement. And since modern anthropology lives from the modern belief in simultaneity (see above), with the disappereance of the ornamented armbands it had to moan the loss of all other magical techniques of an auratic culture. It was the dissident anthropological schools, in particular those of cultural morphology in Germany and surrealism in France, that maintained a sensibility for an auratic culture troughout the twentieth century; in a world changed by colonialism, they confessed to their “Ergriffenheit” in the field and tried to put “Verblendungszusammenhänge” such as the Fantôm Afrique (Leiris 1934) into words. Only when the attempts of the above mentioned rationalist sanitation crews faltered and the monotony of a modern description of a society with its kinship structures and survival strategies had evoked enough objections could an auratic culture be newly discovered as cultural theater, social performance, and rhetorical event. Today young ethnographers do not go into the field with the steadfast belief that irritations caused by the Other are only start-up problems, that, after their elimination—in particular through the learning of the local lan-

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guage—the studied society will reveal itself in all its clarity and logic. The basic assumption that culture follows rules and that people try to reach their goals using a “charter” that an ethnographer has to expose, is surely not only questionable due to the developing dynamic of the discipline—that rhythm of scientific paradigms described by Thomas Kuhn (1976). A decisive impetus for the new change in perspective was the “neue Unübersichtlichkeit” (new obscurity) that Jürgen Habermas discovered in the modern world itself, which ethnographers take as baggage into the field, where they unpack it and for which they find local equivalents. In Bronisław Malinowski’s and Siegrfied F. Nadel’s time, the blueprints after which another culture was traced were set up logically with the purpose of demystifying as many aspects of culture as possible. But the pre- and postmodern ethnography has other stencils that do not sanitize the sensibility for aura but maintain it for as long as possible. What do such models look like? Again, Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of a labyrinth (see Dietzsch 2001) could be such an aid for an anthropology of aura. In Greek myth the hero Theseus defeats the labyrinth of Minotaur on Crete, and after that he falls in the love net of Ariadna. The escape from one labyrinth by flight into another is, according to Steffen Dietzsch, the message that Nietzsche read from this Cretan lesson. But the consequence drawn from this hopeless situation was, already in the context of Antiquity, not desperation but dance. Walter F. Otto, an interpreter of Nietzsche who was close to the Frankfurt cultural morphology school, saw in the labyrinth a place of dance and a symbol of a “justification of being in the world, of all theodicies the only indisputable and never-ending” (1963: 217). The ceaseless return, Benjamin has warned, promised nothing good (see Bolz/Van Reijen 1991: 70). But it is, according to the interpretation of the pre-, para-, and postmodern anthropology, the essence of archaic cultures, preserved in myth and ritual, packaged in aura, foreign to modern humanity. It speaks to emotion rather than to reason, but by no means to the eye more than to the ear. If Jacob Taubes played the two senses against one another in that he associated the sensing eye with the Greeks, the heeding ear to the Jews (1991: 15), then one must be reminded that while sermon truly does not belong to the aura of a heathen cult, music surely does; a typical feast for the ears that, says Nietzsche, continues after words have been silenced. Sound and resonance are key terms in the present rhetorical anthropology (see Strecker, chapter 6, this volume).4 Karl Kerényi, another participant in the cultural morphological discourse around the time of the Second World War, defined this plan of a cultural aura as follows: “The labyrinth, sugested by meander and spiral, was a place of detours but not a place of no escape, even if it was a place of death” (1994: 71,

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quoted in Dietzsch 2001: 9). The labyrinth as a cult site for Dionysos stands for a more ancient Greece, not that of Socrates and Plato who had already placed truth higher than wisdom and appear in Karl Jaspers’s “Achsenzeit” (axis time) to be allies of Old Testament prophets (Jaspers 1963: 97ff.). In a labyrinth, as Jorge Luis Borges has pointed out (Borges 1999: 35, quoted in Dietzsch 2001: 10), immanageability is the source of power and thus also of aura—power that attracts. A labyrinth is a series of dead ends, but are these arranged systematically? Friedrich Dürrenmatt found this to be extreme: “I believe that the attempt to make oneself a plan of a labyrinth has to fail.”5 Still, this model is valid to describe a culture of aura that in the worst cases is an “exile of gaiety” (Odo Marquard); in normal cases it is fed by the attraction of empty promises. Tropes, gestures, and phrases stand at the twists and turns and their truth lies singularly in their beauty and charm. In this way appearances do carry and stabilize, as Dietmar Kamper has demonstrated in his Schwarze Madonna (1997). Art as the “highest power of forgery” (Deleuze) persuades one to continue and the ethnographer to follow. While his rational scepticism hesitates, the magic of the other spellbinds him. The labyrinth is a picture puzzle where one can join in but that cannot be solved.

Veils of Knowledge We have just come to discuss the labyrinth as a cultural self-veiling that can be experienced but not solved. That antique and traditional cultures could be described using this metaphor was known outside of anthropology as well. Friedrich Schiller wrote one of the most famous and most beautiful examples of auratic sensibility as cultural inheritance in 1795: his poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” (“The veiled Image at Sais”; see Assmann 1999). In this transitional period in which the revolutionary French army was establishing the rule of reason with violence, the idealistically oriented Schiller was told by the classicist Karl-Werner Reinhold from Jena how distaseful any enlightenment was in Antiquity and that this was the message in the story of the veil of Isis. Schiller recapitulated this in a ballad: a youth is shown by an initiated priest in Sais (Lower Egypt) the veiled statue of Isis, the epitome of truth that cannot be unveiled by any mortal. The young man is plagued by the edict and his pursuit of truth seduces him to its violation: he lifts the veil. “Unconscious and pale,” the poem ends, “thus found him the priests the next day, laid out at the foot of Isis. What he saw and felt, his tongue could never say.”6 In this way the heathens of Antiquity saw the need for aura and obscured truth. It was possible to speak about it, but not to speak it.

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Appropriately, gods were the theme of daily conversation and many statues showed their bodies without any coverings, Hermes even was shown in sexual arousal. But these were images of gods and never the gods themselves. Divinity itself only became problematic in religious history with the Decalogue, when icons were banned. God himself had spoken, said the Old Testament prophets, thus an end to speaking about him. This was the birth of modernism, as, among many other theologists, Jürgen Ebach attempted to demonstrate (1986). Jewish monotheism commanded the departure from the heathen labyrinth. Heathen obfuscation was to be replaced by the path of truth. Christianity brought, with its moral commandment of truthful speech— “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil” (Gospel of Mathew 5, 37 [King James Version])—the ancient art of rhetoric to an end. Enough clever rhetoricians ranted from the pulpit for the next two thousand years, but they never admitted to it. They wanted to convince, not to persuade, since the truth, once revealed, speaks for itself. The New Testament ban on speaking reinforced the Old Testament ban on images and prepared once again the way for modernism. Both bans were renewed at the turn of the twentieth century. Adolf Loos banned ornamentation and the abstractionist, easy understandable pictures. Walter Benjamin tore the veil of aura down and Ludwig Wittgenstein declared that speaking about God was useless. Ronnie M. Peplow described this newaged iconoclasm in the following words: “Truth was not beyond reach and hidden; there is nothing obscurely unspoken: Everything that can be said, can be said clearly. In architecture this means reduction to logic, truth is the structure, everything else is empty talk.”7 “Form follows function” announced the American architecture revolutionary and inventor of the skyscraper Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924), who was soon followed by an international herd of form-functionalists, many an anthropologist among them. This was the cultural milieu of the twentieth century in which traces of an anthropology of aura are only difficult to identify. Very few were prepared to acknowledge the veil and by it develop their fantasy. And death, which according to Kerényi still had its enduring place in the labyrinth, had to leave the room as an element of the disdained metaphysics. “Oh graves, what power lives in you!” exclaimed the French romanticist Constantin Comte de Volney (1757–1820) once (quoted in Ernst 1996: 291). Ludwig Feuerbach saw in the graves the cradles of gods (1846–49) and Leo Frobenius announced at the age of twenty-one that the “Rätsel Tod” (mystery of death) was the key to understanding every culture (1894). Despite all the technical and scientific advances of the nineteenth century, the power of the unreachable as the foundation of culture was clearly recognized. But a new cultural foundation was poured in the twentieth century: growing out of econ-

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omy and society, it no longer had—being logically constructed and universally understandable—an aura. Still, as we have seen, there existed anthropologists who reflected on the veil. Some even went so far as to develop theories: because of their applicability to the discussion on the rhetoric of culture, I want to look at them more closely.

Costume Studies The works of enlightened travelers such as Georg Forster or the Baron de Lahontan, who in their sympathy with the described peoples raise themselves above the general asymmetry of the colonial condition, are often cited as the beginnings of anthropology. But there is a more anonymous root of anthropology that can be brought directly into connection with the anthropology of aura: the costume books of earlier centuries. In this enduring tradition, people in various contexts were contrasted and classified alone by their exterior—not their racial, but their cultural exterior, their costume. These often-anonymous picture books inform a sense for visible or demonstrated culture. All cultures were the same in that they consisted of coverings. But these were highly unique and visibly expressed idiosyncrasies. Pre-scientific anthropology practiced its eye for dress and dressing up in the tradition of these costume books. The other traits of the peoples being compared were more associative, aphoristic, or trivial. But costume was the expression of truth—not in the sense of religion of words but in the sense of beauty and properness. The ways in which naked bodies are to be covered to achieve an aura are an ideal cultural differential. Anthropology missed its chance, though, to force this point—the discovery that there is no nakedness in the cultural world—when the colonial practitioners instituted a policy of full dress. The already mentioned work of Hans Peter Duerr came too late. All over the tropical world the edicts against “shameless” nakedness were surprisingly quickly put to effect—for the missions and ministries a victory of civilization, for the affected a travesty, sometimes mimesis, sometimes carnival. Immanuel Kant compared the “Einfassung” (frame) in the area of art with the crown of a tree. It is essential and completes the beautiful form (see Ernst 1996: 289). In human cultures these “Einfassungen” are forms of expression or combinations of signals that are only effective in their totality, but they are also mystifications, as the above-cited Novalis stated. Costume is much more than a simple application that can easily be removed, that even asks to be removed, to reveal the true essence. The alternative of costume description was an important potential differentiation to measurements of physical anthropology. Not the measured man but the covered man was of interest to cultural

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anthropology. And not the uncovering was the goal but the understanding of the cover. The anthropological perspective of the veil was systematized toward the end of the nineteenth century. The first theories of dress were developed—or as Heinrich Schurtz called it, a philosophy of costume (1891). In it he attacked the widely held conceptions of paradisiacal innocence in tropical regions or the much-loved idea of “shameless” peoples. Shame is moreover one of the most common motives behind dress, even in cases where this was only suggested—by means of a cord—symbolically. The second characteristic was dubbed “Heuchelei” (hypocrisy) by Schurtz, and meant the deceptive elements in European men’s dress or the chest cord of African women that only symbolically reminds of a covering. But the value Schurtz found in an anthropology of the covering is made clear in the following: “The apparently indifferent covering of man is the exterior expression of his spiritual state and is ruled by his inner life.”8 Novalis’s concept of an outward-turning interior had reached the comparative sciences one hundred years later. Schurtz cautioned, however, to resist wanting to get more out of dress than what it showed. In particular, the assumption of an essence behind the clothing lead nowhere. In a social context only the shown was important and that had two functions: it was at the same time to attract and prevent looks. Schurtz develops in the course of his comparative study of costume a general theory of covering: This technique reveals a deep human need for a right to secrets. Children and slaves are naked in Africa because, due to their age or status, they have nothing to hide. Individual and social advancement can be seen in the gradual addition of covering and—connected to it—rights to secrets. The king, in his many robes, behind his curtains, and in his invisibility is the personification of secret itself, and is only outdone by the dead, who, even in cultures with little clothing, are completely wrapped up. Conversely, grief, submission, and protest are demonstrated by revealing oneself, in the rejection of secrets—after what was said above, nearly a self-disembodiment. From Schurtz’s general assumptions on the connection between life, showing, and hiding, two paths can be followed. One leads to reflections of transvestism and travesty as demonstrated by above all Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann and Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg in the German speaking anthropology (see Mühlmann 1984; Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg 1984). In this wider field of “clothes make people” (Gottfried Keller), the customary coverings and veilings are on the one hand prescribed, and on the other hand available essences of social life, that, in daily as well as on special occasions, regulate communication and make the metamorphosis into a “higher form of being” (Hermann Baumann) representable. The other path leads to the ancient theory of pre-animism that

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found an original reinterpretation in Fritz Krause in the inter-war years and probably represents the peak of an earlier anthropology of aura. In the early period of the anthropology of religion, Tylor’s concept of animism played a key role. Archaic humans differentiated between body and soul and the soul was free to live in a variety of bodies. Robert Ranulf Marett (1866–1943) was one of the first to criticize these assumptions as modernist. In his theory of pre-animism there is no difference between body and soul, everything living and relevant is an expression of the mysterious power of mana that in archaic societies was responsible for miracles and provoked the awe that was much loved in all social contexts and was essential for its coherence. This, in religious studies, much-debated term, the contradiction of which the Iroquois John N. B. Hewitt brought to a point in a singular way (Hewitt 1902), was developed further by the Leipzig anthropologist and Indian researcher Fritz Krause (1881–1963), in a direction that corresponds with our current considerations of aura. Krause criticized in two articles (1929, 1931) the, in anthropological interpretations, widely held point of view that the outer form was inconsequential to essence of being. The ethnographic data suggested, on the contrary, that this differentiation was seldom made and that the essence often merge with the form. To avoid questions of chronological priority, Krause named this find not “pre-animism” like Marett, but “non-animism.” In this context people transform themselves by simply changing their clothes because they are completely unified with their respective coverings. This “Prinzip der Hülle” (principle of covering / of the shell) governs in mythology—in the numerous metamorphic scenes between gods, humans, animals, and plants, for example—as it does in ritual, in body painting and masked dances. In many examples of realizing this principle, Krause submits that a suggestion, a partial covering or metamorphosis, is enough; that which in rhetoric is called a “synecdoche.” A characteristic element stands for the whole and eases the transformation. The degree of transvestism is not as important as its suggested essential transformation. Clothing, veils, masks, and emblems are not just applications but essential substances; they do not represent a door to something but say everything in and of themselves, like Heinrich Schurtz’s “philosophy of costume” had developed the thought forty years earlier. In this seemingly simple way, the peoples compared by Krause let the gods, spirits, and dead take part in their lives. It goes without saying that the kinetic and acoustic, as well as the olfactory, performance belong to the totality of the impression of the presence of invisible entities. Only in the agreement of these sensual experiences does an aura develop that we have above defined as necessary for the effective blinding of all participants. We see in Krause’s “Prinzip der Hülle” as well that the rhetorical performance is only a specific aspect of the persuasive power that the whole culture represents. In cultural

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life there are differing registers of blinding, lies, and deceptions available, and in cult and cult performance as many as possible or all together are instrumentalized, because the proper impression of the unity of the living and the dead, of humans and gods is so very important. Diana Zilliges, in her excellent discussion of theatre anthropology (2001), saw the line between ritual and the stage here: the audience in the theatre does not believe in what happens, the representation remains a play and maintains its “as if ” character. But the members of a cult are believers that are not merely letting themselves be entertained; for them the masks are living truth. According to our above-defined differentiation between aura and truth, the believers are convinced because the truth of the mythology is being represented in the dancing area; the theater-goers have only been persuaded to let themselves be enthralled for two hours. Even if opposition between the obligation of a ritual and the contingency of an evening at the theater is self-evident, the social reality nevertheless lies in the wide continuum between the two ideals; and an anthropology of aura, whose interests are more for the fascination than the facts, finds illustrative material for a social act of spellbinding and enchantment in the place of worship as much as on a stage. How much humans cling to form as essence was confirmed for Krause by the worldwide distribution of mummification as a technique of extending life. Modern humans see the preparation of a corpse as a particularly evident illusion and blinding; in light of anthropological costume studies, the mummy is a triumph of the power of the veil. In multiple coverings, of salves, on cloth, of wood and gold, the dead pharaohs rested under gigantic mountains of stone and thereby continued their rule. What popular speakers in modern democracies achieve with precisely packaged promises—namely to spellbind the masses— the archaic rulers achieved by the multiple packaging of their very selves. Here the act, there the word. Persuasion knows differing techniques but only a single goal: to spellbind the people in a community bound in appearances.

Conclusion Our flight over the history of anthropology has, in the confusion of currents, opinions, and schools, revealed quite clear traces of a sensibility for aura. Studies of a rhetorical culture do not have to begin with nothing in hand. It was, in particular, the early anthropological attempts and the heterodox concepts in the golden age of anthropology that prepared the grounds for today’s questions of constructivism, discourse analysis, and speech aesthetics. It also became clear that a study of rhetoric culture needs to understand itself as part of a general anthropology of the senses that concentrates on demonstrated culture and examines its effects in the whole spectrum of human sensibility.

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In this opening up to sensuality there is also security against drifting into the minimalism of rationalist exchanges, such as in ethnomethodology or conversation analysis. In the above-mentioned scenarios, in which aura plays a role as a force of very differing strains, restricting oneself to themes verbalisable in conversation or easily accessible acts is an unacceptable limitation of scope. The labyrinth that we have discussed as a symbol of a hopeless, but not impassable culture is not Bauhaus architecture where nakedness simulates truth; rather it is comparable with an oriental palace with “pointless” towers, halls of mirrors, secret passages, hidden doors, tower chambers, and other comparable architectural follies. Aura, which we have used as the key term in our search for interesting traces of today’s rhetorical research has—maybe—not become any “clearer” in the above discussion; it has merely been freed of the pejorative smell that essentialist and proselytistic cultural critique has given it. The sum of the powers working in a culture, the ensemble of persuasive acts and deceptions, that complex whole of visual, olfactory, tactile, and acoustic concentration and temptation does not let itself be precisely defined. But the concept of aura helps to understand culture as the dress of a society, by which the members confirm their sameness to themselves and their difference to others. The paradoxy of wrapping and showing gives to the aura a kind of hierophanic quality. Therefore, let us listen in once more to Ludwig Klages on the subject: “In the aura and in her alone … does the outward drive of the earthly essence show itself that only occurs in times of a telluric turn.”9

References Assmann, Jan. 1999. Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais: Schillers Ballade und Ihre Ägyptischen und Griechischen Hintergründe. Munich: K. G. Saur. Bataille, Georges. 1994. Die Erotik. Munich: Matthes & Seitz. Benedict, Ruth F. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Gisela. 1984. Der Weibmann: Kultischer Geschlechtswechsel im Schamanismus: Eine Studie zur Transvestition und Transsexualität bei Naturvölkern. Frankfurt: Fischer. Bolz, Norbert, and Willem Van Reijen. 1991. Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt: Campus. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. “Das Labyrinth.” In Jorge Luis Borges: Gedichte, eds. Raoul Schott, Siegfried Völlger, and Michael Krüger. Munich: Hanser. Dietzsch, Steffen. 2001. “Nietzsche in der Freiheit des Labyrinths.” Berliner Debatte Initial 12: 5–16. Duerr, Hans Peter. 1988–1995. Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß. Vols. 1–3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Ebach, Jürgen. 1986. “Babel und Bibel oder: Das ‘Heidnische’ im Alten Testament.” In Die Restauration der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus, eds. Richard Faber and Renate Schlesier. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

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Ernst, Wolfgang 1996. “Rhetorik des Ornaments.” In Ornament und Geschichte: Studien zum Strukturwandel des Ornaments in der Moderne, eds. Ursula Franke and Heinz Paetzold. Bonn: Bouvier. Faber, Richard, and Renate Schlesier, eds. 1986. Die Restauration der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Feest, Christian F. 2001. “Franz Boas.” In Hauptwerke der Ethnologie, eds. Christian F. Feest and Karl-Heinz Kohl. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. Feest, Christian F. and Karl-Heinz Kohl, eds. 2001. Hauptwerke der Ethnologie. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1846–49: Das Wesen der Religion. Leipzig: Wigand. Franke, Ursula, and Heinz Paetzold, eds. 1996. Ornament und Geschichte: Studien zum Strukturwandel des Ornaments in der Moderne. Bonn: Bouvier. Frobenius, Leo. 1894. Die Geheimbünde Afrikas: Ethnologische Studie. Hamburg: Verlagsanstalt u. Druckerei A.-G., vorm. J. F.Richter. Frobenius, Leo. 1921. Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre. Munich: C. H. Beck. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Wahrheit und Methode. Vols. 1–2. Tübingen: Mohr. Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1969 [1944]. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Hewitt, John N. B. 1902. “Orenda and a Definition of Religion.” American Anthropologist N.S. 4 (1): 33–46. Jaspers, Karl. 1953–63. Einführung in die Philosophie. Munich: Piper. Kamper, Dietmar. 1997. Im Souterrain der Bilder: Die schwarze Madonna. Bodenheim: Philo. Klages, Ludwig. 1951 [1922]. Vom Kosmogonischen Eros. Stuttgart: H. E.Günther. ———. 1981 [1929–32]. Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele. Bonn: Bouvier. Krause, Fritz. 1929. “Zur Frage der nichtanimistischen Weltanschauung.” In In Memoriam Karl Weule: Beiträge zur Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, ed. Otto Reche. Leipzig: Teubner. ———. 1931. “Maske und Ahnenfigur: Das Motiv der Hülle und das Prinzip der Form: Ein Beitrag zur nichtanimistischen Weltanschauung.” Ethnologische Studien 1: 344–64. Kuhn, Thomas. 1976. Die Struktur Wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Leiris, Michel. 1955. L’Afrique Fantôme: De Dakar à Djibouti 1931–1933. Paris: Gallimard. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Librairie Plon. Maranhao, Tullio, and Bernhard Streck, eds. 2003. Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mühlmann, Wilhelm Emil. 1984. Pfade in die Weltliteratur. Königstein: Athenäum. Münzel, Mark. 2001. “Hans Staden.” In Hauptwerke der Ethnologie, eds. Christian F. Feest and Karl-Heinz Kohl. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. “Aphorismen zur Lüge.” In Über Wahrheit und Lüge: Ein Essay: Aphorismen und Briefe. Ed. Steffen Dietzsch. Frankfurt, Leipzig: Insel. Otto, Walter F. 1963. Mythos und Welt. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Peplow, M.R. 1996. “Adolf Loos—Die Verwerfung des wilden Ornaments.” In Ornament und Geschichte: Studien zum Strukturwandel des Ornaments in der Moderne, eds. Ursula Franke and Heinz Paetzold. Bonn: Bouvier.

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Ratzel, Friedrich. 1887. “Die geographische Verbreitung des Bogens und der Pfeile in Afrika.” In Berichte über die Verhandlungen der königlich sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Klasse XXXVIII–XXXIX: 233–52. Roos, C. 1940. Nietzsche und das Labyrinth. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Schurtz, Heinrich. 1891. Grundzüge einer Philosophie der Tracht (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Negertrachten). Stuttgart: Cotta. Spencer, Baldwin, and Frank J. Gillen. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan. Streck, Bernhard. 1997. Fröhliche Wissenschaft Ethnologie: Eine Führung. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer. Strecker, Ivo. 1988. The Social Practice of Symbolization. London: Athlone. ———. 1998. “Kulturanthropologie.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Strehlow, Carl T. F. 1907–20. Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien. Vols. 1–4. Frankfurt: Baer. Taubes, Jacob. 1995 [1947]. Abendländische Eschatologie. Munich: Matthes & Seitz. Van Gent, Jacqueline. 2001. “Carl T.F.Strehlow.” In Hauptwerke der Ethnologie, eds. Christian F. Feest and Karl-Heinz Kohl. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner. Zilliges, Diana. 2001. Täuschung—Ent-Täuschung: Studien zum Verhältnis von Ritual und Theater. Cologne: Teiresias. Zwernemann, Jürgen. 1983. Culture History and African Anthropology: A Century of Research in Germany and Austria. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Notes 1. “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one; the ‘true world’ has only been mendaciously added.” 2. “Es stimmt, daß der Schein trügt. Es stimmt aber auch, daß er trägt” (Kamper 1997: 10). 3. “The exterior is an interior elevated to a secretive state.” 4. For the sounds of the labyrinth, see Roos 1940. 5. Die Welt als Labyrinth. Die Unsicherheit unserer Wirklichkeit. Franz Kreuzer im Gespräch mit Friedrich Dürrenmatt und Paul Watzlawick. Wien 1982: 36, quoted in Dietzsch 2001: 15. 6. “Besinnungslos und bleich, so fanden ihn am andern Tag die Priester am Fußgestell der Isis ausgestreckt. Was er allda gesehen und erfahren, hat seine Zunge nie bekannt.” Schiller, quoted in Assmann 1999. 7. “Die Wahrheit ist nicht jenseitig und verborgen; es gibt nichts dunkel Unausgesprochenes: Alles was sich sagen läßt, läßt sich klar sagen! In der Architektur bedeutet diese Beschränkung auf die Logik: die Wahrheit ist die Konstruktion, alles andere ist leere Geschwätzigkeit.” Peplow 1996: 184. 8. “Die anscheinend gleichgültige Hülle des Menschen ist der äußere Ausdruck seines geistigen Zustandes und wird aufs strengste beherrscht von seinem inneren Leben.” Schurtz 1891: 95. 9. “Mit der Aura nun und mit ihr allein (und gemäß ihrer Stärke) zeigt sich jenes Nachaußendrängen der Erdessenz an, das nur den Zeiten einer tellurischen Wende eigen.” Klages 1929–32/1981: 918.

CHAPTER 6

Tenor in Culture Ivo Strecker








When we reflect upon the role of tenor in culture, we probably think first of tenor as indicating some kind of communicative mood and content that eludes univocal definition. For example, when we witness a heated conflict between persons, and later are asked what their debate was about, our answer could well be: “I did not precisely understand the different arguments, but their general tenor was such and such.” The present chapter takes off from this observation.

Tenor in Music The dictionaries define tenor as “general tendency, general drift of thought; purpose.” They also say what most of us know from school: it comes from the Latin tenere, which means “to hold.” But, interestingly, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians adds that tenere does not simply mean a lax and inactive holding but an energetic “holding fast” and thence an “uninterrupted course.” This was then metaphorically extended to refer to chant modality and the structurally fundamental “holding” voice or instrument in polyphonic music. Also, the Roman author Cassiodorus is said to have used tenor for “string tension.” This early and very tangible concept of tenor is the most relevant for purposes of the present study of “tenor in culture.” Whenever we study tenor in culture we ultimately study a form of tension that comes from holding fast, from holding on to (or being held by) whatever, be it an object, a substance, a person, a feeling, a thought, a god, or a devil. In Roman usage, tenor also came to be used for “melodic formula,” psalm tone, and in particular, for the termination formula of a psalm tone. Until the eighteenth century it was used

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to mean “progression or turn of phrase.” The Grove Dictionary tells us that in “medieval and Renaissance polyphony the counterpoint in all other voices was normally calculated in relation to the structurally fundamental tenor … [and] all writings about counterpoint were concerned primarily with the relation of the descanting voice (discantus) to the tenor. … The first line the composer wrote in polyphony was called the tenor because it ‘held up’ and supported the harmonic structure of the counterpoint” (2002: 284). But then, in the 16th century the hegemony of the tenor-descant pair broke down as fully imitative polyphony developed its own requirements and rules; but it was still common to give the name tenor to any voice carrying a cantus firmus. … In the late 14th and early 15th centuries any tenor line in polyphony was almost invariably paired with a “contra tenor” part. These two lines, overlapping in range, shared the function of providing both a harmonic foundation and a harmonizing part. (The contra tenor, in fact, was occasionally called a “concordant”). Later, tenor and contra tenor then became more clearly distinguished from one another, and the old contra tenor became known as “contra tenor altus.” It tended to lie slightly higher in range than the tenor—with the result that the word tenor came more and more to refer to a vocal range. (2002: 285)

The French word tenoriste and the Italian tenorista “were used for a highly skilled singer able to perform the lower lines of polyphony, contra tenor as well as tenor. The word tended to be reserved, however, as a title for the most eminent singers” (2002: 285). Also, “the bulk of the Renaissance lute-song repertory was appropriate for male singers (tenors), … the leading male roles in the earliest operas were also written for tenor,” and in the seventeenth century “heroic roles and those of lovers were increasingly assigned to castratos, and tenors came to be allotted only small or comic roles … and in Mozart’s music the castrato played the romantic hero while the tenor took the secondary male role, of a king or military commander” (2002: 286). In the twentieth century, “tenors have increasingly been categorized by voice type and repertory. … Four types may be delineated: the dramatic tenor voice, continuing late 19th century traditions; the lyric tenor voice, particularly valued in a song as well as a range of operatic roles; the lyric coloratura tenor specializing in the ‘bel canto’ repertory and earlier music; and the theatre and popular singer” (2002: 289).

Tenor in Linguistic Theory Much of current functional linguistics is inspired by M. A. K. Halliday (1973) who says that language has two basic tasks, firstly to express ideas (ideational

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metafunction), and secondly to influence people (interpersonal metafunction). Both tasks emerge in contextual situations that are characterized by a “field,” a “tenor,” and a “mode.” While field refers to what is happening and mode to the role language is playing in particular social situations, tenor refers to the mutual persuasion and negotiation that goes on between participants. Functional linguists have by now worked out many methodological tools for tenor analysis and study it on various phonological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic levels. They do this along the three dimensions of status, contact, and affect. In the words of Leanne Togher and Linda Hand: “Status refers to the relative position of the interlocutors in a culture’s social hierarchy, while contact refers to the degree of institutional involvement with each other. Affect covers what Halliday … refers to as the ‘degree of emotional charge’ in the relationship between participants” (1998: 757). Anyone familiar with Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s work on politeness will immediately realize how close all this is to their theory of positive and negative face, their examination of the variables of P (power), D (distance), and R (ranking of imposition), and their detailed study of politeness phenomena. Each of the four major strategies of politeness that Brown and Levinson propound could be seen to entail tenor as understood by contemporary functional linguistics. However, functional linguists would probably be hard pressed to define exactly what they mean when they speak of the tenor of, let us say, positive politeness or negative politeness. Brown and Levinson themselves were already uneasy here, and despite their otherwise great precision, they took recourse here to metaphor. Positive politeness, they said, “anoints” the face of the addressee, and negative politeness is a “softening mechanism” that gives the addressee an “out,” a face-saving line of escape (1978: 75). In terms of the colloquial use of tenor, which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I would say: “I have not understood what functional linguists mean by tenor, but the general tenor of tenor seems to be such and such.”

Tenor in the Theory of Metaphor In his lectures published as “The Philosophy of Rhetoric” (1936), I. A. Richards made a number of innovative steps, one of which was to introduce the term tenor. Also, he opened the way for a study of resonance in or around metaphor when he said: “Let us consider more closely what happens in the mind when we put together—in a sudden and striking fashion—two things belonging to very different orders of experience. The most important happenings—in addition to a general confused reverberation and strain—are the mind’s efforts to connect them. The mind is a connecting organ, it works only by connecting

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and it can connect any two things in an indefinitely large number of different ways” (1936: 124f.). And then again: “As the two things put together are more remote, the tension created is, of course, greater. That tension is the spring of the bow, the source of the energy of the shot” (1936: 125). All this sounds very much like Cassiodorus, who used the term tenor for “string tension.” But Richards went further than this and made tenor a key term for the study of metaphor: “One of the oddest of the many odd things about the whole topic is that we have no agreed distinguishing terms for these two halves of a metaphor—in spite of the immense inconvenience, almost the necessity, of such terms if we are to make any analyses without confusion. For the whole task is to compare the different relations which, in different cases, these two members of a metaphor hold to one another, and we are confused at the start if we don’t know which of the two we are talking about” (1936: 96). Richards proposed the term tenor for the first and vehicle for the second part of a metaphor, and he held that “the copresence of the vehicle and tenor results in a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction … that vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either … that with different metaphors the relative importance of the contributions of vehicle and tenor to this resultant meaning varies immensely” (1936: 100). This is the interactional model of metaphor that was later taken up, altered, and extended by Max Black, David Sapir, and many others. In a recent paper entitled “Issues in the Use of I.A. Richard’s Tenor-Vehicle Model of Metaphor,” David Douglass has reviewed this rich literature and concluded: “Anyone familiar with the work of I.A. Richards cannot help but think that he would delight in the varied uses to which his tenor-vehicle model has been put. Indeed he might well advise that we forgo attempting to resolve his terminology and reflect instead on the insight that its use has generated” (2000: 422). I propose that we do neither of these, but instead go ahead with a new model of metaphor based on Stephen Tyler’s insight: metaphoric expressions emanate from and vanish into the realm of the unspeakable (Tyler 1987). They are generated by complex mental and emotional states like love and hate, hope and despair, triumph and fear, etc., which carry multivocal meanings that cannot be described but only evoked, as Stephen would say, by hints and reminders; and once produced, metaphors reverberate and echo in the minds and emotions of interlocutors until their energy and evocative power is exhausted. All this, I think, can be summed up and expressed by the notion of tenor. Now, which terms would be best for these two unspeakable realms of metaphor, one relating to production and the other relating to reception? I propose the terms tenor and resonance. Tenor would be used here as in functional lin-

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guistics, except that it would not refer to univocal, but multivocal states and meanings, and it would indicate the movement of thought and feeling that results from the co-presence, co-operation, and interaction of the two parts that constitute a metaphor. In other words, neither of the two terms of a metaphor would be called tenor, but rather the metaphor’s “sound,” its totality, its intentional thrust and the resonance it produces. Following Stephen Tyler’s thoughts about pathos and emphasis being the raison d’être of metaphor (1978: 325), I suggest calling the first part of a metaphor the “pathetic” term. Pathetic means “causing or expressing sympathy and pity,” and in addition it evokes a state of affairs that is distressingly inadequate like when an old man sits huddled before a pathetic fire (Collins Dictionary). The second part I call “sympathetic” because a pathetic state of affairs evokes sympathy, affection, shared suffering, and an instant longing to help, to support what is weak, to heal what is sick, to complete what is unfinished. Or, expressed differently, pathetic evokes a kinetic movement, which has an impact on some material object, ground, or substance, while sympathetic evokes a notion of response, correspondence, reply, and answer. Both terms have an affinity to music, where we speak in fact of sympathetic strings that vibrate in answer to the energy provided by strings that have been plucked by the fingers of the musician.

Tenor and the Problem of Cultural Description Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, wrote in the introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific that we “must grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most ultimately, that is the hold which life has on him … to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by which these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness, is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man” (1922: 25). So, in his early period, Malinowski was clearly interested in tenor phenomena. He wanted to grasp what the people of other cultures were holding and what was holding them. He wanted to understand the “string tension” (see the definition of tenor above) of their aims and yearnings for happiness. Yet, later on, Malinowski excluded subjective desires from what he considered proper scientific discourse, and thus, he and most of his peers and students were caught in an epistemology that was inimical to a serious study of tenor in culture. Wedded, as they were, to natural science, they felt obliged to demonstrate that cultures were orderly, functional wholes, fully determined

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by general laws of nature, just like other domains of the world. Malinowski postulated that, “the whole of tribal culture in all its aspects has to be gone over in research. The consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect make also for joining them into one coherent whole” (1922: 11), and it was extremely difficult for anyone to extricate their self from this agenda. The problem was confounded by an ethical factor. That is, with the narrow epistemology of modern ethnography went an—often unspoken—aim to “rehabilitate the native” by showing that even the most terrifying, absurd, and fantastic institutions and patterns of culture had good reasons to be what they were, for they fulfilled necessary social, political, economical, legal, and religious functions. Furthermore, a stereotype theory absolved the “natives” from individual responsibility as “their mental states receive a certain stamp, become stereotyped by the institutions in which they live, by the influence of tradition and folk-lore, by the very vehicle of thought, that is by language” (Malinowski 1922: 23). After surveying a wide spectrum of twentieth-century ethnographies, I have found no other work that better exemplifies the dilemma of cultural description than Gregory Bateson’s Naven (1965). Trained at home in the canons of natural science, Bateson was faced in the field with a cultural reality that defied any kind of univocal categorization and escaped full scientific comprehension. In addition, his ethical position faltered. According to the tenets of modern anthropology, his analysis should reveal the underlying soberness and usefulness of seemingly extravagant and exotic institutions. Yet his observations of life among the Iatmul made him wonder whether such a relativist view could be upheld in earnest, and torn between the will to credit Iatmul culture with sanity and the wish to debunk its insanity, he experienced, to use the title of Anthony Paul’s analysis of Macbeth (1992), a veritable “torture of the mind.” To show how Bateson’s struggle relates to rhetoric culture theory and the study of tenor in culture, I will now quote and examine Naven at some length. First, let us have a look at some of his footnotes, for here he allows his anguish and lack of terminological and conceptual certitude to come to the fore. Already when he introduces the notion of “ethos” he questions the conceptual appropriateness of his metaphors. Speaking of “cultural details” that “constitute an intricate series of channels which express and guide the ethos,” he adds in a footnote: “Such metaphors as this are of course dangerous. Their use encourages us to think of ethos and structure as different ‘things’ instead of realizing as we should that they are only aspects of the same behaviour. I have let the metaphor stand pour encourager les autres” (1965: 121). Shortly after this, when he makes the telling observation that Iatmul male ethos “is a mixture of pride and histrionic self-consciousness,” he adds the following self-doubting footnote:

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In my description of ethos, I have not hesitated to invoke the concepts of emotion and to use terms which strictly should only be used by observers about their own introspections. I have been driven to this loose phrasing through lack of any proper technique for recording and of any language for describing human gesture and behaviour. But I wish it to be understood that statements of this kind are an attempt—crude and unscientific perhaps—to convey to the reader some impression of the behaviour of Iatmul natives. (1965: 124)

The two epilogues to Naven—one written in 1936, the other in 1958—also abound with passages that reveal Bateson’s epistemological problems. Constantly he stresses that the book was “an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about anthropological material,” and that he did not “clearly see any reason why [he] should enquire into one matter rather than another” (1965: 257). Of his theory of Iatmul transvestitism he says, “how sound this theory may be I can hardly judge, but it is put forward in all seriousness” (1965: 260), and with admirable self-irony he comments on his tendency to subside to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: “Again I took refuge in the terms ‘formulation’ and ‘structure.’ The kinship system was ‘built up’ of formulations, was part of the structure of society and the naven was ‘built upon’ this structure. It appeared, then, that there was another ‘thing’ called ‘structure’ which mattered in the culture” (1965: 261). In the epilogue, he comes back again to the difficulty of describing emotions: “The English language—and perhaps all language—is not adapted to the critical description of emotion. While a syllogism can be stated in stark simplicity, it is almost impossible to make any simple statement about emotions. The best we can do is to sketch an ethos or personality in a diffuse journalistic or artistic style and then sum up that sketch in a few words whose significance is fixed by the sketch” (1965: 268). Considering all this, it is interesting to note that he exemplifies one of his most central concepts, that is “ethos,” in ways that come very close to the concept of tenor as outlined above in the sections on music, language, and metaphor: “When a group of young intellectual English men or women are talking and joking together wittily with a touch of light cynicism, there is established among them for the time being a definite tone of appropriate behaviour. Such specific tones of behaviour are in all cases indicative of an ethos” (1965: 119). Generalizing, he adds: “The point which I wish to stress in this example is that any group of people may establish among themselves an ethos which as soon as it is established becomes a real factor in determining their conduct. This ethos is expressed in the tone of their behaviour” (1965: 120). Here we are right in the midst of tenor theory, for as we have seen above, linguists define tenor as the mode in which at specific mo-

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ments “mutual persuasion and negotiation goes on between participants.” So tone could well be substituted here with tenor. In fact this would be the more appropriate term, for tenor evokes an element of tension, a tension that is very real in the ethnographic examples that Bateson provides. But before I come to this let me draw attention to the fact that ethos is produced discursively, or—more to the point—rhetorically. People persuade themselves and others that in this or that particular situation this or that “tone” is appropriate. This in turn produces a certain kind of “tenor” or “ethos,” which, when generalized, may pertain to a whole culture. Tension, even hypertension, is in fact what characterizes the core of Iatmul male ethos where “there are no steady and dignified chiefs—indeed no formulated chieftainship at all—but instead there is continual emphasis on self-assertion,” which often leads to harsh swagger, over-conscious pride, buffoonery, and even clowning (1965: 124). Summing up Iatmul male ethos as arising from a tension between a rhetorically induced sense of pride, and its (also rhetorically induced) lack of formal recognition, Bateson provides a piece of cultural description that is not only compatible with the notion of tenor but also foreshadows rhetoric culture theory: “So the whole culture is molded by the continual emphasis upon the spectacular, and by the pride of the male ethos. Each man of spirit struts and shouts, playacting to convince himself and others of the reality of prestige which in his culture receives but little formal recognition” (1965: 129).

Epistemological Baseline for a Study of Tenor in Culture As I have stated above, trapped in the epistemology of “objective” natural science, most of twentieth-century anthropology shied away from an attempt to study anything as ephemeral as tenor phenomena, and it took the bold and imaginative mind of Stephen Tyler to tease anthropology into acknowledging the fact that the unsaid and unspeakable should not be relegated to the background but be brought to the foreground in the study of language and culture. This, in turn, has opened the way for an investigation of such difficult topics as tenor in culture. The last sentence of The Said and the Unsaid reads as follows: “So now for us meaning is not in some scarce and minuscule germ of abstraction secreted in the interstices of quasi-mathematical forms, it abounds instead in the resonating silence of the unsaid—in that possibility of all meaning” (1978: 465). This sums up Tyler’s view that human languages necessitate indirect discourse, and that the match between words and things is always “indexical, analogical and inferential—a creative accommodation of words and things” (1978: 181). Thus, meanings in language are “intersubjective accom-

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plishments that speakers and hearers negotiate, amend, and reaffirm by communicating with one another” (1978: 147), and language becomes a means by which we “nudge” each other into recognizing our respective intentions. Refusal to acknowledge this incomplete, provisional, and inferential nature of discourse leads, as Tyler points out, to obstruction and paralysis rather than to better understanding: Literalness in all its forms is reprehensible, but it is most odious in conversation, for its effect is obstructionist and is usually so intended. There is a certain “looseness” about all of our conversational rules and our rules of social life generally, so that anyone who follows the rules literally, destroys the normative character of interaction and induces social paralysis. To ask for mathematical exactitude in our everyday rules and use of rules is to ask for disaster, the very destruction of the form sought rather than its fulfillment. Rigid rule-following is, of course, a highly effective method for obstructing interaction and discourse. (1978: 396)

This has important implications not only for everyday conversations but also for scientific discourse in general, and for the role we might be willing to allow notions like tenor to play in ethnography and anthropology. Nothing would be easier than to put anyone down who uses the word tenor, asking him what he means literally by it and to define precisely, possibly even in mathematical terms, the tenor of a particular situation. Yet this would be nothing but the “odious” tactic pointed up by Tyler above. The communicative intentions of the speaker or writer would be obstructed, and potentially fruitful ideas would be lost. If, however, one accepts the use of the notion of tenor as a “creative accommodation of words and things” and a way of “nudging” us to recognize certain intentions, then the notion of tenor might well have an important role to play. Tenor is used to address the fact that people often experience situations as comprehensive totalities where various elements interact with one another and create a Schwingung, Stimmung, an “atmosphere,” a “sense” or “spirit” that cannot be reduced to any of its properties. Paraphrasing Tyler, we now can say, that although a tenor cannot be reduced to any of its properties it can, nevertheless, be evoked by them. In The Unspeakable, Tyler has outlined this creative role of evocation, its power to conjure “a fantasy whole abducted from fragments” and to make “available through absence what can be conceived but not presented” (1987: 199, 202). In order to get Tyler’s ideas across, I quote him here again at some length, first as he criticizes naturalistic realism: The whole point of “evoking” rather than “representing” is that it frees ethnography from mimesis and that inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric

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which entails “objects,” “facts,” “descriptions,” “inductions,” “generalizations,” “verification,” “experiment,” “truth” and like concepts which, except as empty invocations, have no parallels either in the experience of ethnographic field work or in the writing of ethnographies. The urge to conform to the canons of scientific rhetoric has made the easy realism of natural history the dominant mode of ethnographic prose, but it has been an illusory realism, promoting, on one hand, the absurdity of “describing” nonentities like “culture” or “society” as if they were fully observable, though somewhat ungainly, bugs, and on the other, the equally ridiculous behaviorist pretence of “describing” repetitive patterns of action in isolation from the discourse that actors use in constituting and situating their action, and all the simple-minded surety that the observer’s grounding discourse was itself an objective form sufficient to the task of describing acts. (1987: 207)

Secondly, Tyler reminds us of the fragmentary nature of field work: Life in the field is itself fragmentary, not at all organized around familiar ethnological categories like kinship, economy, and religion, and except for unusual informants like Ogotemmeli, the natives seem to lack communicable visions of a shared, integrated whole; nor do particular experiences present themselves, even to the most hardened sociologist, as conveniently labeled synecdoches, microcosms, or allegories of wholes, whether cultural or theoretical. At best, we make do with a collection of indexical anecdotes or telling particulars with which to portend that larger unity beyond explicit textualization. (1987: 208)

Thirdly, he develops a view of an emergent ethnography based on evocation that “accomplishes a cognitive utopia not of the authors subjectivity nor of the reader’s, but of the author-text-reader, an emergent mind which has no individual locus, being instead an infinity of possible loci. Here then is a new holism, one that is emergent rather than given, and one that emerges through the reflexivity of text-author-reader and which privileges no member of this trinity as the exclusive locus or means of the whole” (1987: 209). This, then, is the theoretical baseline from where an anthropological discourse about unspeakable phenomena can begin and from where we may reasonably embark on a study of phenomena like tenor in culture.

Tenor in Hamar Culture As I have argued above, metaphors derive their power and “tone” from a tension resulting from the co-presence, co-operation, and interaction of the two

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parts that constitute a metaphor. This I have called the “tenor,” while characterizing the two constitutive parts of a metaphor as “pathetic” and “sympathetic.” The pathetic part is unfulfilled and asks for help, as it were, and the sympathetic part provides a kind of answer. In certain embarrassing social situations people may be afraid of losing something. But what is this “something”? The answer will be culture-specific. For example, in the stratified, “stand-offish” societies of Great Britain and Japan, which are characterized by predominantly negative-politeness rhetoric (see Brown/Levinson 1987), people have come up with the ingenious metaphor of “loss of face.” This metaphor combines three figures into one. Firstly, face stands metaphorically for “public self-image,” and also “honor,” and the like. Once a person has lost face, he or she will not want to show their face in public anymore, and other people won’t want to look into his or her face, especially not into the eyes. Secondly, face derives its evocative power from a synecdoche: a significant part of a person, that is the face with which one faces others (or which one hides from others) is taken to represent the whole person, that is, the whole character, social standing, moral values, etc. Thirdly, a single action, or single acts, are used as an index where metonymically an effect stands for a cause. A bad deed, it is said, reflects a bad person, a bad result reflects a bad cause. Thus, when people warn each other not to risk loss of face by doing this or the other, they say implicitly that there will be people who track back the paths of synecdoche and metonymy contained in the notion of face. The unspoken argument is: if you do not do what is publicly expected of you, then you will lose your face and will be declared bad in toto. Now, it is tempting to think that the metaphor of face is universal. But it is not. Many other parts of the body or the external world may be used as metaphors instead, as the following examples from Hamar (southern Ethiopia) will show. The Hamar are aware that social encounters can be dangerous, but the key metaphors—and hence varieties of tenor—that govern their social life differ from face. I have explored this in an earlier publication (Strecker 1993), but as my data have acquired a new, and to me surprising, relevance for the present chapter, I will make full use of the old data and their interpretations in the pages that follow below. In the egalitarian, proud, and very individualistic social world of Hamar, one will not hear people say that they are afraid of social loss; rather, one finds them prone to express anger and indignation about any kind of social trespass. They will demand, “Don’t spoil my forehead; don’t spoil my word; don’t spoil my name; don’t spoil my whipping wand; don’t spoil my right, big, green toe, don’t spoil my good fortune!” All five metaphors and the notion of good fortune involve an extension of the persona and can be understood as aspects of what we call “face.”

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“Don’t spoil my forehead!” The metaphor that most closely resembles our “face” is woti, forehead. When one asks the Hamar to point to their woti, they always move their hand up to the forehead. Similarly, the verbal explanations of the term woti focus on the forehead. Woti is part of the head as the carrier of the brain. Behind woti lies thought and reflection. Conversely, woti is the place where a person’s worry and sorrow show, that is, the informed concern for others. Also, woti is the part of the body with which you meet and confront others, rather like the goats and cattle that typically meet head-on in play and in earnest. Thus, by metaphoric extension, boldness and courage as well as thought and reflection are stressed when the Hamar speak of a person’s woti. Interestingly, there is no Hamar word that focuses, like our word face, primarily on the area around the eyes and the mouth, which so easily betray a person’s inner feelings, and concomitantly can be used deliberately to express them. Woti does not focus on a person’s concern for his/her own self but on his/her concern for others. Therefore it is not associated with shame. In fact, the Hamar have no word for shame, nor do they have one for sin. What they are concerned with in social life is not to speak of failure but of success, not to humiliate others but to elevate themselves. Theirs is a culture of boasting and not of humility (see Strecker 1988: 87f., 187). Hamar men claim for themselves freedom of action. This is what they fight for: issa wotin säsan gara (“Don’t spoil my forehead—my ‘face’!”). The forehead refers here to a person’s sphere of action, the world which he “faces” and wants to control. The forehead, the word (voice), the whipping wand, and the big toe (see below), all have a similar directional and outward element. They are metaphors of intention and action. They embody the will to confront, reach, influence, and control others. What distinguishes the tenor of woti from the other metaphors is the fact that it lends itself for the celebration of social worthiness. In a literal sense the forehead of the Hamar is often anointed in precisely the way Brown and Levinson have described positive politeness that “anoints the face of the addressee by indicating that, in some respects, S (the speaker) wants H’s (the hearer’s) wants (for example, by treating him as a member of an in-group, a friend, a person whose wants and personality traits are known and liked)” (1978: 75). Such anointing of the woti is ritually done as a celebration of a man’s proof of his competence and courage. A man should prove himself before he marries by hunting dangerous game and/or killing an enemy. Once he has done this, he is applauded, his ‘positive face wants’ are satisfied and he is ritually anointed. “Don’t spoil my word!” One often hears in Hamar the statement, apho barjo ne (“The mouth [metonym for word] is barjo”). The Latin proverb nomen est omen comes to mind, and the prevalent belief in the magical power of words. The word is always a very critical extension of the persona, and it

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inescapably affects both the speaker and the world around them. An ultimate expression of this mode of thinking is found in the Hamar barjo äla (calling forth good fortune). Here the human voice is used to invoke well-being. In a continuous process of giving and receiving barjo, people bless each other by means of their inherent power of speech. As speech is such an intrinsic part of people’s social and moral being, it also lends itself for the production of metaphors that refer to the social and moral side of a person. When the Hamar say apho issa säsan gara (“Don’t spoil my word”), they do not mean this literally but think of much more complex meanings like, “don’t spoil the good influence that my words usually have on the world,” “don’t interfere with my will,” “don’t attack my persona.” When the Hamar judge each other and assess their respective social values, they constantly refer to the sincerity or insincerity of a person’s word, and to whether it is truthful or false. They say apho kissa tipha ne (“his word is straight”), or apho kissa koara ne (“his word is bent”). As speaking is such a significant social activity, to speak truthfully is to be a good person, to speak falsely a bad person. No wonder then that in Hamar, apho has been exploited for metaphoric production and has received a meaning that pertains to the whole person. However, in contrast to woti the tenor of apho is not one of confrontation but of integration; not one of destruction but of creation; not bullying but accommodating; and generally apho pertains to breath, the ephemeral, and the ethical, while woti evokes bones, decisive action, and a certain disregard of morals. “Don’t spoil my name!” The Hamar metaphor of name, nabi, closely resembles our figurative use of the term name. Like face, it acts by exploiting a metonymic relationship. To have a good name is to be good; to have a bad name to be bad. In this way, name in our own culture and nabi in the culture of the Hamar can be used in coercive rhetoric, much like face is used. If you do not behave properly, you run the risk of losing your good name. Name acquires some coercive force already by the simple fact that through giving a name to someone one implies the recognition of her or his social value. Naming is equivalent to valuing. People are given names in order to be or become socially acceptable. In Hamar people are usually given several names during the course of their life, and each name signifies some specific aspect of their persona. Also, the giving of a new name is always associated with blessing. You are blessed to become worthy and great, like a big mountain, as the Hamar say. This blessing is an emphatic act of positive politeness, but it is also coercive in so far as a person is named and given value in order to get him or her to enter the social domain and aspire to social worthiness. Unlike woti and apho, the metaphor of nabi has a tenor of fear, insecurity, perpetual worry. This derives from the fact that the name is given to a person

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by others, and the owner is obliged to guard, keep, and enhance it, and fulfill all the social expectations that are connected with it. “Don’t spoil my whipping wand!” The tenor of micere (whipping wand) is one of playfulness, pride, threat, control, and provocation. The metaphor evokes man’s ability to act, a sense of freedom, and of magical power. This derives from the fact that the whipping wand is the most significant tool for herding in Hamar. It is long, light, and flexible and ideally suited to act as an extension of the arm of a herdsman, or, more often, a herding boy or girl. “At the nose of the whipping wand, there is butter,” goes the cheeky saying, and indeed in the long run no survival would be possible if the Hamar did not manage to use their whips well. Cattle and sheep are easier to herd because they tend to stay together in a close group, but goats need constant attention for they tend to spread out as each goat wanders off to satisfy its individual taste. The art of herding goats involves the voice (all sorts of hissing, whistling, shouting, singing), gestures (especially with the arms), and the whipping wand. The latter is used not only as an extension of the arm but also as an extension of the voice, because one can produce a variety of sharp noises with it by hitting the ground, leaves, grass, or branches, and thus attract the attention of the goats and lead them in the desired direction. As goats form the core of the Hamar economy, and as the whipping wand is the most important tool for herding, it is understandable that the use of the whipping wand has been ritualized and metaphorically exploited to speak of the social wants of the person. The ritualization begins already in such small acts as when a father hands a new whipping wand to his son in the morning. He does this usually after some accident has happened, for example, a goat may have been lost or eaten by a hyena. After such ill luck, the father hands a new whipping wand to the herding boy, who then uses it throughout the day, and, in the evening, when the whole herd has entered the homestead safely, places it across the gateway of the goat enclosure. As time goes by, many dry old whips accumulate here and grow into a big bundle, which is evidence of the problems of looking after the herd and how those problems were overcome. The whipping wand, however, is not only a tool to herd animals, it is also a tool to control people. Typically, boys and young men shift their attention away from the goats and cattle when they come to the homesteads, the fields, and the waterholes, where they meet girls, with whom they flirt. Then they express their liking for the girls not so much in sweet words but in mock assaults in which they use the whipping wands in their gestures of attack. Later, when they have married, men sometimes use their whips in earnest in order to subdue or dominate their wives. Men use the whip toward women but not vice versa, except during the harvest celebrations when women mockingly

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whip men. Men also use the whip toward other men. This begins as early as childhood when older brothers often threaten or actually hit their younger brothers with the whips they are constantly carrying. Later in life, youths may sometimes be severely whipped by their “older brothers” (men senior to them) as a punishment for some offence like thieving or going on a raid without the consent of the elders. The elders (donza), however, are never whipped but punished by other means, for example, by the fine of an animal. “Don’t spoil my right, big, green toe!” It may sound odd that the Hamar consider the big right toe, dumai, and, by extension, the shin, to be an important aspect of the persona. But a brief moment of reflection is enough to grasp the logic of this train of thought. The Hamar move constantly on foot through difficult terrain. When they go to their fields, when they follow their herds, when they go scouting or hunting or raiding, it is extremely important that they do not hurt their feet and legs. But there are many thorns, hard pieces of wood or sharp stones, on which people hurt themselves even if they are careful and experienced. People are, therefore, very much aware of the importance of their feet and legs and the need to keep them safe from damage. “May your path be free (of obstacles)” is one of the ways in which the Hamar wish each other well. Also, when they bless, they wish each other to move like baboons, for baboons move lightly and never hurt themselves as human beings do. The big toe is thus, in practical terms, a very significant part of the body, and it makes sense that the Hamar have used it as a metaphor of a person’s competence and freedom of action. But there is also more to it, an almost magical element, which is also present in the metaphors of “whipping wand” and “word,” but which comes out more clearly here. The Hamar say that your big, green, right toe leads you to success, to success in raiding, in hunting, and so on. Your dumai should be “fat.” If you go to visit a homestead and your big toe hits hard against an obstacle on the path, then you ask yourself whether the homestead will be well. If you stumble with your right foot, this will lead you to suffering, lack of food, and misfortune. When you encounter such obvious bad luck, you say to yourself, isn’t it the stumbling that has caused this affair? Here the Hamar do not only speak of predictive signs, but also of causes for bad luck. When someone stumbles on his way, he does not know whether the stumbling initiates anything. Only when he arrives at his destination and finds there that he is not welcome, or that there is simply nothing to eat and drink, or that people are sick or have died, does he say, “Things are bad here because I have stumbled.” The tenor of dumai is ambivalent. On the one side it expresses hope and is seen as proof of one’s general well-being and good luck, but on the other side it reveals some deep-seated fear, in fact the possibility of madness. Like in Indo-

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Germanic languages, uncontrolled movement is a sign of madness. The Latin “errare,” the English “err,” and the German “irren” are, like the Hamar barri, terms that refer to uncontrolled movement. Because you are mad you do not only go wrong mentally, you also lose your orientation and walk hectically in different directions. All this lies at the back of dumai and provides the metaphor with a tenor that ultimately evokes error coming from madness, which in turn can be seen as the greatest threat to harmonic social life. Those who are mad will stumble, fall, and bring misfortune, while those who are sane will walk like baboons, as the Hamar blessing goes, and their green, big, right toe will bring good fortune, abundance, and well-being. “Don’t spoil my good luck!” The tenor of independence, self-sufficiency, confidence, and even pride that we could detect already in the five demands outlined above comes out most clearly in the Hamar philosophy of continuous creation. According to the Hamar, creation goes on constantly in the world, and human beings have an active part to play in it. Every living being needs barjo (good luck, good fortune) to exist and to achieve its natural state of wellbeing. Even such phenomena as clouds, rain, the stars, etc., need to have their barjo to appear in a regular and ordered way. People can actively engage in producing and augmenting the barjo of people, animals, plants, the soil, the seasons, etc., by calling forth barjo. Here is an abridged version of such a barjo äla: Eh-eh! The herds are carrying sickness May the sickness go beyond Labur, may it go, Cattle owners you have enemies, May the Korre who looks at our cattle, die, die, May his heart get speared, get speared, Eh-eh! My herds which are at Mello, May my herds come lowing, come, May the girls blow the flutes, blow, May the women dance, dance May the men rest, rest. (Lydall/Strecker 1979: 14f.)

Both men and women have barjo, but only the elders call forth barjo in the emphatic and stylized way of the example given above. Women call forth barjo in a quiet and unobtrusive way, for example, by sweeping the entrance to their goat enclosure and by putting on a belt that is decorated with cowry shells. As one old woman once told me, she causes others to be well (have barjo) simply by wishing them well. She does not need any words for this.

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The Hamar elders, on the other hand, stress that they need to meet and chant together in order to call forth barjo. They carry their own barjo with them wherever they go, and whenever it seems necessary to cause well-being, they get together and call barjo. Often they delegate the leading part of the chanting to men who act in a specific office, for example, as gudili (“guardian of the fields”), kogo (“guardian of the fires of the homesteads”), or bitta (“guardian of all of Hamar country”). When older and younger brothers are present, it is always the older brother who leads the chanting. By means of the barjo äla the elders exercise control over each other and especially over women and children. It is the old who call barjo for the young, and it is the men who call barjo for the women, not vice versa. But having said this, one needs to stress that the concept of barjo and the practices associated with it lack any competitive or aggressive element. People never do anything great and outrageous to achieve barjo, nor do they boast about their barjo. In fact, implicit to the concept is that the greater anyone’s barjo is, the more that person will be harmonious, non-aggressive, non-competitive and non-problematic. Anyone who has great barjo will be able to act well, will not collide with others, and will be agreeable in the eyes of others and his or her self.

Concluding Note In this chapter, I have tried to weave a few strands together that derive from music, linguistics, metaphor theory, ethnography, epistemology, ethos, and politeness theory, and finally from the ethnography of the Hamar of southern Ethiopia. If I have succeeded in showing that tenor, just like metaphor, is inherent in culture, and that tenor is a useful concept for understanding the rhetorical—and therefore ephemeral, fantastic, and extravagant—nature of culture, then this is all that I have hoped for.

References Bateson, Gregory. 1965 [1936]. Naven: A Survey of the Problem Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglass, David. 2000. “Issues in the Use of I.A. Richards’ Tenor-Vehicle Model of Metaphor.” Western Journal of Communication 64 (4): 405–24. Halliday, M.A.K. 1973. Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold.

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Lydall, Jean, and Ivo Strecker. 1979. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, Vol. II: Baldambe Explains. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge. Paul, Anthony. 1992. The Torture of the Mind: Macbeth, Tragedy and Chiasmus. Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers. Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strecker, Ivo. 1988. The Social Practice of Symbolization: An Anthropological Analysis. London: Athlone. ———. 1993. “Cultural Variations of the Concept of Face.” Multilingua 12 (2): 119–41. Sadie, Stanley, ed. 2002. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan; New York: Grove. Togher, Leanne, and L. Hand. 1998. “Use of Politeness Markers with Different Communication Partners. An Investigation of Five Subjects with Traumatic Brain Injury.” Aphasiology 12 (7–8): 755–70. Tyler, Stephen. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning and Culture. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1987. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.










Part 2

Emergence

CHAPTER 7

Attending the Vernacular A Plea for an Ethnographical Rhetoric Gerard A. Hauser








In , Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richard published The Meaning of Meaning, in which they advanced a daring challenge to the philological orthodoxy of how words mean. It included, as a supplement, a paper by Bronislaw Malinowski dealing with Trobriand Islanders’ uses of language. Malinowski discussed his efforts to understand the Trobrianders’ language by asking them what a word meant, which he then entered into his homemade dictionary. To his surprise, however, his systematic effort was defied by everyday uses in which the Islanders’ language served pragmatic communal functions, such as gathering women and the elderly to shore to help the men unload their catch after a day of fishing. Pragmatic functions, such as temporal references, could indicate a time not captured by the literal meaning of the words but by their relationship to context. His discovery of how context changed meaning also intensified his sensitivity to how the Trobrianders used language for symbolic performances of festive pleasures, such as goading and teasing opponents to enhance the physical tests of friendly competitions with verbal jousts. For the most part, rhetoricians of that period (and the rest of the century), who were primarily concerned with criticism of official discourse delivered by government officials and governing bodies, the history of a momentous debate, and the social significance of a mode of discourse, paid scant attention to Malinowski’s paper. As a result, the quotidian exchanges that were at the heart of Malinowski’s argument about how words mean and how humans act with language were largely ignored. Its micropractices of inducing neighbors

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and community members to share bonds of affiliation about political events, community concerns, economic needs, class differences, and the like did not fit within the traditional understanding of rhetoric as public address intended to influence public policy, arrive at legal verdicts, or celebrate bonds of communal identity. By mid century, as rhetorical criticism came increasingly under the influence of Kenneth Burke (1931, 1937, 1984), Malinowski’s attention to the details of non-oratorical discourse pointed to how everyday exchanges among members of a community could be of interest to rhetoricians. However, critics remained focused on qualities of symbolic inducement found in the speeches of leaders and formal statements of moment while they largely ignored how these same elements established identification, moment by moment, in everyday exchanges of the street. Nor did they pay attention to how vernacular exchanges among ordinary citizens evaluated the rhetorical performances of officials and officialdom. The critic often looked to the responses of official bodies, such as parliament, or outcomes, such as a vote, for assessment of their consequences, while bypassing street level expressions of judgment as an index of the discourse’s influence, or at least of how it was received. This absent interest in the rhetoric of the everyday did not reflect an absence of interest in the relationship of rhetoric to the culture in which it occurs. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, articles and books began to appear that examined the role of culture in shaping discourse, influencing perceptions, and perpetuating ideological distortions. One of the most influential works published in the 1990s was Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993), in which he argued that rhetoric is a practice with its own culture, that it is normative, and that it is significant in shaping social reality. Currently, cultural studies and rhetoric studies are enjoying a time of intersection that was formalized within the discipline of communication in 2004 when the National Communication Association commenced publication of the journal Communication and Critical / Cultural Studies. This union is reflective of a movement among critics and theorists of public discourse to incorporate the literatures of cultural studies as part of the intellectual scaffolding for their research. Today, they commonly draw on the literatures of critical race, post-colonial, and feminist theories, among others, that are centrally concerned with the cultural conditions associated with domination. Scholarship in rhetoric studies has less commonly exhibited direct ties to cultural anthropology, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Ralph Cintron (1997, 2003, 2004, 2005). The relative absence of more direct connection to anthropological studies as part of the rhetorician’s frame of reference is perplexing in that when cultural anthropology burst onto the intellectual scene during the early part of

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the last century, rhetoricians were quick to seize upon its insights for the news they carried about language and how humans used (and were used by) it. Of course, the impulses of one age are transformed to meet the needs of another, and while adaptations of the cultural anthropologist’s insights were important for engaging the intellectual, political and social currents of the 1920s and 1930s, the study of rhetoric since has focused more on issues of political culture born from ideological wars and social identities that invite a scholarship of intervention. Whereas an anthropologist seeks to know a culture from the inside and without passing judgment, many rhetorical studies that invoke a cultural frame do so to interpret power structures from a distanced perspective, critique their forms as manifestations of domination, and encourage the corrective of activist responses. Yet there are strands of intellectual foment in rhetoric studies that signal a developing interest in rapprochement between it and local discourse as it is inflected by the local culture from which it springs. Looking through the rearview mirror of the rhetorical tradition as it was challenged and steered in a new direction during the early part of the twentieth century, these strands can be read as part of a continuing fascination with extending rhetoric beyond the discourse found in formal texts, their strategies of inducement, and the production of speeches and essays. They urged greater attention be paid to the less formal symbolic inducements of the everyday. These radically new ways of thinking about human symbolic activity moved beyond the podium to the streets where the micro-practices of moment-by-moment interactions contribute not only to the organic character of the culture but become a significant source of rhetorically salient meaning and influence. Thus my meditation is divided into two parts. In the first, I will provide a brief and selective history of footprints in the sand that indicate the unnoticed presence in twentieth-century rhetorical theory of vernacular rhetoric as a significant mode of influence. Then I will turn my attention to discussing the texture and promise of vernacular rhetoric for joining the work of ethnographers and rhetoricians in a new domain of investigation under the banner of rhetoric culture.

The Rhetoric Culture of Language In the 1930s, the study of rhetoric took a new turn with the publication of Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).1 Philosophy’s chapters were originally presented as the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered in 1936 at Bryn Mawr College. Richards was neither optimistic about nor complimentary of the state of rhetoric as a theory of communication. He began his lectures by noting that rhetoric was a subject in such low estate that he dismissed it as “the dreari-

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est and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English!” Richards advised it were better “dismiss(ed) to Limbo than to trouble ourselves with it,” unless it could be revived as a study addressed to human needs. He proposed to do just that by redefining rhetoric as “the study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (1936: 3). To Richard’s way of thinking, the problem of meaning was ubiquitous and stemmed from an absence of deep understanding of the laws of language. We had settled for “poking the fire from the top,” in his view, since most people, including scholars, thought words “just have their meanings” and can be used to construct a composition much like bricks to construct a wall. Richards labeled this view the Proper Meaning Superstition, whereby we took each word to have a proper meaning, usually found in the dictionary. Thus, to express ideas with precision, the “superstition” advised deploying words in a manner that conformed to their proper meaning. Richards attacked this view as conceptually confused in that it treated words as if their meanings were static. Language is organic, changes with times and situations, and is better examined, he argued, in terms of its context of usage. As a counter to the Proper Meaning Superstition, he posited the Context Theory of Meaning, which held that meaning could only be discerned from its context of usage, such as a phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, book, prevailing circumstances, and so forth. More than a decade prior to publication of Philosophy, in 1923, Richards and Ogden’s The Meaning of Meaning (1947) was intended to examine how, in their language practices, people used signs for symbolic purposes to identify actual referents, and for emotive purposes to express attitudes. The collaboration with Ogden was felicitous. Ogden’s concern with the influence of language (he was the inventor of basic English—an 850-word vocabulary intended for international use) complemented Richards’s interest in how to read a literary production such that one might discern a wrong reading from one that disagreed with one’s own. From their respective perspectives they joined the principles of a newly developing science of psychology with semantics to challenge the emerging orthodoxy of positivism. Meaning went through nine editions from 1923 to 1947, despite it being considered a renegade text. Its long shelf life—it is still read in communication courses—is indicative of the potency that their implicit critique of positivist doctrine had regarding emotive meaning. In the intervening period between its publication and today, Meaning had itself gained sway as the accepted wisdom on how language acquires meaning: that its use is situated and its meanings are shaped by the situations of usage. One of the supplements to Meaning was, as mentioned earlier, Malinowski’s (1947) paper “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in which he discussed his conclusions on linguistic meanings based on his ethnographic

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research in the Trobriand Islands. He had returned to England just as Meaning was going to press. His experience trying to learn and decipher the Trobrianders’ language supported the argument Ogden and Richards were making and he agreed to include a paper discussing the intersections of their work, especially their more psychology-based arguments, with his own supporting evidence gathered in the field. In both instances, meaning was understood as more than what is found in a dictionary; it was situational, culturally inscribed, and differentiated between thought and action. Language in practice transported a history of usage—some shared by those who were part of the speech community and some unique to the speaker—into meaning. The situation was critical for determining which part of this history was in play at any given moment. Signatures of time and space, for example, were less fixed by the terms used as by the context in which they were used—linguistically, temporally, situationally, and speaker positionality. Moreover, Malinowski’s work showed that in use, language not only reflected thought and expressed emotions, but that people acted with words, such as with the phatic communion of greetings, or the symbolic jousting with personal insults as a way for onlookers to participate in the festive competition of a boat race. At the same time as these theories of meaning were developing, the American literary critic and rhetorician, Kenneth Burke, began his early speculations that culminated in his dramatistic theory. Burke posited that humans are, by definition, the symbol-using (misusing) animal and that their use of symbols constitutes an ongoing ensemble performance. Burke’s inspiration for this theory came from his work during the 1920s as music critic for The Dial, a journal of art and culture. Burke’s nights and weekends spent in New York’s concert halls immersed him in performances of symbolic forms that encouraged audiences to respond in particular ways. His internalized understanding of musical form made it possible to participate in musical performances in a way that went beyond content to appreciation of the composition for its own sake. An understanding of form capacitated him to decipher the composer’s choices and anticipate what should come next. Burke speculated that the formal characteristics of music were not remarkably different from those of symbolic forms in general. When humans understand a form, they also anticipate what comes next. Thus, in Counter-Statement, published in 1931, he posited that insofar as anticipation is satisfied, we respond to the form, participate in it, complete it and, in that activity, are swayed by it. Burke’s insight into the power of form went beyond the aesthetic performance to the aesthetics of all symbolic performances. In Permanence and Change (1984), published four years after Counter-Statement, he argued that form permeates society, expresses human motives, and encourages social action. Early in the book he introduced form’s power by borrowing John Dewey’s

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concept of “occupational psychosis.” Burke explained as follows: “Professor Dewey suggests that a tribe’s ways of gaining sustenance promote certain specific patterns of thought which, since thought is an aspect of action, assist the tribe in its productive and distributive operations. This special emphasis, arising in response to the economic pattern, he calls the tribe’s occupational psychosis. Once this psychosis is established by the authority of food-getting patterns (which are certainly primary as regards problems of existence) it is carried over into other aspects of tribe culture” (1984: 38). Occupational psychosis reflects mastery of (or indoctrination to) a form to the extent that it serves as a way of understanding and responding to the world. A capitalist, having internalized the logic and value of acquiring excess capital, can transfer the logic and value to other venues, such as displays of military might or displays of injury. Burke extended the theoretical formulations of Permanence in Attitudes Toward History, published in 1937. There, Burke engaged in social critique that resonated with the troubled times of the Great Depression. He traced historical antecedents to the economic catastrophe of his day to argue that our way of thinking about the past reflected an attitude perfected across time that lead to the naïve capitalism of the 1930s. Burke’s argument in Attitudes, as in Permanence, found humans acting through symbolic forms imbedded in the everyday performances of social action. Symbolic actions proceed as imbedded patterns of perception, interpretation, and response that make sense of the times we live in and are understood by the communities of which we are members. Finally, in a quite different cultural and political frame, Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) was advancing a view of literary forms, most particularly the novel, that drew its inspiration from social life. Although Bakhtin bracketed literary work from social reality, he also located the inspiration for literary work in the everyday congress of social actors. Most particularly, Bakhtin’s critical ear was attuned to the social interrogation inherently present in everyday use of language. He argued, much as Richards, Ogden, and Malinowski, that in any given utterance, context has primacy over text. Bakhtin expressed this relationship with the concept of heteroglossia, which refers to the diversity of unofficial forms of a national language that guarantees an utterance’s meaning is a function of its prevailing conditions of time and place. The multiplicity of unofficial forms, he argued, allowed an interrogation of meaning across social classes. The centripetal pressure of prevailing authority that seeks to solidify its position by homogenizing and imposing hierarchy on language use, when juxtaposed with centrifugal pressure to dislodge authority and power, guarantees that language in use always entails interrogation of power. The speech of leaders is always at odds with that of those they seek to dominate.

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Bakhtin detected the inherent dialectical character of these tensions; in language use one speaker’s utterances interrupt, interject, and otherwise question the words of the other. An utterance always rubs against the speech of the other, always dialogizes the other’s speech by insinuating one meaning into his or her words. Bakhtin observed how social discourse undermined the monologic speech of authority with relational talk that required recognition of another “I” who had the autonomy to speak for him or herself. It resisted monologism’s ideological construction of the inanimate and voiceless subject with the exchange of utterances that required dealing with another subject. These dialogizing moments were formed through the process of social interaction, most especially in discourse across classes. He found the interrogation of different social values in the representation of the other’s speech, re-actualizing it in a discourse other than its own. Parody, irony, and prosopopoeia, for example, acted as social imitation and inclusion of the absent other. It represented her or his speech in a manner that was understood as ridicule from below in its faux dialogue of social dialectic.2 These intellectual developments during the first half of the twentieth century reflect an organic attitude toward language. They found its interesting aspects in symbolic functions whereby humans created meanings, often as they went along, and acted with words. Language use always already was engaged in social identification and social critique. In short, you could not understand a people without understanding the culture of their language use because that is where you discovered their social world. Significantly for this discussion, they oriented toward meaning as it is found in social uses of everyday symbolic exchanges. One may speculate about why this perspective did not take hold as a rhetoric culture of language use in the ordinary discourse of the everyday. Certainly the fact that its major voices were predominantly literary critics pointed toward the dialogue of literary texts. Herbert Wichelns’s foundational essay, “Literary Criticism of Oratory” (1958), which appeared in 1925 and beckoned critics to turn from the study of great orators to other rhetorical forms, nonetheless framed the rhetorical critics’ work in terms of the literary critic. Those that did heed his call turned to criticism of social movements, but their work focused on the speeches and writings of leaders, such as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Mundane exchanges were seldom examined for their rhetoricity so much as their marking the way ordinary social actors internalized the movement. Most significantly, however, the orthodoxy of a “text” as a rhetorical artifact went unchallenged.3 It remained for Charles Taylor’s important article on creating a text from social interactions, published in 1971, to open the hermeneutical enterprise of criticism to vistas beyond the bounds of formal genres and public performances.

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Social Practice as Rhetoric Culture If most of twentieth-century critical work in which rhetoric remained tied to traditional views of text, there is no denying that this orthodoxy was not able to account for social influence, which, after all, is basic to a rhetorical view of language. The work of Richards, his collaboration with Ogden, Malinowski’s account of Trobriander language and the islanders’ performative uses of words, Burke’s development of a dramatistic perspective in which the forms of symbol using patterns are enactments that influence social joining, and Bakhtin’s theory of the inherent critique emergent from the clash of centripetal and centrifugal forces in language use add up to a paradigm shift in what counts as rhetorical. Prior to that time, rhetoric was understood as an art of production: one studied rhetoric in order to make discourse; rhetoric produced certain consequences on the world—a verdict or a law; critics examined public statements as artifacts that showed signs of their production in evidence, argument, and persuasive appeals. Perhaps the tumultuous period of the 1930s led these writers to regard the relationship between language and circumstances contributing to its social discord. Undoubtedly, discord situates meaning in practices and, by extension, a consideration of rhetoric’s influence on social practices and, in its performance, as itself a social practice. The human world, from this perspective, is constituted by the ongoing social exchanges found in dress, manners, material culture, popular arts, social gatherings, and the like. Included in this extension is the rhetoric of the everyday—a “vernacular rhetoric” of interaction within a discourse community that depends on local knowledge, concerns, meanings, modes of arguments, value schemes, logics, traditions, and the like shared among ordinary people. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, vernacular rhetoric has started to receive focused attention. Ordinary people, whether they are neighbors or a class, develop and rely on a vernacular with rhetorical salience. Although not a discourse of power and officialdom, it nonetheless adheres to the fundamental rhetorical demand for propriety. Much as neighbors co-construct a symbolic utterance of shared identity through maintaining their property—creating a vernacular, humanly constructed landscape of neat lawns, colorful flower beds, trimmed shrubberies, and domiciles with well-maintained exteriors—vernacular exchanges indicate bonds of affiliation; they speak a legible and intelligible rhetoric of shared values and solidarity. Adherence to the demands of propriety produces a surplus of symbolic value or symbolic capital that governs the community’s life. Michel DeCerteau (1998) and his collaborators’ study of a working class neighborhood in Lyon exemplifies the place of symbolic capital in its construction of its and our own self-understanding. How we present ourselves, speak to one another, reference shared exemplars of social knowledge, in short how we par-

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ticipate in the social field, allows us entry to the community and freedom to circulate in its network of relationships without necessarily having mastered them all. Propriety within vernacular rhetoric often manifests in a discourse that implicitly critiques outsiders, usually official power. Bakhtin, as noted above, speaks of the dialogizing power of references to class differences through double meanings, innuendo, speaking by indirection, intonation, hack phrases, commonplace utterances, puns, and other ways of dislocating conventional meaning. Equally, and without necessarily expressing social critique, a rhetoric of local salience can serve the internal political function of negotiating how we shall act and interact. Clifford Geertz’s much cited study of “deep play”4 embedded in Balinese conventions for wagering on a cockfight is a disclosure of propriety expressed stylistically through cues to indicate a desire to make a wager, conventions for locating an intermediary to arrange a wager, local etiquette governing a relationship one must honor with a supporting a wager, and the like (1972). This is vernacular rhetorical work in which the community tells a story about itself in its own terms. It is more than the voice of community; it reflects a rhetorical culture expressed through the banal exchanges of quotidian micro-practices. Whatever else we might consider these exchanges to be, they are inducements to an attitude that organizes the ordinary person’s social and political life. At the same time, a culture’s vernacular rhetoric is a language of power in tension with “anti-vernacular” representations of power. These are the monological discourses that function within the hierarchy of an overarching system(s) of power. They may be formal addresses and policy statements, bureaucratic rules and directives, or even the presentation of person that is a display of public authority. In these ways the anti-vernacular functions as an elite discourse, and those who speak it enjoy the elite’s capacity to disseminate information, opinions, and decisions while evading direct interrogation. The anti-vernacular tends to normalize its reification of its construction of reality through the ideological realism of official discourse. It stands in opposition, therefore, to the “perspective by incongruity,” or seeing the given case from outside its assumptions about experience and meaning, by which Burke (1984), in Permanence and Change, envisioned the stance of social critique. In authority’s striving to own public issues, it can extend its reach by codeswitching to imitate vernacular rhetoric in its appeals to the ordinary citizen through marketing and politics that speaks in their language. These mimetic performances dampen and deflect the dialectic between it and the everyday discourse whereby ordinary citizens make sense of their experiences.5 Once we recognize vernacular rhetoric as the natural extension of rhetoric’s paradigm shift instigated during the 1920s and 1930s, it is difficult to imagine

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any venue in which it does not have bearing, or any venue in which it is not functioning as counterpoint to the official. Whereas performances of official rhetoric are akin to the formalism of a fugue, vernacular rhetoric is a performance of jazz—free-form ensemble call and response. Although it may not be the centerpiece of all rhetorical practices, it is always operating in the background, reflecting how social actors understand and participate in construction of their social world. Three modes of everyday discourse illustrate this point. As a commonplace of US political analysis, the ordinary citizen is debunked as apathetic about public matters. Often this generalization is based on low voter turnout; sometimes it is based on levels of accurate information about public matters. However, few studies have examined in detail how ordinary citizens understand the issues of the day, how or even whether they think about them, and what opinions they hold. When scholars suspend this assumption, and look at the vernacular expressions of citizenship and understanding of issues, such as in the work of William Gamson (1992), Gerard Hauser (1999), and Karen Tracy (2010), they find counter evidence that calls the assumption of apathy into question. Moreover, when they focus on vernacular rhetoric per se, they discover interesting patterns that bear on the culture of decision making in liberal democracies. A prime example is Amy Grim’s (2005) study of citizen discourse on physician-assisted suicide. Grim conducted three case studies of officials and citizens expressing their understanding of the issues, relevant data, and standards involved in making sound public policy about end-of-life decisions: a televised physician-assisted suicide conducted by right-to-die activist Jack Kevorkian, citizen participation in hearings on a proposed bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide before the Hawaiian legislature and subsequent legislative debate, and a series of interactions on physician-assisted euthanasia between ordinary citizens and healthcare professionals on Talk of the Nation, a talk radio program broadcast in the US. She discovered that ordinary citizens and experts often differ on salient issues, relevant evidence, the urgency of time frames for making end-of-life decisions, the privileging of institutional norms and voices, what counts as reality-guiding decisions, and the logic and language they use to support their views. Most revealing, the vernacular rhetoric of ordinary people who are bonded by having lived through end-of-life decisions, even though they often disagree with one another on whether physician-assisted suicide should be legalized, use a different language and logic than experts. Rather than dismissing ordinary people as disengaged, analysis of their vernacular rhetoric suggests that decision makers and framers of policy may be guilty of disengagement from those who bear the burdens of their decisions. Acts of resistance provide a second, more obvious case where vernacular rhetoric plays a central role. The work of political scientists such as James

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Scott (1990), Robert Boyte (1996), and Sara Evans in collaboration with Harry Boyte (1986), of resistance theorists such as Frantz Fanon (1965), and culture theorists and critics such as Gloria Anzalduá (1999), focus on ways the underclass speak resistance with hidden transcripts in hush harbors and public transcripts in the streets, the systematic misunderstanding by colonists of the vernacular that defines local culture, of the constraints and opportunities of language for identity formation and political power. Moving from the political and cultural to the rhetorical brings added insight to the vernacular of resistance. As with the vernacular / official divide noted in the Grim (2005) study, rank and file rhetoric has a different perspective on the meaning of a social movement than leader rhetoric. Alain Touraine et al.’s study of the Solidarity movement in Poland (1983), for example, found that movement leaders often spoke of the union’s role as engaging the state. Fifteen months after Solidarity’s formation, however, its rank and file seemed to be at irreconcilable odds over the union’s meaning and what they were doing as its members. Workers in Warsaw seemed to agree with leaders who saw it as a challenger to the state, as their discussions focused on the avant-garde socialist political model of self-management; miners in Katowice were concerned about the lack of material gains they had expected from joining Solidarity; while shipyard workers in Gdansk were concerned that Solidarity’s purpose as a trade union was being co-opted by Varsovians more interested in political theory than trade union issues, and distorted by miners in Katowice more focused on immediate gratification than organizational means to leverage membership size into worker benefits. Extending from this to the more culturally inscribed vernacular, the rhetoric of the hunger strike in Ireland, of appeals by dissident defendants to procedures and rules of evidence in the South African law courts, of dissident appeals to signed international accords in Czechoslovakia, of samizdat circulated in the underground of Central and Eastern Europe, and of small acts of disobedience by women imprisoned in the Soviet camps, offer rich insight into the way resistance is a symbolic inducement to greater resistance. Thus, when IRA militant Bobby Sands undertook his hunger strike at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, his starving body was a potent rhetorical weapon within the Irish vernacular. In the Irish political vernacular, which has a rich tradition of the hunger strike as a means for demanding good faith negotiations, Sands’s starving body acquired the rhetorical position of symbolizing the Northern Irish body politic. As his material body diminished, its rhetorical power magnified until international media coverage produced a firestorm of protest against an intransigent Margaret Thatcher who refused to negotiate an end to his strike (Hauser 2000). The urban vernacular also holds news for understanding quotidian rhetoric. Cityscapes are unlike vernacular landscapes in that they are formally

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planned, are expressions of official identity, material wealth, power, and authority, intended to serve official civic functions, and are places that exert control over public movement. Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, engage in daily practices that appropriate these places for their own purposes and redefine them with their own meanings. They refuse to stay off the grass. By contrast, neighborhoods are intensely vernacular enclaves. If official places offer a glory road to public identity, the neighborhood offers a vernacular rhetoric of local gestures expressing communal identity. Local storefronts, gatherings in neighborhood shops, uses made of local parks and plazas, neighborhood and church festivals, and the like are beseechments to an attitude. They employ a common language of local reference and identity whose rhetorical salience and clarity contrasts with the obscurity of status language from above or the foreign tongues of outsiders. They also provide a frame for addressing the little injustices of everyday life that make perceived insults from a neighbor or the interloping Other invasions of personal identity. Quotidian destabilization among neighbors has its own rules of propriety for neighbors to resolve differences in a way that restores order and keeps them in good standing with the neighborhood, just as those caused by interlopers may be irreparable violations that reinforce stories of identity and difference in a way that, harbored over time, intensifies emotions of opposition. For the neighbor, or the ordinary citizen, local ethos grows from adhering to the rules of propriety its vernacular requires. This sketch of the urban vernacular is, of course, incomplete without including the countervailing forces that constrain its inventive opportunities. The realities of industrialization, service economies, and globalization often make it undesirable, if not impossible, for generational continuity. Gentrification changes the character of the local, imports alien class values, may disregard the locale’s vernacular, and import a discourse disconnected from the norms of rhetorical propriety on which community members relied for their sense of local connection. And the forces of modernity, of which electronic modes of communication are but one example, exert a form of violence on the world of the local. They invade the vernacular rhetoric of locality with the vernacular of YouTube, blogs, Twitter, internet commerce, and the like.6 Each of these is fertile ground for discovering the richness of local rhetoric of which and from which we have so much to learn.

Rhetorical Ethnography This fleeting discussion of vernacular rhetoric leads back to rhetoric culture in the form of studies it suggests, the methods it requires, and the news it

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promises. The insights into performative functions of language by rhetoricians and others during the first half of the last century suggest that moment-bymoment interactions in the street, as well as sustained discourse among ordinary citizens, require a different mode of study than has heretofore been the warp and woof of rhetoricians. It looks at ongoing exchanges of ordinary people rather than leaders for an understanding of issues. If there is such a thing as public opinion about public problems, it suggests you will find it in the vernacular rhetoric of ordinary exchanges among ordinary people. These studies will be concerned with the language, logic of arguments, logics of circulation, modes of evidence, norms of propriety, and stylistic devices that define issues and construct rhetorically salient meanings. These studies may be of past rhetorical performances, such as Grim’s (2005) study of euthanasia debates. However, they also enter a new territory of the ongoing discourse among ordinary people on matters that intersect their lives. It calls for observational studies using methodologies of participant observation and quite possibly “rhetorical ethnography.”7 To study the rhetoric of place and space, for example, requires a research site—a research concern heretofore alien to rhetoric as a discipline—where the vernacular rhetoric of place and space is performed, such as a city square where the local culture of inclusion and exclusion, or use and abuse of community space is enacted on a daily basis, and where those who are using the city square can say for themselves what they think they are doing by their public performances. Or, if one is investigating how Chinese peasants make sense of their involvement in developing local civil society structures, he or she needs to be with the peasants to participate in their sense-making discourse. At the same time, rhetoricians are not anthropologists; their claims are concerned with symbolic inducements to an attitude. They bring a critical lens informed by their disciplinary training in the suasory dynamics of symbol use. Importantly, however, the study of vernacular rhetoric opens a field of exchange between anthropologists and rhetoricians on the ways their respective methods might augment one another, or encourage collaboration in research on the quotidian. Finally, studies of vernacular rhetoric offer news about the ways in which ongoing social discourse serves as a mode of influence on what people think and do. They can answer the question of what makes rhetorical criticism something other than another form of literary criticism by examining how actual audiences responded to formal or official rhetoric. Indeed, studies of vernacular rhetoric, in all its forms, have the potential to expose sense-making processes in more raw and revealing ways than its official or formal rhetorical counterparts considered alone. It takes rhetorical criticism in an empirical direction, which includes not only audience judgments of “official” rhetoric but the construction of a rhetoric culture of their own. It promises to tell something

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about public opinion that goes beyond the mood swings of opinion polls by disclosing the narratives of lived reality in the ongoing exchanges of ordinary people about events that touch their lives, even if those events are mundane enactments of living in a neighborhood. It holds the promise of revealing how ordinary people engage in the ongoing struggle between those in and out of power by which society continually produces itself. Historically, rhetoric has been one of the practical liberal arts. The point of its study has been capacitating a person to communicate with consequence in the world. The ruminations about language and meaning of the select group of early twentieth-century thinkers discussed at the beginning of this chapter found meaning in the stormy world of those times. Social congress, by their lights, depended on symbolic interactions with (acting on, being acted upon) others. It was a rhetorical accomplishment and it occurs daily, not just on special occasions or through privileged performances. Vernacular rhetoric is the culture in which it grows. It adheres to the same rules that Clifford Geertz posited about all societies when he wrote, “Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them” (1972: 140).

References Andzalduá, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981 [1975]. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bentham, Jeremy. 1931 [1802]. The Theory of Legislation. Ed. Charles K. Ogden. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Boyte, Harry. 1996. Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Burke, Kenneth. 1931. Counter-Statement. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. ———. 1937. Attitudes Toward History. New York: New Republic. ———. 1984 [1935]. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cintron, Ralph. 1997. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2003. “‘Gates Locked’ and the Violence of Fixation.” In Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life: New Directions in Research on Writing, Text, and Discourse, eds. Martyn Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2004. “Valerio’s Walls and the Rhetorics of the Everyday.” In Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, & Literacy Education, eds. Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villaneuva. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. ———. 2005. “Gangs and their Walls.” In Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global, eds. Sunaina Maira and Elisabeth Soep. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Darsey, James. 1997. The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America. New York: New York University Press. De Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol. 1998. The Practice of Everyday Life (Vol. 2): Living and Cooking. Rev. and trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Evans, Sara, and Harry Boyte. 1986. Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1965 [1959]. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press. Farrell, Thomas 1993. Norms of Rhetorical Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gamson, William. 1992. Talking Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101: 1–37. Gregg, Richard B. 1971. “The Ego-function of the Rhetoric of Protest.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 4: 71–91. Griffin, Leland M. 1952. “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38: 184–88. ———. 1958. “The Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement.” In The Rhetorical Idiom, ed. Donald C. Bryant. New York: Russell and Russell. ———. 1964. “The Rhetorical Structure of the ‘New Left’ Movement: Part 1.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 50: 113–35. Grim, Amy 2005. “Citizens Deliberate the ‘Good Death’: The Vernacular Rhetoric of Euthanasia.” PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder. Hauser, Gerard 1999. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2000. “Body Rhetoric: Conflicted Reporting of Bodies in Pain.” In Deliberation, Democracy, and the Media, eds. Simone Chambers and Anne N. Costain. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Ogden, Charles K., and Ivor A. Richards. 1946 [1923]. The Meaning of Meaning. 9th ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1946. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In The Meaning of Meaning, eds. Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards. 9th ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Richards, Ivor A. 1964 [1936]. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press. Sanprie, Vorginia. 2009. “Sarah Palin, Live and on the Web: The Critical Analysis of Online Texts.” PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder. Scott, James 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, Robert L. 1973. “The Conservative Voice in Radical Rhetoric: A Common Response to Division.” Speech Monographs 40: 123–35. Scott, Robert L., and Donald K. Smith. 1969. “The Rhetoric of Confrontation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55: 1–8. Taylor, Charles 1971. “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” Review of Metaphysics 25: 3–51. Touraine, Alain, et al. 1983. Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social Movement: Poland 1980– 1981. Trans. David Denby. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tracy, Karen. 2010. Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: Discourse, Community, and Reason-

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able Hostility at a Local School Board. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Underwood, Erin. 2007. “Place and Space in the Public Square: A Theoretical and Critical Framing of Platial Vernacular Rhetoric.” PhD dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder. Wichelns, Herbert. 1958 [1925]. “Literary Criticism of Oratory.” In The Rhetorical Idiom, ed. Donald C. Bryant. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Notes 1. My colleague Peter Simonson pointed me in the direction of intellectual foment about rhetoric that began in the 1930s as prelude to current theorizing of vernacular rhetoric. 2. This dialectic is always seen from below in Bakhtin’s writings because authority always usurps formal rhetoric, which has no need to speak the words of an absent Other it presumes to control by virtue of speaking with the voice of authority. 3. These traits of movement criticism are exemplified in such work as Darsey (1997), Gregg (1971), Griffin (1952, 1958, 1964), Scott (1973), and Scott and Smith (1969). 4. Geertz borrows the concept of “deep play” from Jeremy Bentham’s 1802 treatise, The Theory of Legislation (1931). Bentham argued that deep play is a form of irrational behavior that occurs when the stakes are so high that a player has more to lose than to gain. 5. The idea of anti-vernacular was prompted by comments of Felix Girke and developed further through discussion and debate among students enrolled in my graduate seminar in vernacular rhetoric at the University of Colorado during the spring of 2007. I am indebted to both. 6. For example, in a study of online discussion of the American vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in the 2008 election campaign, Virginia Sanprie found the viral nature of these online media led to web discussions of Palin that, at times, made it difficult to discern whether responses were to Palin herself, or to spoofs of Palin built around her unconventional hobbies and verbal faux pas. See Sanprie (2009). 7. I borrow the term rhetorical ethnography from erin underwood (2007), who developed it as a methodology for her doctoral dissertation on place and space in city squares, to which I allude in this section.

CHAPTER 8

Enhoused Speech The Rhetoric of Foi Territoriality James F. Weiner








Every language is located in a space. Every discourse says something about a space (places or sets of places); and every discourse is emitted from a space. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Introduction: The Double Emplacement of Foi Speech A recent fruitful direction in anthropological linguistics has been the resurrection of interest in language’s deictic features, its constant function of anchoring itself in time and space by way of grammatical markers that “gesture” toward reference points in the world (see, for example, Hanks 1990; Senft 1997). We have ample evidence, especially from Papuan and Austronesian languages, of the high proportion of spatial indices in speech. In this chapter, however, I would like to argue from the opposite direction: that it is also spatial and architectural practices that themselves contour and elicit certain forms of speech; that, rather than language creating space, as it were, space also creates specific forms of language, and by implication, provides certain kinds of subject positions for speaking beings. The intuition of interior New Guinea people such as the Foi is that the capacity for a specific language is linked to one’s place of habitation, and that one

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comes to develop as a speaker of a certain tongue through the same processes that one comes to know a specific territory, its named places, its features, and so forth. A language from this point of view is first and foremost a catalogue of names, and knowledge of certain named places is what certifies one as an inhabitant of a specific place. But there is another dimension to this emplacement of speech, what I call its enhousement. It stands to speech’s emplacement as its microcosmic reiteration. I have previously tried to convey the image of the Foi communal men’s longhouse village as an important built space wherein converges the articulation of Foi personhood, territoriality, and language (see Weiner 1988, 1991). The Foi longhouse is more than simply a residential locus for a group of Foi clans who make use of the same land; insofar as it is the site of men’s public oratorical and rhetorical encounters with each other, it is a focal social venue for the articulation through speech of a number of spatial, territorial, and political relations among men of that village. The architectural configuration of the longhouse, its central corridor along which speaking men stride up and down, its sleeping platforms and fireplaces that line it on either side, forming a gallery of lined men in face-to-face (Foi: erefa’asobo) placement to each other, surely developed as a carefully engineered artifact in this region of Papua New Guinea, one which embodies men’s understandings of the way speech and land place men in specific relations with each other, and make certain exchanges of language inevitable and necessary. The referential embodiment of place names serves to “gather” places of Foi territory into this discursive and conversational space of the longhouse. When men talk about land in the longhouse, there is thus a complex iconic mirroring of speech and place: the simultaneous emplacement of talk, and the enhoused talk of place, which dialectically generates the historical content of the Foi person’s relationship to and experience of lived territoriality. The Foi today number around six thousand, the bulk of whom inhabit about thirty longhouse villages along the banks of the Mubi River and the shores of Lake Kutubu, southwest of Mendi, the capital of the Southern Highlands Province. The Mubi Valley has an average altitude of between seven and eight hundred meters above sea level, in contrast to the twelve to sixteen hundred meter altitudes of their Highlands neighbors directly north of them. Their territory is dominated by mixed lowland pandanus forest into which sago has been introduced in the last few hundred years. The Foi inhabitancy of the Mubi Valley is in all likelihood not long in historical terms, since every Foi local sub-clan in the early 1980s still had a story about its own exogenous origins, either from the Fasu to the southwest, the Nembi and Nipa areas to the north, or the Kewa region to the east. Each Foi longhouse is a collection of sub-clans, and sub-clans of the same name in dif-

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ferent villages accept that they are kin even though they usually cannot trace any physical connection. Each sub-clan has a story of how it arrived at its present location and most of them portray an event such as warfare, sorcery, adultery accusation, or some other conflict that forced the ancestors of the sub-clan to flee and claim sanctuary at another longhouse. Each longhouse is associated with a discrete, non-overlapping territory, though individual sub-clans may themselves have rights to land in a number of different village territories. The exogenous origin of most Foi clans implies that arguments used to support claims to proprietorship over land and resources cannot and do not make reference to idioms of primordial association with territory, or to origin myths linking first ancestors with specific places, as is the case in other parts of interior Papua New Guinea, notably the nearby Huli (see Goldman 1983). The Foi longhouse is therefore a collection of more or less agnatically composed groups with disparate territorial origins. Their relationship to the land to which they make claim is always historical rather than primordial. This has far-reaching implications for the tenor and valuation of everyday Foi sociality. Although the substantive connections between kinsmen are a “given” in the Foi world, the “togetherness” or solidarity of the longhouse community is by no means a taken-for-granted condition of Foi life. It is very much a precarious, achieved, and artificial outcome of day-to-day as well as longer-term political and ecological interaction. Because the Foi population is small in relation to its extensive territory, subsistence and dwelling on the land always involves a suspension of communal life, as men disperse into individual family groups or at most sets of full brothers to make gardens, work sago, and fish and set traps. Often the longhouse is deserted for long stretches of time, during periods when its male members are living near their gardens and sago groves in more distant locales. Because face-to-face, verbal sociality is so tenuous in the dispersed mode of Foi productive life, the longhouse serves as a key space for the (re)patriation of Foi communal discourse and its historicizing effects. I use the term patriation to indicate several linked ideas concerning the relation between land, speech, and persons in Foi: that disputes over land are always resolved through speech in the longhouse; that such resolution is therefore always a matter of reasserting the limits and membership of the longhouse as a community of men; and that rights to land and relationships between men based on territoriality are phrased in the patrifilial idiom that incorporates both actual ties of filiation as well as patronage, which is its substantive content (see Langlas and Weiner 1988; Weiner 1988; Langlas 1974). In this chapter, I compare two instances of public talk centering around proposed changes of longhouse affiliation, separated by a long period of time

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and yet demonstrating the perdurability of Foi rhetorical conventions especially with regard to the language of emplacement. In both cases, identity is publicly asseverated through the Austinian speech act properties of Foi exhortative verbal constructs, although the content and social effect of such usages could be radically opposed, as was the case in these two instances. In my analysis, I also draw attention to the semantics of Foi language about talk itself, as a key to understanding its material qualities.

The Exchange of Land Between Longhouses Because the origins of local clan groups are always historical and contingent as opposed to categorical or primordial, co-residence and the forging of practical relations of patronage, support, and reciprocal aid that are consequent to it are not seen by the Foi to be subordinate to either territoriality or kinship per se. In the first conversation that I will examine, it was acknowledged that an awkward situation existed between the neighboring villages of Herebo and Hegeso: Sohï, a man of the Banimahu’u clan of Hegeso, had committed adultery with a Hegeso woman and had moved to Herebo, the longhouse of his spouses, to avoid further conflict. He laid claim to some extensive grounds near the Hegeso longhouse, including valuable sago groves at the place called Oyane near the Mubi River. Meanwhile, Hamederaro, the only representative of the Kuidobo clan currently residing at Hegeso, was a descendant of a line that owned land in Herebo territory. The solution arrived at was to effect an exchange of land and sago groves between the two men and hence their villages. Technically, of course, it was an exchange between men of Hegeso. But Hamederaro, himself a descendant of immigrants, took the opportunity to divest himself of land that was inconveniently located as far as his present affiliation was concerned (and more to the point, that of his sons). The normative understanding among Foi thus is that men live on their own land and hence control the resources they acquire access to through patrilineal inheritance. But the practical situation is that men leave their own land for a variety of reasons—adultery, sorcery accusations, inability to get along with fathers and brothers, and so forth—and wind up making connections with other men. Through this mechanism of public debate and discussion, a strategic realignment of property was made so as to collapse the two versions of the kin-land system back into some ideal form. As I have suggested, the Foi speeches in this exchange have speech act qualities, made especially noticeable through the use of the exhortative and command verb endings: they formally instaurate changes in land ownership,

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longhouse membership, and group alignment, as in “Don’t call it my land anymore, it’s Hamederaro’s now.” WARIBU: My father went to prison for two years [Boyabi, in Mendi] and I was here alone, I waited for him all that time (441). When he returned, I stayed with him. My father and Utari [of Herebo] swapped land in the meantime. Thus, let Mare Arase [Mark = Magemo] take this land. This land I’ll look after (446). Let Haimabo [eldest son of Hamederaro] take Oyane sago grove. I’ll take his that’s here in Herebo (449). IRITORO: If you are speaking clearly and properly then that will be sufficient (455). It won’t be right if you come complain to us later. … (458) I saw him pack up all his belongings, but if you start walking backwards, ege! If Sohï dies, you will say “I want to go” and the ground will be “clear” [i.e., empty], Hamederaro’s ground there (463). If you tell us this, then this ground you can let it be [i.e., show him]. If you talk like this, your talk will truly be there. Thus you have taken this land and sago, come and take the sago at Nama; come and stay at Yo’oro below (489). You come and stay with your line [i.e., Viya, Hibare, etc.]. If you come and go and you’re hungry, you can cut Viya’s sago (492). If you are like one of my sons, you can be alongside my sons (494). You’ve left Momahu’u and you’ve become Banimahu’u (496). I’ll give you land (497). If you keep abstaining from using Momahu’u land, then soon you will be finished as a Momahu’u you’ll become a Banimahu’u (499). Your base (ga) I will give you.

Sohï is the full brother of a man Fo’awi of Hegeo. Therefore, although his political affiliation was now with the Momahu’u clan of Herebo, Iritoro, a headman and father’s brother son of Fo’awi reminded him that he would still consider Waribu tied to him through agnatic kinship, and hence would allow him access to resources at Banimahu’u places. The fact that Hamederaro originally obtained access to Oyane through Fo’awi, who gave him that land when he arrived at Hegeso, made it even clearer that although this looked like an exchange of land between longhouses, only Hegeso men were really involved, and men of the same local clan, Hegeso Banimahu’u. The language used is strikingly performative. At log 496 (na’a Banimahu’u mosana’agere: you’ve become Banimahu’u), the speaker uses mosana-, the common Foi verb to denote “to transform, to change, to turn into.” But at log 499 (Banimahu’urabo baodehaba’ayo’o: you’ll become a Banimahu’u), he uses baudeha-, a complex term whose metaphoric constitution I am not completely clear about. It is used to mean “to hide,” but in the form baudi- means also “to appear close, as of a distant object.” It seems to suggest things being revealed by being brought

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from a distance at which they were invisible, to a closer venue at which they are visible, which would be an appropriate spatial term to describe the process of transfer of affiliation in this case. IRITORO [continued]: You can sleep/stay/live with my sons; you can stay together with them, come and go with them, cut sago with them, if you keep doing this (503). I’ll call you Ba’a Waribu. You’ve become a son of mine (506).

At log 506 (na’a nomano u’ubi u’ubirabo mogarabubege: you’ve become a son of mine), the Foi verb mogara- has a number of connotations: “to hold next to, to be next to, alongside,” and also “to beach a canoe, to tie up.” It is related to the verb moga’abi-, “to fold, to be folded.” This spatial way of referring to the placing of kinsmen “next to each other” is particularly common to the Foi way of territorializing kin relations. Further, to call someone “son” in this instance is to signal the relationship of patronage per se. Fatherhood is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of this relationship. And as the following lines indicate, the acceptance of patronage implies a sibling, or co-lineage, relationship with all the other patron’s clients, including his “true sons.” The use of the future definite verbal endings here implies an active ordaining and fabricating of an anticipated social future, a command over event. SOHÏ: That’s all; if he goes to stay with you, to go with you, to speak with you; I tried to find a group for him, but now I have found one to join him with (536). He’s finished with Momahu’u, and he’s dived into the water of Banimahu’u, I’m talking like that (539). Now the ground of Hamederaro’s at Herebo is finished (542). My name is finished on the ground here; my name is finished (544).

I have described elsewhere (Weiner 1991) the interchangeability of place names and personal names, and consequently, the identification of men with the places they own. The erasure of one’s name through the discursive medium of enunciation in this way is therefore highly important and momentous in Foi public speech. SOHÏ [continued]: Now we two are finished (562). The ground is finished. Thus, Haimabo, Ta’abo, Hababo [Hamederaro’s sons], you must stay on this land (566). HAMEDERARO: Thus, this is what I’m saying. This land at Herebo you will take, and I’ll take this land. You look after it (021). Subsequently, when Fo’awi died, when he gave this land to me (023). But when he was alive, he told me

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use the land, eat it, but I’m not giving it to you (025). But when he died, he gave me this land. Now I’m saying to you, you can look after the land. This land of mine at Herebo, you can inherit it [he said] (027). … If you die we’ll come and take your body back, as they are saying, but the ground is yours.

At log 025 (noma’amo eresaye hai na’a nibi hai dira earo nomone ne migi’ore ea: But when he was alive, he told me use the land, eat it, but I’m not giving it to you), nibiha- could be better rendered as a single verb, “to habitually and continuously eat,” or “to live, eating,” as a description of how someone occupies land, an inclusive term referring to subsistence on a piece of territory and the use of its resources in so doing. At log 027 (kabe ta’aboba mege dera kuboramo tare gi bara na migibore gi ta’ora tare yo misigaibige disomone: But when he died, he gave me this land. Now I’m saying to you, you can look after the land. This land of mine at Herebo, you can inherit it [he said]), the verb misiga- means “to hold down; to press down; to inherit.” It is semantically very close to the related verb misigaha-, “to step over, to pass over, to cross a boundary.” The latter verb is used to describe the action of a woman stepping over a man’s belongings, thus imperiling them and their owner’s health by exposing her genitals to them. SOHÏ: [condensed]: [says to his son]: If they come and get my body when I die, don’t leave the land. My body they will just bury; a dead body can’t do anything, they’ll just throw my skin away (038). You stay on the land … [repeats instructions to Waribu]: your sago, bamboo, marita, these things are at Herebo, you stay there. … If men need hagenamo or sago or these things, they always come and ask me, I have much land, and you won’t be short of anything. … Now we’ve settled this thing finally (049). ABUYU: True, we’ve settled this. But suppose we take Sohï’s dead body back here when he dies. Waribu, will he follow you here? No, you must show him the boundaries of his land here in Hegeso now, so that if he comes back, he’ll know where his ground is (053) [all the men say: No, he won’t follow Sohï here, his land is at Herebo now] (056) SOHÏ: Once I had a fight with Arase at Herebo; he broke some of my pearl shells during an argument. I was angry and came to stay here with Hamederaro. At this time, Waribu didn’t come with me to Hegeso, he stayed at Herebo (058). … One time Waribu came and decorated with the Hegeso boys when we had our singing at Herebo. He asked me, “Father, how come you’re not singing with the Hegeso men? If you don’t want to stand with them, then I won’t either,” he said (062). … Thus, he won’t come here to stay with you

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now, it’s his decision purely (066). … [Iritoro repeats same points]. … If you Hegesos think that my brother-in-law Yiyimakaba of Herebo will come and stay with me, you’re wrong. I have enough sons of my own to stay with me (074). My ground here at Hegeso, don’t call it my land anymore, it’s Hamederaro’s now. And Hamederaro’s land at Herebo, you must call it “Sohï’s land” now (078). … Waribu you too, you aren’t Momahu’u, you must call yourself “Banimahu’u” (082). HAMEDERARO: But when Sohï dies, suppose all the Banimahu’u’s say, “Hey! Sohï’s ground at Herebo is empty now.” Will they want to take that ground back at that point (101). MEMENE: If Waribu doesn’t stay on his father’s ground after he dies, then we will take the land back [“if he moves to the side, we will take back the land”]. Perhaps one of Hamederaro’s sons will go to Herebo to take that land. And that land at Oyane that Sohï has given Hamederaro, we’ll keep that also (103). HAMEDERARO: If Waribu abandons his ground at Herebo, Viya and Hibare will want their ground back here later. So Sohï, you must now show me the boundaries of my ground at Herebo so that I can be sure of what’s mine (143).

The problem was not with Sohï as such, whom men in both longhouses still considered to be a Hegeso Banimahu’u man. The issue was the status of his son, Waribu, who really had grown up at Herebo and was closely tied to his mother’s clan, Momahu’u, and who did not at that point consider himself a Banimahu’u clan man. The control over the land in question would only become an issue upon Sohï’s death, when Waribu took control of it, and it was the anticipated ambiguity of this succession that exercised men’s discussions that day at Hegeso longhouse. Iritoro, a prominent headman of the area, with a reputation that extended far beyond the Hegeso-Herebo-Barutage neighborhood, interceded constantly during the 1980 exchange of land and speech acts at Hegeso longhouse, guiding the two main characters’ decisions, summing up the anticipated social effects of their announced actions, and interpreting these effects for those assembled listeners, all with the goal of asserting a proprietary interest in his clan land, as well as cementing the patronage of a man in another village. For the Foi, what is critical in conversation is the degree to which men succeed in speaking for others. Headmen are identified by their ability to speak on behalf of others in the context of disputes and to render their positions in their own words: headmen arrogate to themselves the right to interpret the speech of others. It illustrates that in these parts of Papua New Guinea, the emplacement of the “I” is as dependent upon discourse as it is on sheer territorial positioning. Speak-

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ers can assume any number of egocentric positions through talk and can move back and forth among several discursive “I”s (cf., Benveniste 1971). The richly embroidered terminology of “finishing,” “breaking,” in Foi talk, for example, at logs 078–082, centers public discursive attention on the eventmaking qualities of temporal “pooling” of events through talk. These features surface again, but in decidedly different form, in the second example to which I now turn. The previous discussion was an example of what we could call a Foi attempt at Latourian “purification:” they attempted to bring the territorial system into alignment with the historical-social alignment of men. About fifteen years later I recorded another argument in which the opposite was attempted: the social-political alignment of men was deemed to be subordinate to the territorial situating of a headman and his community.

The Exchange of Longhouses Within the Land In the discussion that follows, which I heard in the Hegeso longhouse in 1996, the men who are the current owners of the land upon which the longhouse is sited voiced their desire to abandon the present site and move into the bush land to the south, to build a new longhouse. The new highway, the PoromaKutubu access road constructed by the Chevron Niugini company, runs right through the current longhouse village and people perceive that they are not safe in such a proximate relationship to it. In addition, a long-standing complaint is that the small ridge near the Faya’a River where the current longhouse has been built does not afford much good surrounding land for house sites. Being near the mouth of the Faya’a River, which flows into the Mubi, it is subject to flooding on occasions. These two men became embroiled in a dispute with the affines of a local Hegeso man who are Huli speakers from the Margarima area of the Southern Highlands. One of these men struck both of the local Foi men. They used this incident to precipitate an announcement that they would leave the present longhouse and build a new one on the slopes of Mt. Isa, some few kilometers south of the current longhouse. It should also be noted that at this time, a group of unattached men from the Nembi Plateau area was “camping out” near the Hegeso longhouse, where they would spend most of their time playing cards, and their presence caused uneasiness among residents. The present longhouse is overdue for replacement: the men will have to rebuild it in the near future. The question becomes: do they rebuild it on the current site, as they have already done once, or do they relocate to a different site?

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The concern of the local Hegeso men who were not clan members of the two owners—as in the previous conversation in 1980, the clan in question was Banimahu’u, and the men who were at the center of the dispute were Viya and Hibare, the sons of Iritoro—is that if the two men left the present site, they would then be in a position to force everyone else to vacate the site. Not living there themselves, they would be less likely to condone residence by non-land owners. And so it became in the interest of everyone else to persuade the men not to move to a new site. I focus here on the talk of the headman, Midibaru of the Orodobo clan, who controlled the conversation: ABEABO: Hibare and Viya’s story, yesterday you (pl.) heard it (003). They said, we two alone will go and stay in the bush (004). You can stay here in Hegeso (005). The headman [Midibaru] wants you to make up your mind now—willyou two stay or go? (006) If you two go, we’ll go with you (007). They think that they’ll be killed if they stay here, so they want to go up [to Isa] (008). Now you’ve heard the talk of these two (010). The two think that [these Weyamo] will kill us at some point, so they want to leave and go up [to Isa] (012). Viya and Hibare want to know whether you all will build the new house here (013). Now these two have spoken. I don’t have any land here (014). This ground [Yagenebo] belongs to those two. My land is on top [at Isa] (015). This land, we of Yadobo [Momahu’u Clan] don’t have anything to say about it (016). It’s the affair of those two (018). DAMBO: This is Viya’s idea only (060). All these Weyamo stay in public, visible places (wäga ba) (061). This is your thinking only, not anyone else’s (062). Hibare too has a different thought; Garibi too has another thought (064). Viya’s road is different (ïga me uboba’ae—referring to Viya’s talk) (066). Hibare and Garibi have another road for their talk too, I think, and so I say (066). These two men (Garibi and Hibare) (067).

As I have discussed elsewhere (Weiner n.d.), “talk” is more like an object that passes between people than it is an extrusion of an individual’s subjectivity and thought, though it is also that in a very mechanistic way for the Foi. But the critical point here is how we can see iconism operating at the level of content in speech: just as the men are talking about spaces of habitation and the roads linking them and providing paths for their splitting and divergence, so does talk leave persons’ mouths, make contact with others’ talk, “go inside,” “join with,” “accompany” other talk as if words themselves were like persons traveling along paths that crossed, converged, and parted once again. The task for the Foi, perhaps for all forest dwellers who cannot easily see the end of a path or road, is to find out the final destinations or resting places of both talk and persons in spatial terms.

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MIDIBARU: (points to Viya) This talk of Viya has gone along with that of Garibi and Hibare, but not along with that of Suabe and Dabura (069). DAMBO: (to Viya) If we go with Viya, we (must) all go (070). MIDIBARU: Viya’s talk, we put to the side (gloss: the talk belongs to Garibi and Hibare [now]) (072). IRAWA’ARI KONEMANO: Viya’s talk here, I’ll say again (074). I want to say it in an open place. MIDIBARU: No, not yet. IRAWA’ARI: No, I don’t want to speak in riddles, I want to speak clearly (076). MIDIBARU: Another talk, Viya has already uttered (078). We should compare this with what Garibi and Hibare say (079). Another man can find this other talk and join it (079). Hibare, Garibi, you two (080).

In glossing the log 069, Kora used the tokpisin phrase go insait, “go inside,” but garaha- means “to accompany, to go with, to go together.” It is an extremely central term in the language of Foi kinship: a gara u’ubi is an adopted child; garani- means to feed and nurture on a long-term basis, which is the substantive “content” of Foi kinship (see Weiner 1988; Langlas and Weiner 1988). At log 072 (tare mogarare dibuge), we encounter again the verb mogara- that we examined in the text of the 1980 discussion. Here, it does not “center” the act of fusion or joining, but instead places Viya’s talk “to the side” (as in a canoe being beached on the bank of a river, so that humans can proceed on foot). At log 075–076 (yiamone irisaëmediare dewasomone wägarige dibibisomone: We tree-leaf-talk never-say-as-a-result clear-place-right-here habitually-talk-as-a-result-of), the speakers refer to open and clear talk. As I have described elsewhere (1988, 1991), the Foi house and house-site is a “clearing” for human speech, action, and intention in the fullest sense of the term: it is a space where actions and words of people, and the intentions behind them, are presented in clear view of others, unimpeded by the concealing leaves and branches of uncleared forest. At log 078–079 (dase ga merare Viyamo faserabidobo’oge bore dase ga mera sebe’aneye: talk origin other Viya-[caused to] arrive-[past] but talk origin another let-us-search-for), it becomes evident that, in Foi theory, talk departs and arrives just as people do, and discourses (dobora) and stories (dase) can come to be, or be placed, next to each other in the same way, as co-resident people become kinsmen by being “next to” or “alongside” others. At log 079 (tare memo mogara’abo’e: thus another [talk] let us join), however, the act of

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juxtaposing does not peripheralize talk, as it did at log 072, but focuses on it as the route of men’s intentions, a route made by enchaining separate chunks of talk. MIDIBARU: I’m cutting this talk of yours [i.e., we’ve said it all before, let’s finish it] (141). It’s your affair. If you So’onedobo [and Orodobo] wish to follow me, then it’s your affair (142). Orodobo, the same thing I say to you (144). Whoever is left, you can stay here (145). We’ll have a small house here, and it will be like a few paddles sticking out of the water [gloss: there’ll be only five or six men here] (145). Our Hegeso will be at Faya’aga (146). We want to hear this, so I’m talking (147). We’ll leave Orodobo and So’onedobo and we’ll go (148). Let’s not talk too much about this (149).

Faya’aga is a place name and means the head of the Faya’a Creek—another name for the Mt. Isa region, where the source of the creek is located. The current Hegeso longhouse is located at the place Yagenebo Sabe, near the mouth of the Faya’a, so that it is sometimes called Faya’atage, “the end of the Faya’a.” At log 140–141 (na’a dase ba doba’a hudegerahabubege), hudegeraha- means, most commonly, to break off from a party of people while walking and go off on a different track. Midibaru is saying the same thing with respect to the direction of his own talk. At log 147–148 (haga’are hubomekera ububege: those-two [we’ll] strike-cut-place [and] go; i.e., we’ll split them off from us and go), again, the terminology of severing, splitting, and cutting always accompanies such announcements and decisions concerning social refiguration. MIDIBARU: [speaking for Yadobo/Hibare/Viya]: If “I” go, I can’t pull you other two clans (180). We’ll be hungry up there; I don’t want you to complain to me (181). We don’t want you to blame us for persuading you to come when things get tough later (182). “I” can’t speak for the rest of you; you must decide (183). “I’ll” go with Kuidobo, Aidobo, Wedobo, Yadobo [us], these will go (184). The rest of you stay here (185). This is “my” one talk (186). My other talk, I myself, Midibaru, will have talk with all of you (187).

What Midibaru has done here is to appropriate Viya’s and Hibare’s voices, and then in their names, proceed to negatively anticipate the results of the proposed longhouse fission. This is made possible by the pronomial structure of Foi conversational reference. People are referred to as, for example, kabe ba dera, “that man of which I have just spoken/am speaking.” In this construction, ba means “there” and dera is a shortened participial form of the verb di-, so that both utterance and proxemic location of the invoked interlocutor are combined into a single pronomial referent. Often, other locational terms are added to this basic conversational referent, as in kabe ba ta’abi diri, “the man there downstream of me here of which I am speaking/have spoken,” or kabe ba erefa’asobo diri

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“the man opposite me across from the longhouse corridor there.” Thus, when Midibaru appropriated these men’s speech during this event, everyone knew from which vantage point he was speaking, because the pronouns and their attendant proxemic and spatial referents indicated the point he was occupying through speech (and the speaking man occupying it) from within the spatial disposition of men within the conversation. MEMENE: We’re all wantoks (yango). If any of you want to come with us, that’s all right (190). We have a big ground there (191). We’re too crowded here, but up above, we’ll have room. We’re not angry with each other here (193). We have room to spread out up there (194). MIDIBARU: [repeats Memene’s words] (195). Whoever wants to go [inside with them] can go (196). Garibi and Hibare, do you say “yes” to this [these are Memene”s words] (198). [Midibaru repeats the question] (199). GARIBI: We can do this, but we all have different thoughts about this (202). It won’t be good if there are differing reasons (203). MIDIBARU: Leave it; we’ve said this already (205). That’s the end of this talk (207). Hibare and Viya, you two can’t anger me and go to Isa (209). Abia [ZS], you can’t go, you mustn’t think of me when you go (211). My wife can’t go up there (212) [same thing about Gõtegibu—158–159] (213). So I’ll stay here (215). Hibare and Viya now we’ll reach a decision. This talk of Memene’s, to take some Orodobo people and So’onedobo people with him, Garibi and Viya don’t like this. They want to discard this talk (218). So Viya and Hibare, what is your thought? (221) I’m asking you two (222). Will you go up? (223).

At log 218 (Memenemo daserare kahügaboba’ae: Memene+possessive storyspecific is-being-thrown-away), Midibaru deftly separates Memene’s appeal to men of the two main clans of Hegeso, So’onedobo and Orodobo, so as to isolate the smaller Banimahu’u clan and their small number of close supporters. He did so because he already sensed a lack of consensus between the two Banimahu’u men and their nominal Momahu’u allies, including Suabe (see log 069). The next speaker, Suabe of the Momahu’u clan, aligned with Banimahu’u, shows this strategy is succeeding by speaking “for” Midbaru and thus reiterating his argument in opposition to Viya and Hibare: SUABE: If these two boys go up, should I stay here [he speaks for Midibaru now] or should I go? (230). [Speaking for Midibaru now, and supporting him] If you two go up, I’ll stay here (231). MIDIBARU: Viya’s father said “You three [Viya, Hibare, and Midibaru], you should stay together” (245) when he was alive. … The two won’t leave here.

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We’ve settled that (286). I want to talk about this ridge here (288). Will you two leave this house and go? (289). We’ll make one decision about it, not listen to everyone’s opinion (290). Will you leave me here or go? (291). I’m asking you this way (292). I’m not going to listen to everyone’s story (293). You two want to go up and make a new house up on Isa (295). We can keep talking about this, but this story about the Weyamo, that’s finished (297). We three brothers will straighten this (298). I understand their talk about overcrowding; I’d like to take that talk (302). They want to abandon this ground (303). Abia, suppose you need something, or you get sick, we’ll come and see you (306). [Now he speaks for Viya and Hibare] If we leave here, this whole place will be finished, because we’re the owners of this ground here (310). ABEABO: Don’t hide your thoughts, let us know in public (313).

At log 293, Midibaru uses the now-familiar verb mogara-, “to connect,” when he said mogara’anebiye: “I won’t connect [everyone’s story].” At log 313, Abeabo uses the term mono’oga-, or mono’oboga-, “to swallow,” so that a strict translation of his exhortative usage would be, “don’t swallow your thoughts [reveal them].” MIDIBARU: [Still speaking for Viya and Hibare] These two Weyamo struck us (316). You (Nelson) have brought these Weyamo here. Will you take your Weyamo and leave too? Is this what you two are asking? [Midibaru asks Viya and Hibare] (317). Is this what you all are thinking—I don’t want to presume here, perhaps you have another story (318). … No, I’m talking about the three of us (320). Our talk is finished (322). It’s our story (we three) (320). You want to say to me, “abia, if you are sick, we’ll come and bring firewood to you (328). We’ll come and see you (329). But these Weyamo have struck us, so we’re finished with this Yagenebo place (331). No, abia-o, we’re going; you stay here (334). We’ll leave this ground to you and we’ll ‘go up.’” I’m waiting to hear you say this (335). … I turn to all and help them [i.e., give them pearl shells, help them marry] (560). [To his son Kora] You are a boy, you can’t help these two [in the same way I have] (564). To buy a bride, give compensation, these things, if you, Kora, don’t help them with these things, then later on they will indeed ask you to vacate their ground (567). … I turn to every side and give help (572). Cowry, pearl shells, I’ve helped everyone with these things, I’ve helped these two [Viya and Hibare] also (576). Not just them—anyone, in any clan, I help them. That’s all for Viya’s talk (582). To finish this talk, these two brothers can’t anger me, I too won’t make them angry (587). When I’m sick and you hear about it, you two come and give me firewood; when you hear that I’ve died, you two must come and bury me (590). I’ll stay here. …

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If you two are in need of anything, come to me (594). As long as I am alive, if you need anything, come and see me (597). But for money, don’t come to me [I don’t have much] (601). But if you need shells, come to me (603). When we are young, we have plenty of shells, but when we get old, we don’t have much (605). Before, in the time it takes a woman to process one sago palm [several days], I could get many shells. Now I’m lucky to get three shells in the same time. Now in a month we’re lucky to get one shell (610). … Of that old man, I’m his oldest son [speaking about Viya’s father] (634). [Starts to weep] You two go, I too am about to go [die]. … I’m the first son of Ibutage [Viya’s father, Iritoro: his other name], and I’m going to take this Yagenebo ground (657). You two are behind me, I’ll look after this ground (661), If I go, I’ll abandon you two altogether (664).

At log 560, Midibaru says “tare nanone doregedibure ibusomoneo” (thus Iemphatic while-turning doing-thus). Midibaru here plays a trump card—in effect, he rhetorically asks them, Which headmen will be joining you up at your new longhouse in the bush? Everyone knows the answer has to be “none,” because Midibaru is the only one left. Who will take care of young men’s bridewealth, who will accumulate shells and pigs for wealth? That is the message of Midibaru’s otherwise seeming reassurance to the two Banimahu’u men—“But that’s all right—you can always come back here and I’ll help you.” At log 605–610, Midibaru says “kui garamo mai kui bubiremo mai kui warageremo mai tere ibusomore dibige” (the base of the sago we get, the trunk of the sago we get, the top of the sago we get, just like). As a woman progresses from the base to the top of the sago palm in her processing, so does Midibaru say he used to obtain shells. The Foi commonly make use of these spatial images to express temporal durations (see Weiner 1991). The first point I wish to make about the preceding discussion is an obvious one—that affairs that, strictly speaking, are matters for the local land-owning group are of grave importance to others in the village who are not landowners at all. These men can at any time influence decisions with respect to other clans’ land. The clan may be the land-owning unit as such, but the management, control, and disposal of land is of pressing concern to all village men, any of whom at any given time may be affected by decisions pertaining to land that is not their own. The second point is that along with the interiorization of place names by way of talk in the longhouse I have termed patriation, there is also the reverse movement: the expatriation of a headman’s name onto the land through speech. Midibaru “spoke for” the Banimahu’u men Viya and Hibare not just to obviate their own speech, but also to project his name onto the ground controlled by the two men, most importantly, the site of the current longhouse.

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His reference to Iritoro (Ibutage) the father of Viya and Hibare as his own “father” is a ploy, referring to the ties of patronage that still link Banimahu’u and Orododobo, Midibaru’s clan. It also allowed him to simply arrogate to himself the right to speak for the site of the current longhouse and to refuse to countenance its removal. As I’ve said, Hegeso longhouse is overdue for dismantling and rebuilding, which is characteristically the time to discuss moving to a new site. Despite the risks of living alongside the Poroma-Kutubu access road—the increased numbers of outsiders, at whose hands, it can be seen, Hegeso people have suffered—at the time of this dispute, no one in Hegeso could really contemplate abandoning the longhouse’s current position. Nevertheless, accumulated ecological pressures over a now thirty year period, since its last dismantling and rebuilding—including a dramatic increase in younger men and women seeking access to more distant gardening and sago land of their own—will still have to be balanced against the political and communicative convenience of their current location. It is likely that further events of communal polylogue on this topic will arise before the people of Hegeso make the final decision of where to locate the new longhouse.

Conclusions I have juxtaposed these two conversations to show, among other things, that neither land nor “kinship”—i.e., the personal membership of the village—is seen as “determinative” or “prior” in Foi attempts to repair or alter perceived social instabilities. Indeed, they both develop historically in a quite intimate and mutual relationship, but either can be the ground or grounding condition for the other, as the earlier conversation in particular showed. In either case, the relationship, commutative as it is, is mediated and established through the medium of talk, itself a very specifically spatially positioned activity that implicates speaking beings as located, enhoused, and emplaced. When we talk in such a literal fashion of the emplacement of subject positions, we can also speak analytically and qualitatively of the density and texture of social space in terms of the numbers and positions of speaking beings ranged within it, as well as the architectural and lexico-proxemic positions provided for such points of enunciation in Foi social interaction. This leads to what I can now show to be the third term in the dialectic between speech and place, and that is the status of men engendered (in all senses of the term) by the interplay and exchangeability between them. I have previously noted that inside the Foi longhouse, there are four corner fireplaces which are called a hiforamai-, or literally, “house cut” (see Weiner 1988: 85), and which are reserved for headmen, men of status. These fireplaces

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are located next to the four main support posts of the longhouse, the a boroso ira, so that the men who occupy these fireplaces are sometimes called a borosomena. We could say that these men “contain” the rest of the male population of the longhouse in a number of ways—among others, by being the most common patrons for men’s bridewealth collection, by being the most active and assertive in communal polylogue within the longhouse, and in terms of acting as named and known individuals who “stand for” the longhouse to outsiders—they are, as the Ku Waru people term them, “men in the landscape” (Merlan/Rumsey 1991: 94). Insofar as they also are the source of the performative and interpretational “finalization” of conflicts in the longhouse, their viewpoints and their utterances are a large part of what drives the process of a Foi community’s historicization through speech. In 1994–95, I arrived in Hegeso to find that many old men had died (including Iritoro), and there are now only two men of inter-village repute in Hegeso, the most influential being Midibaru. There are many young men with young families. Moreover, the new generation of Foi leaders are choosing to carve out careers for themselves outside of village and inter-village politics as it once was narrowly conceived, and the techniques of language they are learning are not those of the enhoused, emplaced speech of their fathers, but the technological language of land rights and mineral extraction compensation. This has been a source of anxiety in the villages: Without a minimum number of headmen, with recognized skills in public speaking and rhetorical engagement, there is not the “discursive density” that is necessary to constitute social events and knowledge in satisfactory form. It’s nothing as simple as being unable to achieve a consensus, which is important at some points in village life, but of sensing that the conclusions they reach concerning actions they want to undertake are not decisive. We can understand the “density” to refer simultaneously to the sheer numbers of participants in public discourse, the texture or quality of talk produced in such instances, and the interpretive assessment of the buttressing of action and history by talk and vice versa. The pressure on those remaining elderly headmen, like Midibaru, to assert their power to discursively preempt the speech of others, becomes clearer and more pronounced under such contemporary conditions. I began by talking about the double emplacement of Foi speech—as an activity that is itself enhoused and configured by the spatial properties of the Foi longhouse, and as a means of drawing into this space of enhousement the territorial emplacement of Foi men and their families, by invoking named places as sites of Foi ownership, proprietorship, production, and habitation, and therefore discursively invoking the territorial or geographic dimension of Foi relationality. The concreteness of this relationship is maintained by the enduring iconicity of talk at both its performative and semantic levels. I refer to this iconicity in at least two ways: first, in the sense that talk, words, sto-

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ries, discourses are treated as material items and serve to bind the people they flow between in the same way as does food, procreative substances, and wealth items. Second, because of its irreducibly material qualities, talk occupies space, and makes space by its movement and circulation. Talk then has always been quintessentially local in Foi and continues to be, even in its current confrontation with the global power of foreign-controlled petroleum companies. This localization of talk in its literal sense, the binding of the political to the land by means of the Foi language’s onomastic and deictic features, ensured that the “power of landedness” would underscore the forms of communal subjectivity that the Foi language makes possible. Whether this function will survive the assault on it through the legal technologization of the Foi language in confrontation with State and global capital interests is the topic of my continuing research at Lake Kutubu.

References Benveniste, Émile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Goldman, Laurence. 1983. Talk Never Dies: The Language of Huli Disputes. London: Tavistock. Hanks, William F. 1990. Referential Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. Language and Communicative Practices. Boulder: Westview Press. Keane, Webb. 1997. Signs of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Langlas, Charles. 1974. “Foi Land Use, Prestige Economics and Residence: a Processual Analysis.” PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i (Honolulu). Langlas, Charles, and James F. Weiner. 1988. “Big-Men, Population Growth, and Longhouse Fission among the Foi, 1965–79.” In Mountain Papuans, ed. James F. Weiner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Merlan, Francesca, and Alan Rumsey. 1991. Ku Waru: Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1979. “The Metaphorical process as Cognition, Imagination and Feeling.” In On Metaphor, ed. S. Sacks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Senft, Gunther, ed. 1997. Referring to Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sherzer, Joel. 1983. Kuna Ways of Speaking. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wagner, Roy. 1986a. Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986b. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weiner, J. 1988. The Heart of the Pearl Shell. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1991. The Empty Place. Indiana University Press. ———. N.d. “The Road of Talk at Lake Kutubu: The Spatial Dimensions of Public Speech in Contemporary Papua New Guinea.” Unpublished manuscript.

CHAPTER 9

Transcultural Rhetoric and Cyberspace Filipp Sapienza








In , the most popular play on Broadway was Israel Zangwill’s “The Melting Pot.” This play portrayed America as a place where different ethnicities are mixed into one kind of “American person,” and when one considers the time period, one understands the source of the play’s popularity. Between the late 1800s and early 1900s, America welcomed more immigrants to its shores than at any other period in its history. As the nation incorporated the new groups, artists and writers responded in ways to help the nation address the changing character and identity of the country. To the present day, the melting pot metaphor continues to be used in political rhetoric as a key symbol of nationalist identity. Today, however, a new kind of melting pot is emerging, one that is challenging traditional conceptualizations. It is a melting pot not composed of different immigrant groups who constitute a single national ideal so much as various groups who maintain globally intersecting transnational identities (Shome/Hegde 2002). Researchers have identified several forces motivating the rise in transnational identities, including changes in global economics and capital redistribution, political and racial problems in sites of relocation, global electronic media, imagined futures of a better life elsewhere, improvement in transport, and other forms of nation-state and post-national politics (Schiller et al. 1996). The rise of transnationalism has led some theorists to speak of “transnational communities” (Hannerz 1996: 89). This term does not only refer to the recon-

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figuration of multinational corporate interests but rather may also refer to a new kind of politically significant grassroots periphery-to-center community or network of communities that run counter to traditional ideas of organic relationships among populations and territories (1996: 20). Transnational communities are produced from the unmooring or “dislocation” of cultural habits from specific traditions and localities and a reconfiguration of cultural meaning along global lines (Shome/Hegde 2002: 173). Transnational communities may provide opportunities to acquire identities that are not confined to any single culture. This happens because transnational people are reluctant to cut off connections to prior habitations. Rather, they “construct and reconstitute [a] simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society” and over time begin to see themselves as part of many cultures (Schiller et al. 1996: 48). Cultural specificity, to be sure, is important to transnationals, but the activity of cultural definition is intertwined with the construction of linkages to multiple local cultures rather than primarily originating from one source. One venue through which the active constitution of transnational identity can be observed is through global electronic media. On the World Wide Web, one finds this phenomenon in the form of various ethnicity-oriented websites. This chapter provides an analysis of this phenomenon as it comes to exist through a Russian-American immigrant website. Immigrant communities have historically served as centers for new Russian-speaking arrivals to find solidarity, sociality, and support (Laitin 2004; Markowitz 1995). As indicated earlier, the immigrant groups have historically played a central thematic role in ideological and artistic discourse about the melting pot, and by extension, the nature of national identity. While Russian-American immigrant communities on the ground have different levels of commitments to transnational activity (see Morawska 2004), the immigrant websites studied here not only support immigrants but also focus on transnational connections. They challenge notions of insider-outsider identities, for not only are immigrant websites centers of assistance, amelioration into, and sometimes resistance to new host cultures, they are also communal gathering places that encourage non-immigrants to convene with immigrants and engage in cultural dialogue and debate (Sapienza 2001). They complicate the already elusive definitions used to characterize various groups such as “diaspora,” “transnationals,” and the like (von Amersfoort/Dommernik 2002: 58). To further muddy the waters, the Russian diaspora online is sometimes seen as a transnational network of websites (which might include immigrant sites as well as those hosted within the country) used by Russian and non-Russian speakers worldwide. Hence, the idea of a “Russian Internet” is itself a transnational concept that resists any attempt at closure or definition yet may stand in for something like the Russian society online (Schmidt et al. 2006 120).

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From time to time, the mix of different sites and participants with distinct backgrounds leads members to create new kinds of communal identities that transcend the constraints of specific localities and expectations of national origins. The nature of these formations share three broad characteristics identified in the literature as constitutive of transnational communities: (1) the ongoing contingency of community dynamics (that is, the community may lack certain measures of stability over time that might be more present in face-to-face groups); (2) the reflexive nature of communal relations produced by voluntary, conscious and fluid commitments of its members rather than through fixed criteria such as birth, class, or place of origin; and (3) the privileging of symbolic rather than material resources to sustain the communal affiliations (Kennedy/Roudometof 2002). The transcendent rhetorically constituted identity of these formations—created through what I call “transcultural rhetoric”—does not deny an “original culture” but rather finds and creates persuasive means that facilitate a consciousness carefully balanced between national and global cultural values (Olaniran 2001). More importantly, it becomes possible for both immigrants and non-immigrants to share in a newly created transcultural ethos. This ethos is not independent but, rather, is multi-ethnically interdependent and thus requires new modes of sociation and conceptualization (Kim 2001: 4). Online, the immigrant website is no longer solely a refuge for immigrants but acquires an additional mission centered on creating a transnational community with members having diverse political commitments and ethnicities. The origins of my application of transculture to the realm of rhetoric online emerge from the work of Mikhail Epstein (1995, 1999), who develops a model that emphasizes the inherent insufficiency of cultural autonomy apart from direct and ongoing engagement with different people. Prophetic, utopian, and post-modern, Epstein’s model shares similarities and differences with competing models (see Welsch 1999) and makes assumptions about the state of global culture that are sometimes called into question (Lie 1997). A complete analysis of the diverse strands of transcultural theory and attendant controversies ranges beyond the focus of this chapter. Instead, the chapter draws primarily from one paradigm as an explanatory model for the rhetorical culture that emerges online. In part, the rationale for the choice of Epstein’s model arises out of the Russian cultural context of the paradigm’s incubation: the rapid changes in the post-Soviet states of the CIS that led to an intellectual interest in post-modern conceptualizations of culture and identity particularly with respect to soul searching about Russia’s new role in the world. A similar type of concern dominates the thematics of Virtual Russia. As such, the theoretical paradigm is well suited to explaining the nature of Russian-American interaction in cyberspace.

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After explaining the nature of transculture, I turn to an analysis of this rhetorical practice as it exists on Russian-American virtual communities on the Web. My usage of the term rhetoric is a bit broader than the traditional orientation toward persuasion. In the United States, rhetoric is often used interchangeably with communication and discourse in both persuasive and analytic contexts. Moreover, rhetorical studies have broadened to include analyses of images, sound, and other non-textual forms of communication. This analysis thus includes examination of graphical and linking features. I conclude by suggesting how this analysis may help inspire programmatic steps toward the creation of transcultural rhetorical communities and what such communities mean for the way people conceptualize community, national culture, and personal identity.

Mikhail Epstein’s Theory of Transculture Russian culturologist Mikhail Epstein develops his theory of transculture out of the Russian culturological tradition in the former Soviet Union that arose as a counterpart to Western cultural studies. This tradition defines transculture as the transcending of specific practices, beliefs, and ideologies in order to appreciate the “otherness” of one’s own inherent identity (Epstein/Berry 1999: 21ff.). Transculture is a way of placing “culture” itself into what Viktor Shklovskii referred to as a perpetual state of ostranennie or estrangement (1983: 9–26). A basic premise of transcultural theory is that culture, as a uniquely human creation, ceases to function in isolation. Culture therefore is like a biologically evolving organism that relies on perpetual interaction and exchange through the membranes separating it from the outside environment. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin figures prominently in transcultural theory. Bakhtin once wrote, “the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity” (1986: 2). Epstein argues that as nature imposes physical limits, culture imposes symbolic limits. It is, he writes, “the essential element and merit of culture to free humans from the dictates of nature, its physical restrictions and necessities; but it is the capacity of transculture to free humans from the determination of culture itself ” (1995: 25). Transculture does not constitute a “betrayal” of identity, because “the limits of any culture are too narrow for the full range of human potentials.” For Epstein, in its purest form, “transculture does not mean adding yet another culture to the existing array; it is rather a special mode of existence spanning cultural boundaries” (1995: 83) A transcultural community is one whose participants are “creatively engaged” with one another in ways that

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perpetually diversify their own unique cultural experiences. People who are transcultural see themselves simultaneously as part of several cultures. They may have self-referential, self-reflexive, and malleable identities rather than identities shaped primarily by habitat and custom. For Epstein, transculture is multiculturalism without the narcissism inherent in identity politics, for “multiculturalism proceeds from the assumption that every ethnic, sexual, or class is important and perfect in itself, while transculture proceeds from the assumption that every particular culture is incomplete and requires interaction with other cultures” (1995: 303). Here, it may be necessary to point out that multiculturalism does not only refer to greater cultural awareness, but is also often understood through the framework of a certain kind of class and ethnic politics. Transculture in Epstein’s sense is driven more by philosophy than politics. Although transculture may have political implications (as will be discussed later in this chapter), the starting points of multiculturalism and transculture differ. In multiculturalism, the initial move may be a political act as a response to injustice, or the recognition that one’s political future depends on actively seeking justice to rectify past disenfranchisement based on racial or class differences (Hasian/Nakamaya 1998). The starting point of transculture is an inner recognition that one’s own identity is insufficiently complete without the other. Rather than political justice, transculture seeks a means of better integrating one’s identity with that of another’s. One cannot fully be Russian without knowing what it is to be American, seeing without knowing what it is to be blind, tall without knowing what it is to be short. By extension, then, one cannot be fully human without the possibilities of experiencing another identity integrally. Evidence of a transcultural spirit was present at the first conference on rhetoric culture in Mainz in 2002, when some of the participants spoke about culture and rhetoric in ways that evoked ideas similar to transculture. James Fernandez connected the gathering of scholars from around the globe to current processes of building a new transcultural European identity when he stated: At this time of building a European identity in place of the ethnocentrisms that have been such a torment to Old Europe over so many centuries we cannot forget E.R Curtius’s hope, an exercise of both the Intellectual and the Moral Imagination I think we might say, to revitalize the cultural unity of Europe, lost in the Reformation, through the heritage of Greco Latin rhetoric. A major European Conference on Rhetoric Culture may itself be understood as making a rhetorical statement about the cultural identity of Europe. Indeed, as communication or mis-communication is the nexus of all concord or discord and resultant cooperation and collaboration (or their refusal) in the construction and maintenance of culture the understanding of the shaping of

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that communication whether for persuasive or actionable ends, in the light of the ancient European interest in that understanding, might well, indeed, be a basis, in this time of a new but uncertain common currency (in the various senses of the word to include the currencies of talk and writing as well as of monetary exchange), by which to recapture a more coherent European past and make it a palpable present.

Transculture may offer a theoretical grounding from which one might develop certain discourses to work through ethnocentrisms and other aspects of human consciousness that prohibit engaged cultural identification and interaction with others who come from different backgrounds. Transculture is “a model of inherently multicultural individuals capable of crossing the borders of collective cultural identities … [it] is not an escape into another world but an othering of this world” (Epstein/Berry 2000: 25). The nature of transcultural difference, Epstein writes, is not indifference, but rather to be different “from one’s own self, to outgrow one’s identity as a natural being and to become an integral personality that can include the qualities and possibilities of other people’s experience” (1995: 305f.). Immigrant communities may be some of the most fertile regions for transcultural creativities. James Clifford suggests that the gathering places of immigrants are cultural lenses, rhetorically mingling, refracting, scattering multiple streams of culture where “a truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions becomes imaginable, [where] local authenticities meet and merge in transient urban and suburban settings” (1988: 4). For Russian-Americans, the Web is coming to serve much the same purpose. Entering the phrase “Russia abroad” on any popular search engine produces hundreds of sites ranging from personal home pages, virtual communities, online social networking, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and computer resources. Many Russian-related web sites are initiated by the Russian diaspora in the West. However, people of non-Russian ethnicity are also collaborating with the Russian groups to build these virtual communities. Russian sites link engineering students in Israel with Moscow schoolchildren with American businesspeople in Tennessee. As such, “Virtual Russians” are multiply threaded in old and new, global and local places, temporalities, and commitments across a mediated space. The diverse people involved in electronic transnationalism seek opportunities to form bonds that transgress the limits of habitation and nationality that have historically dominated the shaping of cultural identity.

Method of Analysis From 1996 to 2000, I studied, observed, and joined two Russian-American virtual communities: Little Russia in San Antonio, Texas (LR—at russia.uthscsa

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.edu, now moved to russia-in-us.com) and Virtual Russia (VR—at virtualrussia .net). The group analyzed comprised Russians in diaspora, Russians in Russia, and non-Russians. During the time of my analysis a loosely cohesive group formed out of the frequent visitation and participation of several members to a discussion board connected to LR. This group solidified its communal identification by creating a photo gallery of members that they called “Little Russians.” Due to a disagreement with the LR webmaster, several members split off to form VR in mid 1998. I myself followed this split-off group onto the new site. The method of analysis followed a participant-observation form often deployed in the study of online communities. Cultural analysis has often taken place “at a distance” with the understanding that the observer/researcher should not interfere with the observed group. Online, however, the line between observer/researcher and participant is blurred. Due to its limited textual dynamics, one usually cannot obtain a credible researcher ethos online without participating in some form. The “cues reduced”–character of online interaction limits the communicative channels between researcher and group. Hence, “research positionality”—or the relationship the researcher has within the group studied—becomes a rhetorical as much as existential act since both researcher and participant must interact through a relatively limited stream of symbols. Other factors (the fact that many online group members have levels of education and linguistic competence similar to that of the researcher; the recent imperative within rhetorical studies to connect research to praxis) further complicate the line between researcher and participant. In my case, the dynamics fragmented my researcher ethos into three distinct yet intersecting roles: that of technologist, that of a culturally competent community member, and that of a scholar-expert on virtual communities. The detailed nature of these roles vis-à-vis my research positionality range beyond the topic here but are given extensive treatment elsewhere (see Sapienza 2007).

Discursive Aspects: McDonalds, Friendship, and Free Speech During the early time period of my study, I found many of the discussions to be culturally narcissistic in the sense that people were quick to claim national and cultural privilege, pride, and turf. This character was most apparent in the flame wars between Russians and Americans debating which culture was superior. One example of this kind of discourse centered on the controversial metaphor of McDonald’s. American participants upheld the popularity of the restaurants in Russia as a sign of the victory of capitalism over communism. For the Russians on the website, the restaurant chain may be popular in Russia but

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it nonetheless symbolized American hegemony and global imperialism (note: spellings of original posts preserved): Russian culture is unique and it should stay this way. America had already made all the western Europe eat McDonalds. This should not happen in Russia. (Russia.uthscsa.edu, accessed 12 January 1999) Yes, they really do make a cheap food. However, this food is a total boolshit. I’ve been living in the US almost 2 years, and I can tell you, you don’t have to be rich to avoid McDonalds. I cook for myself, in a way I did in Russia, and enjoy it. By the way, the best McDonald in the world is the one in Moscow. You are wrong saying that McDonald can’t change your culture. Hell, it can! Just look at Russian children grown up in the US. They are no Russians. They are Americans. This happens because they are introdused to American culture, of wich Mc Donald is a great part. (Russia.uthscsa.edu, accessed 12 January 1999)

The claims regarding McDonald’s contextualized early debates about cultural superiority and reflected the tensions among different identity claims. McDonald’s itself is an ambivalent cultural symbol. It represents global corporate hegemony, but it is also admired worldwide as a sign of the American success story by virtue of its business values of fast, efficient, and high quality production, values that are admired in countries with poor infrastructure, unstable governments, and inefficient services. Participants equated “McDonald’s” (a multinational corporation) with “America” (the nation-state), an association indexing the consciousness of participants that nation-state identities may be subsumed under global transnational institutions. It is also unlikely to be contested by the company given the growing influence on nation-state politics that multinational corporations exert and are often all too proud to boast of. From the perspective of McDonald’s, being “American” means promoting the admired business values, but being global means power (see Barber 1996). The discussion could have continued with the refiguration of McDonald’s as a positive force in the world, or further contestation as to its legitimacy as the global heir of American identity, or perhaps some recollection of the advertising campaigns of McDonald’s and other multinational chains that eagerly promote the multinationality of their customers. Instead, an alternative image was raised to compete with it, Russian friendship: “If I love Petersburg, and S—— loves LA, what can be done about that?! So, folks, please stop. Let’s all be friends. Rebyata, davaite zhit’ druzhno! [Folks, lets live as friends!]” (Russia. uthscsa.edu, accessed 12 January 1999). The phrase originates from a popular Soviet cartoon called Kot Leopold (Leopold the Cat) about a good-natured cat that was mischievously attacked by two mice. After each attack, the cat would say to the mice, “Rebyata, davayte zhit’ druzhno.” The way that the phrase is used here raises a Russian cultural metaphor to be on par with an Ameri-

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can one: a folk metaphor competing with a corporate one. By extension, and given their different economic histories, where American equals (and often triumphs) big business, Russia equals (and often triumphs) a kind of folk communality (the original “Russian idea” put forth by philosophers, intellectuals, and politicians—see for example Berdyaev/Berdiaev 1979). At another level, the invocation of the cartoon calls into question the legitimacy of nationalistic discourse itself as a shaper of communal identity online. In effect the speaker says, “we aren’t getting anywhere with nationalistic chauvinism comparing the pluses and minuses of particular countries, so we need a new rhetoric if we are to continue.” The argument thus constitutes a “conceptual opposition between globalization and the nation-state that obscures the foundational role played by the nation-state in the institutionalization of key political, economic, and cultural features” of identity (Kennedy/Roudometof 2002: 5). Over time, as discussion evolved, McDonald’s seemed to create division and conflict among group members, whereas Kot Leopold seemed to build bridges and foster better communality. For American participants, the cultural metaphor of McDonald’s was failing to build bridges. For the Russians, Kot Leopold helped move the discussions from topicality about culture to a meta-discussion about the nature of intercultural community itself. Participants struggled with how best to discuss controversial topics yet maintain something of a communal identity in the spirit of Kot Leopold. Prominent articulations emerged in the form of “Russian friendship,” which group members characterized as a relationship in which people can say harsh things to one another yet still remain close: “A successful friendship means that you can share a couple bottles of wine, argue yourself blue in the face, maybe even beat the shit out of each other, and the next day, you shake hands and thank each other for the wonderful time” (russia.virtualcomm.com, accessed 23 March 1999). Over time, American participants began to comprehend and adopt this metaphor as well: Do you remember the time I went ballistic about arguing and asked everyone to grow up? I got several responses that simply (and kindly) said “that’s the way we Russians are. We love to argue and when it is over, we are still friends.” (russia.virtualcomm.com, accessed 23 March 1999) It seems over a period we all knew what we wanted and didn’t want in the way of posts, and in the expressing of this, something was accomplished. I know I gained a bunch of respect for some on this board I was indifferent to before. … We learned a lot about each other in a short time and discovered most of us to be good people. (russia.uthscsa.edu, accessed 12 December 1999)

With this model of friendship as the new guiding spirit of the group, members began developing other website resources to solidify a common identity.

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Unfortunately, this model was not shared by the webmasters of LR. A censorship controversy soon led several members to leave LR and form VR. The members alleged that the LR webmasters had censored and banished members due to speech they deemed to be offensive. This controversy sensitized the VR people to the issue of free speech, which they identified as an American value, and this value along with Russian friendship were combined and integrated into a larger transcultural consciousness of the group. The combined ideals gave Virtual Russia a common enemy (Little Russia) around which to construct and promote its more integrative identity. By contrast, LR was equated with Soviet style censorship, setting up the following semiotic matrix depicting who and what was “in” and who and what was “out” of the group: IN

OUT

American Value

Free Speech

McDonald’s

Russian Value

Friendship

Censorship

Figure 9.1. In and Out

Members perpetuated these divisions by linking free speech and friendship as something uniquely present on VR: We all, for the most part, share the fact that we were banned from Little Russia for our honesty and politically incorrect point of views. All attempts to get [the LR webmaster] to understand he was being a heavy-handed tyrant, failed. He was invited to be part of the Russian ring of web pages. He refused. Anytime someone mentioned Virtual Russia on his board, the post was deleted and the poster banned. It became very clear to most of us that he was on a personal vendetta against most of us and the place we created as a substitute, where free expression and the continuation of a nice community could flourish. (russia.virtualcomm.com, accessed 23 March 1999)

The discourse reflects the process of Virtual Russians beginning to “imagine” a community into being based on certain rhetorical principles believed to be cherished and practiced there in a much superior fashion. As such, it becomes possible to conceptualize it in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” that comes into being through the aid of communication media (1991: 6f.). Yet this group transcends the modernist conception of the national imagined community because the new community is the product of rhetorical experiences felt online rather than in geographic settings (such as would be the case in cities or immigrant enclaves). The community here has a transnational rather than national character.

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As the group continued to build Virtual Russia, there were efforts to invest finances and time to develop content for the site as well as purchase equipment. Some of these efforts were for charitable causes. For example, members collaborated to send money to Russian orphanages, encourage one another’s diet and health programs, congratulate one another on birthdays (the webmaster even set up a calendar to assist in this task), and assist newcomers to America. Over time, a more unified transcultural identity emphasizing a shared Russian commonality coupled with American libertarian features began to be articulated. For example, in the following post, one member expresses the conditions under which someone becomes an “honorary Russian”: “Yes, times are hard there [in Russia], but as those of you on this board who are Russian know, hard times bring out both the best and the worst in people. We all help each other, and S——, you are an honorary Russian for one reason: you are giving part of your money to friends in Russia. I am willing to bet every single person on this board who has someone in Russia is sending money, food, clothes, anything to help. That is what I mean about the good side of people” (russia .virtualcomm.com, accessed 23 March 1999). Another post took the idea of the melting pot and transformed it into terms more descriptive of the group on Virtual Russia: Many of my joyful moments in the last years have been found in what is being created on this board. It is not always obvious, especially to those who first arrive and wonder what the hell they have stumbled upon. Here on this board is the true vision of America as a place where we both keep our own culture, and at the same time give up the closed world it formerly existed in. The idea of the melting pot has always, in my mind, been misinterpreted. It is not a place where you melt and lose who you are, but a place where you contribute your own flavor to the stew, and therefore create something much more wonderful. (russia.virtualcomm.com, accessed 7 June 1999)

Individual statements with group members confirmed the association they made between certain Russian themes and a kind of global transcultural community. The following email was written to me by a non-Russian member who had never visited the country or met a Russian until participation in this community: We are divided by many miles, but know that one day we will meet on some coming day and meet not as strangers, nor as Russians and Americans, not even as friends, but as a family. Virtual Russia, to me, means it is not Russia in the physical sense, but Russia living in each individual, the core of Russia, the soul of Russia. To some it is to draw closer, to some it is to expand further. For some it is to remember, for some it is to learn. VR helps Russians stay grounded in both worlds and take the best features of both worlds to

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form what is important to them and their families. It is a common ground, a shared experience, a special connection few others will ever know. (JP, personal communication, 13 January 2000)

The contentious nature of early discourse and banishment were difficult experiences for group members, but they proved crucially formative over time for the group as it selected elements of both cultures to define itself. The triumph of Russian friendship (something like organic communality) over McDonalds (business, power) and later coupling friendship with the American notion of “free speech” were rhetorical experiences from board participation (as opposed to experiences from real life) and led to a transcultural identity that was palatable to both Russian and American participants. The flexible adoption of rhetorical values here poses some complicating questions for the influence of national political cultures on transnational settings. Note that the forum presented one of the earliest venues for sustained Russian-American communication, opening a mere four years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Due to politics and geography many Americans and Russians had not really communicated with one another, and impressions of the other group remained negative due to the political rivalry between the USA and former Soviet Union. The uncensored opening rounds of discourse were unsurprisingly hostile and informed by broad general stereotypes of the other group. As such, the beginnings of the discourse marked a turning point in the political history between Russia and America, one that ultimately raised questions about the legitimacy of national origin as a guarantor of cultural identity. Do extant metaphors (McDonald’s, business, free speech, friendship) no longer exclude one another? Is a nationalistic rhetoric extolling the benefits of one culture at the expense of another on the way out? Here we should note that theorists increasingly link the history of nationalism not with settlement but with migration (Goldberg 2002: 14). Modern technologies and techniques were used by nations not so much for the purposes of delineating friend from foe but, rather, to weed out and/or patriate migrants and strangers (Anderson 1991; Bauman 1999). As such, participants enter into the virtual Russian space carrying a rhetorical legacy informed by the logic of nation-state migration politics and at one level use the modern technology of the Internet to continue the project of nation building in cyberspace. At another level, however, the rhetoric of nationalism fails not so much when it is narcissistic (indeed, the narcissistic or perhaps better-termed “parochial” character of certain rhetorical values may account for why participants are willing to adopt them) but, rather, when it perpetuates outdated conceptions of identity that limit the participants’ conception of themselves and vision for the group and undermines the project of building virtual community.

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Non-Discursive Transcultural Elements Although the discussion boards on the virtual community permitted one to glance the discursive nature of how members struggled to articulate a transcultural sensibility, the non-discursive features of web communication also serve this purpose. Indeed, through the opportunities for interactivity and linking, the medium of the web itself may be specially situated for the development of certain kinds of transcultural rhetorical practices. One way these transcultural rhetorics emerged on LR and VR was through the integration of graphics. Unlike many printed documents in which images are supplementary to text, graphics of web pages serve a usability function as rhetorical anchor points reminding and often guiding (through the use of image-maps) participants to different portions of the site. The imagery on LR and VR serve this similar purpose. The visual layout of LR features a picture of a small wooden church set against a vast landscape of rolling hills and sky (see russia-in-us.com). This picture evokes a nationalistic Russian artistic style called pejzazh (scenery or landscape), part of a late nineteenth–century movement marked by a revival of indigenous Russian culture through folk art (Kirichenko/Anikst 1991: 91ff.). Of note is that the picture has remained constant for many years, yet the actual website changed its affiliation from “Little Russia in San Antonio, Texas” to “Russia-in-us,” a moniker that echoes some of the statements articulated by members that were cited earlier. Moreover, it has maintained its longtime motto to “form a loose association of volunteers promoting Russian culture throughout the world.” These features seem to suggest the gradual transformation in rhetorical purpose for the site and in some sense, a kind of calibration of Russian identity and meaning toward a global context. This kind of thrust of specific Russian cultural meaning into a global sphere was witnessed through the articulations about friendship on the discussion board. The VR site contains imagery that is more modern in its Russian content and articulates a very direct transnational mission. An analysis of the sites’ cultural archives provides further clues about their global purpose. It is widely believed that exposing one group to the cultural treasures of another enhances mutuality and understanding. This is the ostensible basis for the many “cultural exchange” programs popular in universities worldwide as well as the numerous political summits by national leaders. It is also a rhetorical function of the LR and VR cultural resources. Both sites contain photo galleries of attractions, museums, and buildings of architectural significance found in the former Soviet Union. Each photo is accompanied by English text to provide a brief historical context. At the time of this study, English was the most widely used language on the Internet (Paolillo 1996), and so the usage here is pragmatically chosen to maximize exposure to Russian

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culture. As one of the earlier discussion posts indicated, the use of English is one non-Russian aspect that facilitates a transcultural rhetoric by permitting interaction with many others. LR also contains a collection of jokes (translated into English) with brief explanations of the historical context of each. This page includes political jokes about Russian military heroes, family jokes, and jokes about America. An important transculturating dimension of Russian-American web pages takes place through hypertextual linking. Transcultural rhetoric draws attention to what Mikhail Epstein alludes to as zones of “interference,” the borderlands of engagement where the otherness of one’s identity is thrown into sharpest relief (Epstein/Berry 2000: 16). The rhetorical “commonplaces” or “topoi” of transcultural rhetoric index the interstitial modes of knowledge. As Jay David Bolter has indicated, such topoi may be located in the links of hypertext (1993: 102). We can claim linking as perhaps the most potentially transculturating activity of web page communication. A website is always in process, unfinished (what Bakhtin referred to as “nezavershen”), in a perpetual state of “becoming” (“stanovlenie”) (1984: 365). Put simply, the web ceases to exist without links. And yet, each link “threatens” to diversify the content of a specific cultural identity. The web makes explicit Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, noted by many commentators, that all language, all meaning, is inherently relational and participatory (Makhlin 1997). It is via the process of interchange, in what Renate Lachmann terms “the zone of interference between texts” that transcultural rhetoric and new knowledge are present (Lachmann 1997: 69). Typically, the links of Russian immigrant web pages lead to sites created by users of varying ethnicities and nationalities. An example of this exists on the Little Russia Literature page (see russia-in-us.com). Russians place an extremely high value on their literary heritage (see Raeff 1990; Hosking 1983): arguably it is their most valued artistic resource. And yet all of the content and links on the literature page go to sites created elsewhere, many housed on American servers and developed by Americans with scholarly or other expertise in Russia. Similarly, the links from VR are created by a network of webmasters worldwide, not just in Russia itself or of Russian heritage. This suggests that concerning the web, the boundaries of authoritative Russian literary texts can be interpenetrated by people of varying cultural heritages. It is Russia through the eyes of others. What hypertext theorist Donna Haraway calls “outsider identity” (1991: 174) comprises an important part of transcultural rhetoric. Finally, an important transcultural dimension of the Russian-American site content emerged through the solidification of communal memberships through the creation of a photo gallery of members called “The Duma.” Each entry included a brief biography of the person, online contact information, favorite foods, artists, books, and colors, and a response to the questions, “What

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would you do if you had three wishes?” and “Name a person you would like to be stranded on a desert island with.” This Duma indicates a membership that in some sense stands apart from both Russia and America yet integrates aspects of both cultures. The choice to label the collection of photos a “Duma” (a term that refers to the Russian parliament) is displaced, put in a strange environment, and rather than hybridized, recontextualized in a global manner. The word means something different here, but its primary force relies on the distinctiveness of Russian from non-Russian modes of commonality. In this respect, it is not coincidental that as a ruling body in Soviet and Russian governments, the Duma here is primarily comprised of people responsible for maintaining the virtual community itself. Thus, the Duma photo gallery is defined best as “like a Duma,” untranslatable in a certain respect yet constitutive of a unique global identity. The Duma brings to mind the possibility of a transcultural ethos or transcultural rhetorical agent. Recall that the concept of “ethos” is a conscious construction of credibility through speech choices. Ethos is traditionally constructed through the situatedness of speech in place (Giddens 1991: 16; Alcorn 1994). Thus, the credible speaker is a single person in a single body, in which people can rely on some consistency in the words coming out of the mouth of the person for some time. Online, however, identity play and “as-if ” constructions are sometimes more credible than reliance on traditional markers of cultural membership. For example, where the Duma asks for “Current location” (as opposed to permanent location), several people respond, “In front of my computer,” “Chilliwack, CA, originally from Glasgow, Scotland,” “moving to San Diego,” and “Germany, but not for long.” Members also frequently choose nicknames for their on-board identities such as “kisa,” “mishka,” and “nurey.” Here, it might be worthwhile to consider these as-if constructions of identity as similar to Ulf Hannerz’s “esthetic cosmopolitan.” Rather than seek to “master” a given culture through linguistic, rhetorical, and gestural competence, the esthetic cosmopolitan views other cultures “as experiences in their own right, that is, regardless of any readily identifiable concrete use value. … The esthetic attitude entails being positively oriented toward such experiences, but also striving toward achieving some degree of competence in handling other cultures as ongoing arrangements of life. One masters them to a degree, and at the same time surrenders to them, trying for the moment to abide by their rules. And at the same time this kind of competence entails a particular kind of mastery of one’s own culture, as one shows that one can establish distance to it” (Hannerz 1996: 61). For Hannerz, this new form of cosmopolitanism is a short step away from what he calls “creative confrontation” with other cultures. For the esthetic cosmopolitan, there is a paradoxical interplay between mastery and surrender, for

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while the cosmopolitan may artistically pick and choose from other cultures that which suits his or her identity, in the long term, his or her own identity is likely to be the product of “the way a cosmopolitan constructs his [sic] own unique personal perspective out of an idiosyncratic collection of experiences” (1996: 104). In a similar way, the opportunities afforded for as-if identities through electronic media may be seen as special forms of transcultural ethos that free participants from heritable limits of culture.

Conclusion: Rhetorical Figures of Transculture The instances of transcultural rhetoric on the virtual Russian community can be distilled as follows:


























McDonald’s as a global rhetorical figure becomes the locus for articulating a transcultural conception of what it means to be an American or Russian; Kot Leopold, via the rhetoric of the line “rebyata, davayte zhit’ druzhno,” comes to inspire and characterize a type of transcultural relationship for the group; censorship and freedom of speech acquire new transcultural significance as they originate from Russian and American cultures but are reworked to articulate a rhetorical identity and purpose for the group; the figure of “soul” to characterize the cultural experience of participating in the group evokes an entity that is, mysteriously, both transcendent and embedded in a person; the use of imagery evoking old Russian culture is recycled for the purpose of creating a new technological Russian identity that is globally transcultural; the use of links to different sites broadens the connectivity of the site and heightens its rhetorical inter-dependent-ness with other sites, thus heightening awareness of community, an activity that is both rhetorical and transcultural; the use of “duma” reflects a figure purloined from its original Russian context and here given a new meaning that provides rhetorical possibilities for the purpose of developing a transcultural politics; the virtual cosmopolitanism of Duma members using as-if constructions is enacted rhetorically via electronic text and allows them to construct transcultural identities and relationships based on them; the way that transcultural rhetoric complicates the legitimacy of nation-state politics as a guarantor of culture and cultural rhetoric.

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The global spread of new electronic media offers highly interactive and flexible possibilities for the rhetorical construction of community. The nature of these groups constitute what Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe have called a “global literacy” that does not omit localized identity boundaries but rather, integrates them in complex “post-modern” ways. These forms deny “outdated geopolitical landscapes yet maintain a value on cultural specificity by arguing against a romanticized version of global oneness [and yet provide] for a continuing redefinition of ethnicity and difference in hybrid and multiple forms” (2000: 10). Hawisher and Selfe characterize these multiple forms with terms such as messy, complex, and contradictory, the products of “dynamic tension between localness and globalness” (2000: 277). Transcultural communication arises out of these tensions and thus challenges narratives of “difference mapped by clear cut and confident distinctions” (Shome and Hegde 2002: 176), stimulating the development of new kinds of communication communities that may pose challenges to the political conceptions and arrangements of modernity. Over time, the normalization of “estrangement” inherent in transcultural identity takes hold as members poach elements of nationality suited to the formation of their virtual identity, only to undermine the role of nationstate politics as the ultimate arbiter of cultural and ethnic definition and differentiation—indeed, perhaps, diminishing the power of national civic rhetoric to deliberate and adjudicate matters of social policy. As we enter the age of social networking and Second Life communities, transcultural affiliations (such as Facebook fan-sites centered around a particular nation) are likely to raise new forms of transcultural rhetoric.

References Alcorn, Marshall W. 1994. “Self-Structure as a Rhetorical Device: Modern Ethos and the Divisiveness of Self.” In Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory, eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: SMU Press. Allen, Christina L. 1996. “Virtual Identities: The Social Construction of Cybered Selves (Internet, Electronic Mail, Multiple User Dimension, Object Oriented, Hypercontextuality, Multiple Personae).” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: A Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. V.W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baranov, Vadim. 1995. “The Poverty of the World and the Fullness of Text: Notes on Space and Text.” In Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, eds. Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Barber, Benjamin. 1996. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine. Bauman, Zygmut. 1990. “Modernity and Ambivalence.” In Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage. Berdyaev, Nicolas, and Nikolai Berdiaev. 1979. The Russian Idea. Westport: Greenwood Press. Bolter, Jay David. 1993. “Hypertext and the Rhetorical Canons.” In Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication, ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Clifford, James. 1988. “Identity in Mashpee.” In The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doheney-Farina, Stephen. 1996. The Wired Neighborhood. New Haven: Yale University Press. Epstein, Mikhail. 1995. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Epstein, Mikhail, and Ellen Berry. 2000. Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. California: Stanford University Press. Goldberg, David. 2002. The Racial State. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: People. Places. Culture. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Symians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hasian, Marouf A., and Thomas K. Nakayama. 1998. “The Fictions of Racialized Identities.” In Judgement Call: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy, eds. John Sloop and James McDaniel. Boulder: Westview. Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe. 2000. Global Literacies and the World-Wide Web. London: Routledge. Hosking, Geoffrey. 1985. The First Socialist Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kennedy, Paul, and Victor Roudometof. 2002. Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures. London: Routledge. Kim, Min-Sun. 2001. “Perspectives on Human Communication: Implications for Transculture Theory.” In Transcultural Realities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Relations, eds. Virginia Milhouse, Molefi K. Asante, and Peter O. Nwosu. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kirichenko, Evgenia, and Mikhail Anikst. 1991. The Russian Style. Britain: Lawrence King. Lachmann, Renate. 1997. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laitin, David D. 2004. “The De-cosmopolitanization of the Russian Diaspora: A View from Brooklyn in the ‘Far Abroad.’” Diaspora 13 (1): 5–35. Lie, R. 1997. “What’s New About Globalization? Linking the Global from Within the Local.” In Media and Politics in Transition: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization, eds. Jan Servaes and Rico Lie. Louvain: Acco. Makhlin, Vitalii. 1997. “Bakhtin’s Programme and the Architectonics of Being-as-Event in the Twentieth Century.” In Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, eds. Carol Adlam, Rachel Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin and Alastair Renfrew. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.

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Markowitz, Fran. 1995. “Criss-Crossing Identities: The Russian-Jewish Diaspora and the Jewish Diaspora in Russia.” Diaspora 4 (2): 201–10. Morawska, Ewa. 2004. “Exploring Diversity in Immigrant Assimilation and Transnationalism: Poles and Russian Jews in Philadelphia.” International Migration Review 38 (4): 1372–410. Murphy, John. 2001. “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Rhetorical Tradition.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (3): 259–77. Nakamura, Lisa: 1995. “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.” Works and Days: Essays in the Socio-Historical Dimensions of Literature and the Arts 13 (1–2): 181–93. Olaniran, Bolanle A. 2001 “The Effects of Computer-Mediated Communication on Transculturalism.” In Transcultural Realities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Relations, eds. Virginia Milhouse, Molefi K. Asante, and Peter O. Nwosu. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Paolillo, John C. 1996. “Language Choice on soc.culture.punjab.” Electronic Journal of Communication 6: 3. http://www.cios.org/www/ejcmain.htm, accessed 12 February 1997. Raeff, Mark. 1990. Russia Abroad. New York: Oxford University Press. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/index.html, accessed 5 December 2001. Sapienza, Filipp 2007. “Ethos and Research Positionality in Studies of Virtual Communities.” In Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, eds. Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss. Creeskill: Hampton Press. ———. 2001. “Nurturing Translocal Communication : Russian Immigrants on the World Wide Web.” Technical Communication 48 (4): 435–48. Schiller, Nina Glick, et.al. 1995. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly 68: 48–63. Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper. Schmidt, Henrike, Katy Teubener, and Nils Zurawski. 2006, “Virtual (Re)Unification? Diasporic Cultures on the Russian Internet.” In Control + Shift: Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet, eds. Henrike Schmidt, Katy Teubener and Natalja Konradova. http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/russ-cyb/library/texts/en/control_shift/control_ shift.htm, accessed 3 May 2006. Shklovskii, Viktor. 1983. “Iskusstvo kak priem.” O Teorii Prozy. Moskow: Sovetskii Pisatel’. Shome, Raka, and Radha Hedge. 2002. “Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 19 (2): 172–89. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster. Von Amersfoort, Hans, and Jeroen Dommernik. 2002. “Emergent Diaspora or Immigrant Communities? Turkish Immigrants in the Netherlands.” In Communities across Borders: New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures, eds. Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof. London: Routledge. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” In City. Nation. World.: Spaces of Culture, eds. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 10

Jesuit Rhetorics Translation Versus Conversion in Early-Modern Goa Alexander Henn








Introduction In this chapter, I shall analyze a body of literature produced by Jesuit missionaries who arrived in Goa, India, in the sixteenth century as part of the early Portuguese expansion to the East. Determined to convert the gentios1 to Christianity, the missionary pioneers’ first and greatest challenge was to make the Christian message comprehensible to the local population. Apart from the use of images, music, theater, and rituals, therefore, all of which played a significant role in contemporary proselytizing strategies, great attention was paid to the ability to communicate with Indian people in their own languages. Thus, the Jesuits made efforts not only to learn, but also to study Indian languages systematically and to teach them to newly arriving missionaries and to seminarists trained in India. For this purpose, a considerable number of vocabularies and grammars of Indian languages—Tamil, Malayālam, Marāt ≥hi, Konækan≥i, and Gujarāti—were produced, which today are considered to represent the start of European scholarship in Indian linguistics. Moreover, the missionary scholars began to compose educative Christian texts in the Indian vernaculars, in particular biblical stories, hagiographies, catechisms, and confession manuals that were widely disseminated by the help of newly imported printing presses. Allowing for the fact that these translations required more than merely linguistic skills, the missionary scholars also took a distinct interest in Hindu religious literature—especially the popular epics of the Mahābhārata

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and Rāmāyan≥a, the ancient collections of myths known as purān≥as, and the devotional literature of Hindu bhakti religiosity—which they used as literary models for the composition of the Christian texts. In sum, the Jesuits thus developed an impressive linguistic and rhetoric skill in their compositions of Indian-language Christian texts in which they did not just translate Christian meanings to Indian idioms but also made use of mimetic methods and consciously borrowed from poetic models and aesthetic styles of the local Hindu religious literature that was familiar to actual or potential converts. However, although praised to this day by Indologists for its great philological proficiency with regard to Indian languages and Hindu literature, the linguistic and literary activities of the Jesuits were accompanied by awkward circumstances. In the same period of the second half of the sixteenth century, when Jesuits like Thomas Stephens (1549–1619) prepared for the publication of Indian-language adaptations of the Bible that were to become widely popular under titles such as Kristapurān≥a, the combined forces of the Portuguese crown and the Catholic Church were launching a violent campaign of destruction against Hindu culture. To this campaign fell victim not only most Hindu idols and temples but also—and incredibly, though clearly documented—most Hindu books and manuscripts in the region. And only a few years after the third edition of Stephens’s Kristapurān≥a had been published, the Portuguese viceroy in Goa ordered that all Indian subjects had to learn Portuguese within three years and that henceforth all official communications, Christian instruction, and church sermons had to be in Portuguese only. The problem I would like to focus on in this chapter therefore refers to the seemingly paradoxical attitude of the Christian missionary approach in early modern Goa. In particular I will attempt to explore how in the same period when the missionaries learned the Indian languages and studied the religious literature of the Hindus in order to disseminate the Christian message through local idioms, precisely those religious Hindu books and manuscripts—whose literary style was copied in the composition of Indian-language Christian texts—became subject to ruthless destruction. And why did the language politics become a matter of debate that resulted, only little later, in the crude attempt to suppress the use of local vernaculars for any official purpose? Moreover, what did the cross-cultural linguistics and rhetoric applied in the Indian-language missionary approach actually mean to the missionaries? Was it indeed considered to facilitate the translation of Christian meanings into Indian idioms, as we obviously tend to assume today? Or were there other principles and aims at stake than the strictly hermeneutic? How was translation and conversion related to each other? How did hermeneutics and violence interact in the proselytizing literary process?

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Kristapurn≥a: Assimilation The efforts undertaken by the Jesuit missionaries to learn, study, and teach Indian languages were truly remarkable. There is some indication that the earliest initiatives in this direction were taken by Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the co-founder of the Jesuit order who became known for taking the European counter-reformation fervor to the Asian mission field by, among other things, pointing out in his letters to Rome that the slow conversion rate achieved by the Franciscans on the Malabar coast could be speeded up by talking to the Parava fishing communities there in their own languages (Stephen 2001: 38). In Goa, Xavier’s suggestions were bearing results in a series of local Concílios held in 1567, 1575, 1585, 1592, and 1606, all of which strongly recommended that parish priests should learn the local languages. In fact, in 1609 it was even ordered that no priest could be appointed vicar of a parish unless he was conversant with the local language, and vicars already appointed who were ignorant of local languages were to lose their positions unless they learnt a language within six months (Cunha Rivara 1992: 226f.). In the middle of the sixteenth century, the linguistic project of Christian proselytization in India was fostered by the import of the latest technical novelty of the time, the printing press with movable letters (Priolkar 1958).2 What followed was a period of little more than a century of industrious printing on the Malabar coast and in Goa, dedicated overwhelmingly to the publication of texts of a religious nature: catechisms, Bible adaptations, hagiographies, manuals for confession, and religious treatises of various sorts.3 In Goa, the first Indian-language book was the adaptation of the Bible that was to become famous under the title Kristapurān≥a4 and was composed by the English Jesuit Thomas Stephens in what he variously refers to as lingua Bramana or Bramana Marastta, and which scholars today identify as “Old Marāth≥ i” (Skyhawk 1999: 363). Printed for the first time in 1619, Stephens’s masterwork, which itself was re-edited twice in the seventeenth century (in 1649 and 16545) initiated a brief but prolific era of Marāt ≥hi- and Konækan≥ī-language productions of Christian texts in Goa, to which Stephens added another theological work printed in 1622, Doutrina Christá em Lingua Bramana-Canarim, [i.e. Konækan≥ī], Ordenada á Manera de Dialogo, Para Ensinar os Meninos [Organized in the Form of Dialogue for the Education of Children].6 For the entire period from 1616 to 1674, when the last printing in early modern Goa is documented, Anant Priolkar (1967: 17f.) counts eleven major Indian-language Christian texts. Two features of the seventeenth-century Marāt ≥hi- and Konækan≥ī-language Christian texts are especially noteworthy. First, they were all printed in Roman script only, although some of their authors, notably Stephens, tried hard to have their compositions printed in Devanāgarī. The reasons why the Jesuit

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authorities, in particular Alessandro Valignano, refused to have texts printed in Devanāgarī are unclear and seem to have ranged from technical difficulties in casting the characters to the changed attitude of Valignano after his visit to Japan, since he now considered Indians racially and intellectually “inferior” and thus unworthy of having Christian literature in their own script (Dias 1995). The other important fact is that many of the early modern Marāt ≥hiand Konækan≥ī-language Christian texts, unlike those in Tamil, were not written in prose but in verse, that is, in the quatrain verses locally known as ovī. It was Stephens who, by introducing this new practice, not only considerably embellished the literary style of the Indian-language Christian texts, but also rendered them closer to the apprehension and appreciation of their Indian readership. The ovī meter and the poetic composition and style adapted by the Christian purān≥a literature were, and to this day still are, the classical characteristics of the devotional lyrics (abhanægas, kīrtanas, āratīs) of the Hindu bhakti literature of Mahārāshtr≥ a and the Konækan≥. Literally translated as “participation” or “devotion,” bhakti characterizes a piety that favors an intimate relationship with a personalized god and, to some extent, constitutes a demotic counter-current to certain aspects of Brahmanical theology and temple religiosity. In linguistic and literary terms, it helped to boost the regional languages (Prākr≥it) against the claimed exclusivity of Sanskrit in religious writings by stimulating the production of a rich body of mystico-devotional literature in the various regional vernaculars. In Mahārāshtr≥ a, the bhakti literature has especially deep historical roots going back to the famous poet-saint Jñāneśvara (ca. 1271–1296) and, in Stephens’s times, it experienced a second heyday in the work of another poet-saint, Ekanātha (1533–1609). It is therefore highly likely that Stephens’s Kristapurān≥a was inspired by and modeled after Ekanātha’s work. According to Hugh van Skyhawk (1999: 366), In keeping with the devotional nature of Bhakti, Stephens rendered the contents of the Old Testament in brief… and expanded upon the life of Christ in the New Testament. … Instead of using the religious terminology of Latin or Portuguese, he chose or coined corresponding terms from Sanskrit and the regional language Marāt≥hi. Similarly, the metre and the rhetorical devices used in the Kristapurān≥a derive from Bhakti literature in Old Marāth≥ i. Only with regard to its specifically Christian contents and intention does the Purānæa from the quill of the first Englishman in Goa differ from the works of Ekanātha or Śrī Sant Jñāneśvar … , not, however, in its literary form and composition.

Stephens’s way of telling the story of Christ was well received by the local population, as is documented in a Jesuit letter sent to Italy in 1621 and quoted by

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Bandelu (cited in Skyhawk 1999: 363), the editor of a modern version of the Kristapurān≥a published in Pune in 1956: “This work is so delightful that not only do the Christians derive much profit from it, but even the non-Christians speak of it with pride. On Sundays and feast-days this book, or Puranna, as it is called, is being read in the churches with as much profit as it gets applause.” It is therefore little wonder that Stephen’s masterwork not only attracted imitators, but also generated a Christian purān≥a style that developed widely into various genres of Christian devotional and folk literature in Goa and beyond, that is, among Goan diaspora groups in Karnataka, South Kanara, and Mahārāsht ≥ra.7 Among his imitators, two deserve special mention. One is Étienne de la Croix (1579–1643), the French Jesuit who preceded Stephens as the rector of the Jesuit college in Rachol, Goa. He composed a Discourso Sobre a Vida do Apostolo Sam Pedro, also written in the Marāt ≥hi ovī verse form, which was printed in 1643 and became known as the “St. Peter Puranna” (Tulpule 1979: 382; Priolkar 1967: 18). His other imitator is Antonio de Saldanha (died 1663), a Portuguese Jesuit who published a hagiography of his namesake St. Antonio of Padua, a first version of which was printed in Goa in 1655. This version was composed in prose, na lingua de terra corrente, “in the common local language,” that is, Konækan≥i (Cunha Rivara 1858: 127), and was re-edited in 1963 under the title Sancto Antonichi Acharya, or “The Miracles of St. Antony” (Saldanha 1963). A second version, whose first publication is also dated to some time in the seventeenth century, was composed in the Marāth≥ i ovī verse form and was re-edited in 1956 under the title Sancto Antonichi Jivitvakatha, “The Life of St. Antony.” The style of this work, which also became known as the “St. Antony Puranna,” shows great similarities with the work of the Marāth≥ i poet Mahipati (1637–1712) according to its modern editor Saldanha (1963: xvi). Finally, Cunha Rivara (1858: 131f.) reprinted extensive abridgements of a Christian Puranna, an example of which was found in the Biblioteca Publica of Nova Goa, although without a title page, so that its author remains unknown. Cunha Rivara classifies this work as having been printed in the “Jesuit office” in Goa around the “middle of the seventeenth century.” Of all the works written in the Christian purān≥a style, modern scholars agree without exception that Stephens’s Kristapurān≥a shows not only the greatest literary skill and poetic art, but also the greatest sophistication in mediating between Hindu and Christian thought. I have already quoted Skyhawk who also praises Stephen’s “ability to express Christian beliefs and teachings in the images of folk Hinduism” (1999: 365), even, as he notes elsewhere, at the cost of “contribut[ing] unwillingly to a syncretism of Hinduism and Christianity, that was to continue in Goa up to the present day” (1999: 368). Skyhawk is joined by Shankar Tulpule (cited in Falcao 2003: vii), for whom “Fr. Stephens has succeeded in the difficult task of presenting Christ in such an oriental garb

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as appeals in the Hindu mind without abandoning the principles of the Christian religion. The Purān≥a is like a sanctuary in the centre of which is the image of Christ while the structure and decoration that surrounds it are in genuine Hindu style.” The most thorough appraisal of Stephens’s work is that recently presented by Nelson Falcao (2003), a Salesian scholar, for whom Stephens anticipated the art of “inculturation” (Falcao 2003: passim), that is, the creative embedding of the Christian message into local cultural idioms, first discussed in these terms by the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965 (Beall 1996). The Kristapurān≥a has a clear Christian outline that is structured in two parts. The first part, or Pailo Purān≥a, tells of the major events described in the Old Testament: the creation of the world, the nature of the angels, and the fall of Lucifer, the creation of Adam and Eve, their original sin and banishment from paradise, the unfaithful life of people, and the great flood, the preservation of Noah, and the call of Abraham. The second part, or Dusoro Purān≥a, tells of the coming of Christ the Redeemer, his mother Mary and his birth, John the Baptist, the life and teaching of Christ, his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven. By presenting these biblical themes in the poetic meter and style of the bhakti literature, and putting the Old Testament themes into about four thousand and the New Testament themes into about seven thousand ovī or quatrains, Stephens interpreted the Christian story to his Indian readers and listeners. More than that, however, he also used and generated Marāth≥ i and Sanskrit terms to name the persons and describe the course of the Christian epic: Deva Bapā, “God Father,” Vaikunth≥ arāyā, “Lord of Heaven,” Paramesvara, “Lord God,” Sarvācyā Racan≥ārā, “Maker of All,” has sent Devasuta, “His son,” Jeju Kristarājā, “Jesus the King,” Visvatāraku, “Saviour of the World,” Jñānadipu Paripurn≥a, “Lamp of Perfect Knowledge,” and Dharmaiticā Denakarū, “Sun of Righteousness,” to Earth in order to defeat Mārūvā, Devacāra, Ajagara, Satan, the evil ghost, and serpent, and papa, “sin,” in order to cut off dośa banda, “the bonds of guilt,” eradicate āvidyā, “ignorance,” and bring diptī, “light,” jñāna, “knowledge,” and muktī, “liberation,” to the people of the world, thus reconciling svarga and sam≥ sāra, “Heaven” and “Earth” (Falcao 2003: 25–34).8 In a similarly creative and poetic way, Stephens also told the story of Bhāgyevanæta Mari, the “Blessed Mary.” For her description and praise he used more than eighty different names and titles, such as Devamātā, “Mother of God,” Vaikunth≥ apatice Māte Anækuvāri, “Virgin Mother of the Lord of Heaven,” Pavitra Mātā, “Holy Mother,” Sadevi Anækuvāri, “Blessed Virgin,” Devadutānæci Rān≥ī, “Queen of the Angels,” Canædrabimæ ba Sunædari, “Beautiful as the Moon,” Surya Nirmala≥ , “Spotless as the Sun,” Sadaivi Bhāgeveti Striyāmajī, “Most Blessed Among Women,” Svargīci Rān≥ī, “Queen of Heaven,” and Kr≥pe Karūn≥eci, “Fountain of Grace and Compassion” (Falcao 2003: 36). More important still, Stephens succeeded in creating a kind of Hindu equivalent for

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every step and principle in the Christian doctrine. He thus made it entirely clear to his Indian readers that Krista Tāraka, “Christ the Savior,” had come to redeem the people of the world from their ādipurūśace karma, “Original Sin,” and papa karma, “Karma of Evil,” by aganape samapila, “sacrificing himself,” so that everybody who underwent jñāna-snāna, “baptism” (literally “bathing in knowledge”), followed śāstra-rītu pāla≥ vyā, the “laws and rites of the scripture,” and participated in Kiristace bhakti-pujā, “Christian worship,” that is, the Eucharist, and bhakti-satva, “devotion of goodness,” could indeed acquire muktī, “redemption,” and reach moks≥a, “salvation” (Falcao 2003: 197f).9

Ritos Malebaricos: Disputes Who, then, would not agree with Falcao (2003: 170) that “Stephens succeeds in building bridges between Christian and Hindu worlds of consciousness”—except that there was this irritating hostility to the Hindu culture surrounding the early modern Jesuit activities in Goa. Starting with a letter written in 1548 by João de Albuquerque, the first Bishop of Goa, in which the writer “gives … account of his conscientious efforts to collect Hindu literature with the object of destroying it” (Priolkar 1967: 76), the apparently dissonant hermeneutic and violent attitude of Catholic officials toward the literature and culture of the Hindus can be traced throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Typical evidence of this is provided by the various Concílios de Goa, in particular the first, third, and fifth ones, held in 1567, 1575, and 1606 respectively, all of which recommended, if not ordered, that the Christian doctrine should be propagated and taught to the Indian people nas linguas das terras, “in the local languages” (Cunha Rivara 1992: 10, 139, 149, 227). At the same time, however, they requested the viceroy of Goa to order the complete prohibition of all religious expressions, festivities, and practices of what is called the idolatria or falsa religião of the “infidels,” as well as the destruction of all their temples, idols, and books (1992: 13f., 211, 214, 260). Although we do not know how the friar-scholars were involved in these hostilities, there is no doubt that they were intensely occupied with precisely those Hindu books and manuscripts that were confiscated and destroyed en masse. A list of references taken from the work of Étienne de la Croix shows that the French Jesuit used at least twenty-six Hindu purān≥as in the composition of his “St. Peter Purān≥a.” The number of Hindu texts available to Stephens and used by him was certainly no smaller than this. In fact, some Indologists argue that it must have been much larger and had included even grantha texts, that is, Old Tamil transliterations of Sanskrit texts (Falcao 2003: 12). There is also little doubt about the fact that the Jesuit scholars were quite industrious

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in copying Hindu texts and transliterating them into Roman script, a series of such transliterations recently having been discovered in the public library of Braga in Portugal (Rodrigues 1990). Given the early modern Portuguese-Christian attitude toward Hindu culture, which was thus a period of an extremely ambivalent interplay between translation, appropriation, and destruction, the first half of the seventeenth century was apparently favorable to the more positive, that is, assimilative modes of this interaction. Not only did the publication and popularity of the Christian purān≥a literature flourish in this period in Goa, but there are also indications that a number of Hindu performative genres, rituals, and ceremonies were adopted in or, perhaps, converted to Catholic ceremonies at that time.10 Moreover, the assimilative trend in Goa was paralleled by similar developments in the Mission of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, central to which was the Italian Jesuit Roberto Nobili (1577–1659), who, after arriving in Madurai in 1606, became known and even notorious for his radical interpretation of a Jesuit method of conversion known as accommodatio (Županov 2001:5). Unlike contemporary practice, Nobili did not combine conversion with the enforcement of a radical social and cultural transformation of the converts’ lives. Instead, he allowed them to continue a number of practices that were of crucial social significance to Brahmans in particular, such as wearing yajnopavita, the sacred thread, kudumi, the Brahman hair tuft, and tilakam, sandal-paste signs on the forehead, all of which were considered emblems indicating the high-caste status of their bearers, as well as maintaining a vegetarian diet, performing prescribed baths, and other Hindu cultural routines. Moreover, Nobili learned Sanskrit and Tamil and studied Hindu theology to such an extent that he could regularly engage in scholarly debates with local Hindu priests and, more extraordinary still, he adopted the lifestyle of a Tamil Brahmin by wearing the Brahman thread and habit and keeping a vegetarian diet. He also adopted the Hindu title of sannyāsin, which indicated to him the local equivalent of “scholarly monk.” Quite obviously, therefore, Nobili’s ways of mediating Christianity and Indian culture in Madurai were similar to what Thomas Stephens did in the same period in Goa, although the former seemed to have concentrated more on performative and the latter more on textual forms of expression.11 However, as Ines Županov (2001) has brilliantly documented, Nobili’s methods were anything but uncontested in his time, and they triggered a century-long dispute over what were called the “Malabar rites,” fought out in numerous letters circulating between Madurai, Goa, and Rome, as well as in a series of meetings and investigations that took place in these cities. The basic lines of this dispute were drawn up between Nobili and his supporters, who argued that the practices at issue were merely social in nature and had noth-

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ing to do with religious values and beliefs, while his opponents held that they were indeed of a religious nature and therefore could not be separated from the “superstitions” and “false beliefs” of the gentios. Brought up at a meeting of the Archbishop of Goa, the Bishop of Cranganore, and “the best theologians” present in Goa in 1619, the dispute was first officially decided in favor of Nobili. Following this vote, in his Apostolic Letter of 1623, Pope Gregory XV (1621–23) declared that “until the Holy See provides otherwise,” Christian converts would be allowed to wear the Brahman thread, hair tuft, and sandalpaste marks, and also to perform regular baths, provided these were not part of any “pagan ritual” (Nazareth 1894: 131; Brucker 1910). Gregory’s bull, however, was rescinded, and the period favorable for assimilative approaches to the Hindu-Christian encounter was therefore cut short. Thus, the church chronicler Nazareth notes that the archbishop of Goa had not only argued in the meeting of 1619 “that in no way should one allow them [the Christian converts] to wear that [Brahman] thread, no matter whether it is or is not a sign of nobility” (Nazareth 1894: 120, my translation), he also made it clear, in reaction to Gregory’s bull of 1623, that “[he] favours the adversaries of the Jesuits” (1894: 133). In 1684, therefore, Stephens’s efforts on behalf of the production of Indian-language Christian texts were officially ended by the notorious decree of Viceroy Francisco de Tavora (1646–1710), who ordered that henceforth all official communication was to be in Portuguese, and that Goans were to abandon their mother tongue and had to learn Portuguese instead (Priolkar 1967: 64). Obviously the second part of this order was not enforceable, and Konækan≥ī remained the mother tongue of the majority of Goans, despite its lasting neglect in the colonial politics of education, while Portuguese only gradually became the language of high-caste Catholics. Nevertheless, the Tavora decree indicated a clear antiassimilative turn in colonial cultural, educative, and proselytizing policies, which was followed by the aggravated persecution and eradication of what were called “pagan reminiscences.” An especially radical landmark for this was eventually created by the apostolic legate, Charles Thomas Maillard de Tournon (1668–1710), who visited the Christian missions in India and China in the early years of the eighteenth century, and in 1704 issued a decree which drastically ended all assimilative experiments, denouncing in particular the toleration of the ritos Malebaricos and a leitura dos livros fabulosos dos gentios, “the reading of the fictitious books of the heathens” (Nazareth 1894: 200; Brucker 1910). In Goa, the change of policies led, among other things, to the banning of all folk literature and music using the popular ovī or quatrain meter (Nazareth 1894: 243) and, as a consequence, ultimately the banning of the Christian purān≥a literature as well (Priolkar 1967: 89).

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Translation Versus Conversion: Hermeneutics and Violence Against this background, I would now like to return to the question posed initially. How is it possible that the extraordinary hermeneutic efforts that the Jesuits developed in early modern Goa coexisted with the violent suppression and destruction of the Indian languages and Hindu literature? It is worth noting that this question did not arise for the philologists (van Skyhawk 1999; Tulpule 1979; Falcao 2003) who recently analyzed the literary activities of the Jesuits, praising them, as we could see, exclusively for their hermeneutic achievements. However, my concern here is not so much that the modern scholars largely ignored the atrocities that were committed against Indian languages and Hindu literature while the Jesuits were engaged in their cross-cultural literary activities. The critical point is rather that they indiscriminately qualify the activities of the Jesuits as translations in the modern sense of the term thereby dismissing any relation of their work to the violence directed against the Hindu culture. In other words, in this final section I want to problematize the assumption that the Jesuit activities can be reduced to merely hermeneutic processes, in particular the translation of Christian meanings to Indian idioms. I will suggest two alternative perspectives on this problem. A first perspective recalls the work of Michel Foucault on early modern Europe. As Foucault (1966) cogently elaborated, early modernity was the period of a crucial transformation in the realm of language and signification. While to pre-modern understanding “the words and the things” were related by distinct similarities—embodied by contiguities in space and agreement of bodily forms, as well as conceptual analogies and sympathetic affinities—modern understanding considered the semiotic copula to be constituted by arbitrary signs, relating the signifier and the signified through culturally constructed symbols. The diverse positions encountered in this transformation, I argue, characterize different fractions among the Jesuits working in India and, to some extent, explain the irritating inconsistencies in their attitude toward Hindu culture and literature. Modern avant-gardists like Nobili and Stephens, it can be argued, considered their work in the model of a translation that communicates meaning, the Christian message for that matter, between intelligible systems of signification, the different European and Indian languages for that matter, respectively symbols and literary styles relating to Christian and Hindu modes of expression. The pre-modern thinkers among the missionaries and church authorities, however, perceived things quite differently. To them, the texts and literary styles at stake were not so much constituted of symbols that represented, but icons that embodied what they expressed and, therefore, were not (easily) transferable between different languages and symbolic systems, let alone theological idioms.12 Arguably, therefore, the paradoxical coexistence of hermeneu-

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tic understanding and iconoclastic violence in the Jesuit activities in India can be interpreted as a dispute between two epistemological paradigms: a modern paradigm that conceptualizes the composition of the Indian-language Christian texts as a matter of intelligibility, viz. the translation of Christian meanings into Hindu idioms, and a pre-modern paradigm to which the matter is about embodiment, viz. the competing bodily appropriation of the religious field by Hindu or Christian icons. Being in line with the iconoclastic violence directed against Hindu idols, temples, and shrines, the pre-modern destruction of Hindu texts therefore illustrates that the Portuguese-Catholic conquest of India was not only a war against Hindu monuments but also against Hindu signs.13 There are indications, however, that things may have been more complex even. Interestingly, the history of the early modern Christian encounter with Hindu culture can be interpreted not only by contrasting the models of translation and iconoclasm, but also allows for a second perspective that refers to a peculiar notion of similarity between the two traditions. An initial spur toward this notion was provided by Vasco da Gama (1469–1524), who, after his historic landfall in South India in 1498, is reported to have acted for a considerable time in the belief that the Hindu temples he visited on the Malabar coast were actually Christian churches, and the idols of Hindu deities actually images of the Christian Trinity and Catholic saints (Subrahmanyam 1997: 131). Very obviously, da Gama’s perception was not an ephemeral mistake—although he denounced the Hindu idols as images of the devil after discovering his error—but the result of a distinct mytho-epistemological idea about a certain genealogical relation between the Christians and the gentios, as Hindus, in distinction to other so-called pagans such as mouros or judeos were contemporarily called. In mythological terms, this idea had its probably most significant source in the biblical reference to the “gentiles” as a population originating from the sons of Noah, which, in later periods, widely scattered over the world “divided by countries, languages, tribes, and nations” (Genesis X, 4). The Indian gentios, in other words, were perceived by the early modern conquerors of India as part of that mythic humanity that, since medieval times, was described as a “lost” or “fallen Christianity” living in unknown parts of the world (Srivastava 2001). The allusion to corrupted Christian origins or undiscovered Christian islands in the non-Christian world was nourished more concretely by the legend of Prester John, the Christian king who, from the thirteenth century, was thought to rule a powerful kingdom in some unknown part of Africa or Asia (Rogers 1964).14 In epistemological terms, it is noticeable that a great number of travelers, colonialists, missionaries, and chroniclers encountering or dealing with the strange world of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were almost obsessed by what they perceived to be striking similarities between Christian and Hindu theology and culture (Pearson 1987; Srivastava 2001). In particu-

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lar, the assumption of common ideas underlying the Christian Trinity and the Hindu Trimurti, the Christian Mother of God and the Hindu Devi, the Ten Commandments and the śāstras, the assumed descent of Brahman from Abraham, and the current conceptualization of Sanskrit as the “Latin of the Brahmans” that, eventually, lead to the awareness of a common Indo-European language family were taken as proofs of a genealogical relationship between Christianity and Hinduism. Unfortunately, we do not know how Thomas Stephens thought about this. For Roberto Nobili it is documented, though, that he, too, was enthralled by certain alleged similarities between the Hindu and Christian traditions. These appeared to him in particular in the Hindu belief that one part of the most ancient and sacred Hindu texts, the ominous fourth Veda, had been lost in tradition, which he took as the hint of an earlier Christian influence on the gentios, which he was destined to revive (Županov 2001: 74). Eventually, therefore, it cannot be ruled out that even to modernists like Nobili and Stephens the composition of Indian-language Christian texts meant more than just translations: namely, the discovery and recovery of allegedly lost Christian origins and sources. Related to the encounter of modern and pre-modern epistemological paradigms in the Jesuit activities in India, however, this curious “search for similarities” (Pearson 1987: 116) can be seen as a position that—to some extent—conciliates hermeneutics and iconoclasm, by marking a distinct prerelativistic epistemology that is incapable to acknowledge cultural difference and, at the same time, recognize its equality. The gentilismo, or culture of the Hindus, in other words, could only be perceived in two ways: either it was not a religion, but only a form of paganism, or it was a religion, then it could only be a form of Christianity.15 Arguably, thus, the “search for similarities” between Hinduism and Christianity reveals a peculiar affinity between hermeutics and iconoclasm in the early modern period, since it constitutes a mode of conquest of the Other by way of its assimilation to the Self. References Albuquerque, Luis de, ed. 1994. Dicionário De História Dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2 volumes. Lisbon: Caminho. Beall, Stephen M. 1996. “Translation and Inculturation in the Catholic Church.” Adoremus Bulletin II, 6. http://www.adoremus.org/1096-Beall.html, accessed 22 January 2010. Bernand, Carmen and Serge Gruzinski. 1988. De L’Idolâtrie: Une Archéologie des Sciences Religieuses. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Blumenberg, Hans. 1986. “Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik.” In Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben. Stuttgart: Reclam. Burks, Arthur. 1949. “Icon, Index, and Symbol.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (4): 673–89. Boxer, Charles, R. 1969. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825. London: Knopf.

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Cunha Rivara, J. H. da. 1858. Ensaio Historico Da Lingua Concani. Nova Goa: Imprensa Nacional. Dalgado, Sebastião Rudolpho. 1988 [1918]. Glossário Luso-Asiatico, 2 vols. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Dias, Mariano Jose. 1995. “Liturgical Books in Devanagri Konækan≥ī.” Renovação 25: 2003–4. Falcao, Nelson, S. D. B. 2003. Kristapurān≥a: A Christian-Hindu Encounter. A Study of Inculturation in the Kristapurān≥a of Thomas Stephens, S.J. (1549–1619). Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archéologie des Sciences Humaines. Paris: Gallimard. Freedberg, David. 1989. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Godinho, Manuel. 1990 [1665]. Intrepid Itinerant: Manuel Godinho and His Journey from India to Portugal in 1663. Ed. J. Correia-Affonso, trans. V. Lobo and J. Correia-Affonso. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henn, Alexander. 2005. “Gods and Saints in Goa: Local Religion and Cultural Diversity.” In In the Company of Gods: In Memoriam Guenther-Dietz Sontheimer, eds. A. Malik, A. Feldhaus, and H. Brueckner. Delhi: Manohar. Henn, Alexander. 2003. Wachheit der Wesen: Politik, Ritual und Kunst der Akkulturation in Goa. Münster, Berlin: Lit. Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Bundes. 1934. Trans. Paul Riessler and Rupert Storr. Mainz: Matthias Gruenewald Verlag. Jakobson, Roman. 1965. “Quest for the Essence of Language.” Diogenes 51: 21–37. Brucker, Joseph. 1910. “Malabar Rites.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09558b.htm, accessed 23 January 2010. Michaels, Axel. 1998. Der Hinduismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart. Munich: Beck. Mitterwallner, Gritli von. 1983. “The Hindu Past: Sculpture and Architecture.” In Goa: Cultural Pattern, ed. Saryn Doshi. Bombay: Marg Publications. Nazareth, Casimiro Christovão de. 1894. Mitras Lusitanas no Oriente: Catalogo dos Preladas da Egreja Metropolitana e Primacial de Goa e das Dioceses Suffraganeas com a Recopilação por elles Emittidas de Goa, 2.a Ediçåo. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional. Neill, Stephen. 1984. A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patil, Anand. 1999. “Literatures in Portuguese Colonial Goa: The Battle of Puranas.” Govapuri: Bulletin of the Institute Meneses Braganza 1 (3): 56–84. Pearson, M. N. 1987. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pereira, Clifford. 2004. “Thomas Stephens. An English Jesuit in Goa.” goa-research-net@ goacom.com on 26 May 2004. Priolkar, Anant Kakba. 1967. Goa Rediscovered. Bombay: Bhaktal Books. ———. 1958. The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Developement. With an Historical Essay on the Konkani Language by J.H. Cunha Rivara. Bombay: Marathi Samshodhana Mandala. Raman, Shankar. 2002. Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Robinson, Rowena. 1998. Conversion, Continuity and Change: Lived Christianity in Southern Goa. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage. Rodrigues, L. A. 1990. “Glimpses of the Konkani Language at the Turn of the 16th Century.” Boletim Do Instituto Menezes Braganca 163: 43–72.

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Rogers, Francis. 1964. “The Attraction of the East and Early Portuguese Discoveries.” LusoBrazilien Review 1 (1): 43–59. Saldanha, Antonio de. 1963 [1655]. Santo Antonichi Acharya: The Miracles of St. Antony. Ed. A. K. Priolkar. Bombay: Marathi Samshodhana Mandala. Saldanha, J. A. 1908. “The First Englishman in India and his Works, Especially his Christian Puran.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Bombay Branch 22: 209–21. Sardessai, Manohar, L. 1980. “Portuguese Influence on the Konkani Language.” Indica 17: 117–22. Srivastava, Sushil. 2001. “Situating the Gentoo in History: European Perceptions of Indians in Early Phase of Colonialism.” Economic and Political Weekly 17 (February): 576–94. Stephen, Jeyaseela. 2001. “The Portuguese Contribution to Catholic Tamil Literature in the 16th Century.” Indica 38 (1–2): 185–99. Stephens, Thomas. 1907. The Christian Puranna of Father Thomas Stephens of the Society of Jesus: A Work of the 17th Century Produced from Manuscript Copies and Edited with a Biographical Note, Introduction, an English Synopsis of Contents and a Vocabulary by Joseph L. Saldanha. Mangalore: Simon Alvares. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1985. Die Eroberung Amerikas: Das Problem des Anderen. Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp. Tulpule, Shankar G. 1979. Classical Marathi Literature. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Van Skyhawk, Hugh. 1999. “‘… in this bushy land of Salsette …’: Father Thomas Stephens and the Kristapurān≥a.” In Studies in Early Modern Indo-Aryan Languages, Literature and Culture, eds. A. Entwistle et al. Delhi: Manohar. Winius, G. D. 2001. “The Renaissance as Reflected in Goa.” In Studies on Portuguese Asia, 1495–1689. Aldershot: Ashgate. Županov, I. G. 2001. Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Notes 1. Although usually translated by the generic notion of “pagans,” the Portuguese term gentios demarcated Indians not only from Christians, but also from mouros (Muslims) and judeos (Jews) and hence was an early modern designation for Hindus. 2. Four printing presses reached India around 1550 and were installed in Goa (Old Goa) and Kerala (Ambalakadu, Cochin, and Panikkayal) (see Priolkar 1967; Pereira 2004). 3. One notable exception was Garcia da Orta’s Coloquios dos Simples, e Drogas, e Cousas Mediçinaes da India, a compendium dealing with medicinal plants published in Goa in 1563, which Winius (2001: 131) classifies as a notable precursor of “the birth of rationalism of the next century.” 4. There is a strong indication that Stephens’s magnum opus was first published under the Portuguese title Discurso Sobre a Vinda de Jesu Christo Nosso Salvador ao Mundo. The title Kristapurān≥a seemed to have become common only with the second edition of 1649 (Cunha Rivara 1858: 84). 5. No copies of these early modern editions exist today. However, the Kristapurān≥a was re-edited in Roman script in 1907 in Mangalore, having been reconstructed from

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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handwritten copies that still were, and in fact to this day are in liturgical use among the Goan diaspora population in South Kanara. In 1925, a handwritten manuscript in the Devanāgarī script was found in the School of Oriental Studies archives in London, that Georg Schurhammer dated to the eighteenth century (cited in Falcao 2003: 42). Finally, in 1956 and 1996, modern revised editions in Devanāgarī appeared in Pune and Mumbai respectively. Stephens also wrote the Arte da Lingoa Canarim [Grammar of Konækan≥ī.], which was printed after his death in 1640 and is considered today the first printed Indianlanguage grammar. See Henn (2003). Falcao (2003: 41) mentions that Stephens uses about four hundred different “Hindu names” for Jesus Christ in his Kristapurān≥a. It is important to mention here that Falcao’s analysis is based on the Marsden manuscript of the Kristapurān≥a found in the SOAS archives, which is of unknown date and in Devanāgarī script. As he points out, it may be “more Sanskritized and Indianized” than earlier versions in Roman script. The same reservation seems appropriate for the 1956 and 1997 Devanāgarī editions used by Skyhawk and Tulpule. One particular example was the transformation of Hindu jāgar ceremonies into a Catholic performance called zagor in Goa (see Henn 2003). Noting that Stephens and de Nobili had almost certainly met in Goa on the latter’s passage from Lisbon to Madurai, Falcao (2003: 3) even speculates that it may have been Stephens who first inspired de Nobili’s accommodatio. In fact, Foucault’s (1966) argument implies that, to pre-modern understanding, translation was seen as building on genealogical affinity—relating for instance the “sacred languages” of Hebrew and Latin—rather than the idea of meanings that are detachable from their semiotic carriers and, by reference to a common intelligibility, translatable. Truly foundational or sacred texts, such as the Bible, therefore, were considered impossible to translate into vernacular languages. For a very similar connection of iconoclasm against monuments and signs in the Spanish conquest of America, see Bernard and Gruzinski (1988). It is to be added here that the mythology of the “lost Christians” indeed had some evidence with regard to India. A Christian population did live at the Malabar Coast when Vasco da Gama arrived there—and continues to do so. These are the Thomas Christians who trace their origin to the legendary arrival of the apostle Thomas in India or, according to other sources, have been converted by missionaries accompanying Syrian merchants to India in the eighth century (Neill 1984). Interestingly, though, the Portuguese Catholics initially not only did not recognize these highly acculturated Thomas Christians but, once they did, also initiated—together with authorities of the Roman Church—a long-lasting feud over their allegedly heretic rites and customs, rather than celebrating a common Christian community. This corresponds with an observation Tzvetan Todorov (1985: 42) made regarding Christopher Columbus’s attitude toward the languages of the American Indians. Columbus mistakes the diversity of the languages, Todorov writes, and therefore has only two complementary ways of responding to a foreign language: either to acknowledge that it is a language, but to refuse to believe that it is different from his own, or to acknowledge its otherness, but to refuse to concede that it is a language at all.

CHAPTER 11

Evoking Peace and Arguing Harmony An Example of Transcultural Rhetoric in Southern Ethiopia Felix Girke and Alula Pankhurst1








Tuning in Nakwa Bairo shall listen to our mouth Shall listen to our words Bairo shall listen to our words Shall take our word Shall talk what we have talked Talk Our words shall be one Shall be Bairo shall talk what we have talked Shall talk

Chorus Shall listen. Shall listen. Shall listen. Shall take. Talk. Talk. Shall be. Shall be. Shall talk. Shall talk.

This blessing, led by Nakwa Dald’o of Bashada, and joined by a chorus of elders from several other ethnic groups, was part of a peace ceremony that took place in March 1993 in Arbore, South Omo Zone, Ethiopia. It is exemplary of what happened at this event; this brief recital sets the stage for a rhetorical analysis of a meeting where the discussions were always framed by chanting, and manifold expressions of the will to coordinate, cooperate, and commit abounded. Through the ritual at Arbore this chapter ex-

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plores the persuasive aspect of ritual and its use of symbols, which enabled people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds to come together, and despite long-standing and painful grievances declare peace unto the land. We make use of the key terms convergence, resonance, and evocation; the point being made is that persuasion does not rest solely on argument, as it is in many ways an internal process, a stance, brought about by a self wanting to connect to an Other, wanting to be convinced, and laboring toward displaying this very stance of attending. Additionally, on a more sinister note, this stance might also be one of collusion, about giving in to social pressure, to felt power and attempts at subdual. We can choose to open ourselves up to moods and other people’s urgency, and a way to accomplish this, and just as important, to demonstrate this, is precisely to focus not only on attempts to convince the Other of our point of view, but to join in performance, to eat together, sing together, and emphasize common livelihood and ideology—be it in fact common or not. But such a stance cannot be assumed to obtain; the question therefore arises of how a setting is created in which potential antagonists are persuaded to participate such that disruption is foreclosed. Analysis, accordingly, looks beyond argument at attempts to prevent or heal rifts caused by explicit discussions, by blame assigned, at the ways in which a controversial gathering can be turned into something solemn and heartfelt.

The Ceremony The Setting Arbore is located in the delta of the Woyto valley, just before the river ends in the salt flats of Lake Stephanie (Chew Bahir), near the border with Kenya. The plain is flanked by mountains: to the east the range inhabited by the Borana, to the west the mountains where the Hamar and Tsamai live and to the northeast the Konso hills. Like many of the agro-pastoralist groups living in southern Ethiopia, the Arbore2 place a high value on livestock, but they depend also on sorghum cultivation, seasonal fishing, and exchanges of gifts with bond-friends in neighboring groups. The Arbore population is small (approximately five thousand people), and they connect to their larger neighbors in many ways. The sorghum they produce from flood-retreat cultivation and irrigation is exchanged with the adjacent groups, who also bring cattle to the river for dry-season pasture. In turn the Arbore obtain tools and weapons from their neighbors. Individuals from neighboring groups bring tribute to the Arbore ritual leaders (the qa’ot), publicly acknowledging their power and show allegiance to them in

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return for blessings for their children and animals and cursing of their enemies (Ayalew 1995, 1997; Tadesse 1999). They share similar and related institutions and forms of leadership, conceptions of divine agency and a sense of the importance of blessing and cursing with most groups within their historical action space. The Arbore language and culture is closely related to the Borana; however, most Arbore are multilingual and, in addition to their own language and Borana Oromo, as a rule they also speak Hamar, as well as understanding Dassanech. Individual Arbore often have bond-friends among individuals from several neighboring ethnic polities. As a small group living in the middle of several larger groups, the Arbore have tended at times to ally with one of their larger neighbors, though they may also act as intermediaries. In the middle of the twentieth century the Arbore had close links with the Borana and were enemies of the Hamar. However, this situation changed and they made peace with the Hamar in the 1960s, a peace that was strengthened by a joint irrigation venture (see Strecker 1979). The Arbore gradually shifted their allegiances to the Hamar and conflicts emerged with the Borana.

Background to the Ceremony The time when the ceremony took place in March 1993 was characterized by a move away from a period of relative instability after the Ethiopian change of government in 1991. The power vacuum resulting from the loss of state control, however, together with the influx of automatic rifles, also provided an opportunity for score settling. In this context the Borana and Hamar were involved in raids against one another, and due to the deterioration of their relationship, most significantly, the Borana raided the Arbore in May 1991 on a massive scale. The idea of the peace ceremony also emerged in the context of discussion between local leaders and anthropologists, with the anthropologists asked to act as mediators, and also to help with transport for preliminary meetings.3 From Arbore, Surra Ginno, his son Horra Surra, and Aike Berinas from Hamar were at the center of the efforts. As organizers, they first contacted the Borana and Wata, a small population nestled between Arbore and Borana, and later also Konso, Dassanech, and Tsamai. When the conference finally took place, the zonal administration also facilitated the participation of Mursi, Bodi, and Nyangatom; Kara and Bashada representatives formed part of the Hamar delegation. As the main actors were the Arbore, the Hamar, Tsamai, and the Borana, it is fitting that the event took place at a site located in the center of their inter-group action space, and as their conflicts had been flaring up very recently.4

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Theoretical Interests This chapter is about an occasion where members of culturally and linguistically different groups made peace. Peace appears here as something which truly had to be made, and visibly; a mere declaration, or handshakes, as advocated occasionally by government representatives,5 can be considered unsatisfactory in the context of South Omo. Ritual is effective in this, as it allows transmitting much more than just content, or the gist of a consensus reached—it can produce “common ground,” which William Hanks (2006) recently discussed in connection to ritual. Our claim is that therefore ritual acts should be analyzed under the aspect of persuasion, just as we might analyze the metaphors of speech. To substantiate this claim, let us consider the work of ritual. What do the rituals that took place within the frame of the ceremony achieve? A few certainly overlapping examples will suffice to show their relevance to any attempts to analyze persuasion. The opening rituals alone (as shown later) define the ritual space, provide indexical ground, frame the purpose, raise, focus and sustain attention, separate participants from non-participants, highlight relevance, and demand collective commitment. We understand these as the aim of ritual, as the conditions both claimed to obtain by the ritual leaders and created through the ritual actions. In closing the event and sealing the agreement reached, the final rituals do away with differences expressed, so that only the concluding agreement to have peace now remains in the open. The blessings and curses are understood to have the power to prolong the sentiment and preserve the peace. The key to the ritual acts is symbolism; metaphors and metonymies abound, reinforced through the joint bodily participation in chanting, handling ritual implements, and feeling the sensation of necklaces of fat and butter being rubbed on skin. We understand the cultural forms the attending elders employed in their ritual as persuasive means to achieve “convergence,” to overcome what has come to be known as “problems of coordination,” that is, to achieve “credible communication” (Richards 2001: 259). By this we mean that the events, as described further below, should not be seen as attempts by some group to sway others, but as a determined, even desperate effort by concerned elders whose lands had been ravaged by incessant conflicts, to express their will to have peace and to persuade others to “tune in” to this undertaking; only through such a communal expression of the will for peace, so the ritual leaders indicated, could war be banished at all.

Persuasion One of the principal questions underlying the study of rhetoric and culture, but one which is rarely explicitly addressed, is how people ever practically

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come to agreements. What, in social science terms, is an “agreement”? How can we observe it, how do we know it has taken place? In everyday life, we go about this largely intuitively; still, in every culture there are many ways to confirm visibly that agreement has taken place—thus taking account of the universal uneasiness about having to rely on somebody else’s internal state. The phenomenon of “persuasion,” correspondingly, is just as difficult to deal with in social science, as only its supposed effects are observable, but not it in itself. While it could be verbally confirmed, this confirmation would just be another instance of behavior, not necessarily more credible than non-worded actions. In a given discussion, how do we know that somebody has actually been persuaded or convinced of anything? How can the social scientist distinguish between professed conviction and subterfuge? Classical rhetoric allows us to think about the question of “conviction” in the triadic distinction between ethos, pathos, and logos. For our purposes, the model has a specific heuristic value: people can come to agreements in several ways, of which “being convinced” is but one ideal type, corresponding to the demand for logos, where the proposed telos of a communicative situation is defined by the absence of power. There, the often-quoted “eigentümlich zwanglose Zwang des besseren Arguments” (Habermas 1971: 137) is the only constraint on the speakers’ quest for truth. “Conviction” would then mean that a (as defined through this ideal type) dispassionate interlocutor acknowledges that a proposed reasoning is sound, and that reason is the arena in which the debate at hand is and should be grounded (see also Tyler, chapter 15, this volume). If we take the classical distinction as our thought model, two complementary concepts can be suggested: for pathos, the demand is for “compassion,” that is, for foregoing the need for argument, an un-asking acknowledgment of another’s suffering or desire; for ethos, the demand is for “acquiescence,” for bowing to respect for the status, evident morals, and personality of the Other, without requiring or demanding further incentives from the realms of emotion or logic. If one wanted to analyze a given act according to this idealist model, the gain in understanding would certainly be limited. The more interesting question to ask, and for this the model remains heuristically illustrative, is which stances actors assume in communicative situations. Do they claim some matter to lie in the arena of “truth”? Do they present themselves as someone who a priori deserves trust? We want to follow this mode of asking, and therefore, rather than asking about true intentions, we will highlight the displayed intentions of actors during the ceremony. Heuristically, writing in English, it is also helpful to distinguish between “persuade to” and “persuade that/of.” “Persuasion to” is geared toward action; “persuasion of ” strives toward a change in perception, a transformation of an inner state. It is important in this analytical way to draw attention to the fact that we do not, neither as social beings nor as social scientists, have full ac-

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cess to people’s motives. What we can observe are their reactions to persuasion attempts, which are most accessible in the case of “persuasion to.” We can observe people assenting to suggested courses of action; we can see people bow to demands; but what we can see is behavior, just as we interpreted the respective preceding segment of behavior as a persuasion attempt. In a strict approach, any assumption that somebody has been “convinced” of anything would be hardly tenable; all we could say, after witnessing what would appear as a successful persuasion attempt, would be that people apparently chose to comply—whether it be for fear of retribution, out of habitual compliance, calculation, or because they actually had been convinced, would lie beyond the methods of social science, and—if one insisted on a definite answer—would have to be deferred to neuroscience. What remains is simply “persuasion to”; while we see people react in certain ways to challenges, demands, provocations, and suggestions, we cannot feel secure in inferring more than that the situation in which they found themselves made them behave in a certain way. They were persuaded to act, be it through speech acts or other behavior, but whether by the words of their opponent, by taking account of the big knife their opponent was wielding, or through any combination of other circumstances, both internal and external, we cannot know. Psychologizing ex post facto explanations, or assumptions of identity of display and inner state, however frequent, often remain unconvincing. This stance is of course crudely rigorous, and it is only assumed for heuristic purposes; it challenges us to open ourselves to the events at Arbore in, as we claim, a way that is similar to the way participants themselves approached the ceremony. Accepting the basic fact of the intangibility of “conviction/persuasion that” leads us to disregard the question of the “effectiveness” of, for example, metaphors, or the “logicalness” of a chain of arguments, but returns us to the surface appearances. And thus we return to the initial question of what constitutes agreement. How do people in practice, expediently, behave when they deal with the demands of coming to agreements? Even when they have already agreed to agree, how do they manifest it?6 Assuming there is a will to reach an agreement, how is this will expressed? In this perspective, “agreement” has to be rethought—it can but be a mutual expression of will, and the “commitment to a process” (Hanks 2006: 302). “How can one prove that one is sincere,” asked Michael Herzfeld at the third Rhetoric Culture Conference,7 “other than saying ‘I am sincere’?” This is a recursive process, a self-referential chain, which we can only escape from by acknowledging that “sincerity” and “conviction” can analytically be nothing but claims—which is to say, social actions (see Bailey 1969; also discussed in Girke 2001). This chapter does not aim to preach the virtues of solipsism; the objective is not to claim that consideration of inner states should be excluded from

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anthropological or other social science research; instead, by pointing out the difficulty in science and everyday life in assuming that people constantly are persuaded or convinced, it helps us to look at the various ways in which people express their will to agree with one another. Hanks draws a similar conclusion: “Like parties to talk themselves, analysts of talk are forced to make inferences about the inferences of others” (2006: 300), and to take this a step further, people might elect to facilitate other people’s inferences through ostentatious or intentionally unambiguous actions, which, while claiming to be commentaries on the subject matter, provide in fact commentaries on themselves. These ways are assumed to be culture-specific, and within a given culture, context- or function-specific; any society will have invented manifold ways of performing the collusive stance.

Intersubjectivity Invocation of peace is creation of peace, and creation of peace is impossible without invocation of peace. The invocation we witnessed in Nakwa’s words above aims at “convergence,” which, while we understand what we mean by it, and while we feel we understand what Nakwa is doing, is difficult to express analytically. It might be possible to put it this way: the participants of the ceremony, it can be assumed, came to end war in their traditional way. Discussions of grievances, while they occurred, were clearly felt not to suffice; one has to remember that many people had been dying over the years; many attendants felt betrayed, had lost trust and faith in former friends and relations. The talk about these betrayals and killings had to be very carefully channeled, so as to keep the bodily memory of pain from returning and terminally disrupting the gathering. Convergence cannot be assumed to spontaneously emerge; it is a task fraught with difficulty to bring it about. The rituals, then, were the key to peace,8 and to have solemn, satisfying rituals was of utmost importance. In the ritual proceedings, as depicted below, we observe that the participants strove hard to express themselves, linguistically and non-linguistically, in an idiom they expected others could relate to, and displayed these aims constantly (Hanks 2006: 309). The participants labored on this, using their competence to evoke cultural attractors and to evade cultural meaning sinks (see Maranda, chapter 3, this volume);9 and together, they then reinforced each others’ performance. As attentive and receptive audiences inspire, and feed back into the orator or ritual leader, extreme performance, even hyperbole, can result. Through reflecting about what can be resonating symbols, acting as metaphors or metonymies, in an attempt to imagine intersubjectively powerful motifs, actors sustained an emerging process that bonded them together—what better representation of peace itself? An imagination of intersubjectivity, where the actors do not have to be imagined by each other as distinct individuals and where it

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is sufficient to think of the others as generalized representatives of different poles of a larger cultural universe, is here seen as a necessary precondition to a competent use of cultural forms.

The Sequence of Events The meeting lasted three days, from 7 to 9 March 1993. The first day involved preparations, the second day consisted of the main negotiations and customary ceremony and on the final day details of peacekeeping were worked out with the involvement of the administration.

March 7: Preparations on the First Day On the first day the hosts, the Arbore, were largely occupied with preparing for the main session the next day. In the afternoon there was a gathering under a large tree. At the meeting some fifty people assembled, including emissaries (respected spokesmen, ritual leaders, and state-office holders selected by their respective group) from Arbore, Hamar, Bashada, Tsamai, Dassanech, and Konso. In this session the main speakers accentuated the common purpose in holding the peace ceremony, emphasizing shared ways of life, values, and exchanges between groups. The aims of the ceremony and how it was to be conducted were also discussed. The Konso representatives expressed their willingness to take part and stressed the need for the groups involved to take peace into their own hands; they first introduced the agenda about abolishing the wearing of certain emblems by killers.10 In the evening, the Arbore held a separate meeting to work out details and agree on their strategy. They decided that, although the issue of grievances might come up, they should avoid discussion of compensation, and that details of peacekeeping should be postponed to a later meeting of elders of concerned parties. They also agreed that they should try to conclude the discussion rapidly to avoid delays with such a large gathering including government representatives, and try to move on quickly to the customary blessings, curses, and exchange of gifts.

March 8: The Main Event at Gondoroba The Arbore elders had deliberately selected the site at Gondoroba. The occupying forces of Emperor Menelik’s army at the turn of the century had first destroyed a village there and scattered its inhabitants, and fighting had again occurred during the Italian occupation. At the site a large shelter was con-

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structed to host the gathering. In addition, two gateways were erected for the participants to enter and depart from the meeting, leaving their weapons behind. As people started to gather they were instructed to sit in a large circle, and the Arbore spiritual leaders and elders opened the session with blessings, facing the rising sun, raising and lowering their ritual sticks, with the other participants joining in the chorus, all intoning the word of assent, a drawnout “haaaa.” After the blessings, the question of translation into the different languages had to be sorted out. In the end, Borana Oromo, Hamar, and Amharic were used, since there were translators from among each of the groups who could help those who did not know any of these languages. Grazmach Surra Ginno, the Arbore leader, explained why a gathering of eleven groups was necessary, arguing that peace would only be meaningful if it was collective rather than simply between two groups. As he put it, “We believe that the reconciliation of the two fires alone cannot bring peace to our neighborhood unless other fires too, are reconciled.” He also stressed the need for the peace to be concluded in customary ways: “Since our feuds are part of our traditions, we must seek reconciliation in traditional ways.” Grazmach Surra then raised the question of how the different peoples who had gathered could be brought together, and explained that cultural gifts representing the different groups and agricultural tools would be handed out to representatives to take home. Thereafter, Dale Armar, the Arbore qa’ot (ritual leader), explained the need for peace and that spears would be broken and buried and that the group needed to decide what sanctions to propose against whoever would dig up the spear. Borana representatives raised a controversy accusing the Wata of double dealing, or “eating with two knives,” through their siding with the Hamar. One recalled that the Arbore, who should have been allies of the Borana, had failed to warn them of a Hamar attack during which he was injured. Another Borana emphasized the need to determine who was guilty of, in the end, spoiling the peace, and suggested that the Borana, Wata, and Arbore needed to have a separate meeting to sort things out among themselves before the ceremony could go ahead. The separate meeting was held under the shade of a tree a few hundred meters away, and after some tense discussion, during which various accusations were made, Grazmach Surra argued that as there was more than one conflict, which would be very difficult to sort out, they should establish a truce “so that the cattle could graze in peace” and then conclude this meeting rapidly since the government representatives and many delegates from other areas were present and could not stay long. He suggested they should hold another meeting at a later date to sort out the details with the Borana gada generation-set leaders. An Arbore elder led the congregation in blessings and curses, which concluded the separate gathering: “May waq poor water on war;

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may waq bury the spear; may waq bring peace; may waq protect this plain; may waq bring rain.”

The Customary Ceremony The participants returned to the shelter, and, ducking through the gateways, they entered. The customary ceremony consisted of three stages: first the anointing of the traditional leaders and their ritual sticks, then the blunting and burying of spears, and finally the exchange of gifts and fatty necklaces and fresh hide bracelets. The blessing of the Arbore ritual leaders was carried out by Buno Elema, the senior-most woman who was a wife of a member of the oldest Arbore age set. She anointed with butter the heads of the two Arbore qa’ot and Grazmach Surra, the kernet (secular leader). She uttered blessings as she did so, including the following statement: “May you be given power to ward off evil coming from east and west; protect this plain with peace; bury the spear; let her [the spear] not raise her head.” She also verbally challenged the leaders to display their power, and anointed their ritual sticks to enable that very power. In the next stage leaders from several groups—namely Arbore, Borana, Hamar, Tsamai and Konso—brought forth spears from beyond the gateways, where they had been left behind. Various elders proceeded to blunt the spearheads with rocks, points and sides. The tips were placed facing west toward the setting sun. As they were blunting the spears, the leaders addressed the spears, uttering statements such as “from now on you will not wound people; go away from us, we do not want you; we have banished you; may waq close your mouth.” Then two members from the Garrangudo clan,11 coming from both the Arbore and Dassanech groups, were called to bury the spears. These two Garrangudo men, together with an assistant, walked through the gateways to a termite mound some five hundred meters away. One of them then broke the three spears over his knee, and placed the fragments on the mound. The three men then returned to the assembly, and before entering the gateway washed their hands. The final part of the ceremony consisted of the exchange of gifts. The items exchanged consisted of the Borana hororo stick, with a knob at one end, carried by elders, the Hamar koli, a long staff used especially during marriage negotiations, the Arbore simirte, a slender stick becoming thinner at one end, used by shepherds, and the woko, an implement common to all the groups, with a hook at one end and a forked prong at the other. The hook is used for pulling thorns and the fork for pushing them in the bush and to make cattle kraals. Then, greasy strips of belly fat and bracelet-like strips of hide from the

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sacrificed livestock were distributed, the fat hung around the neck, and the bracelets slipped on the wrist. The agricultural tools given out consisted of hoes and axe heads. At the conclusion to the ceremony, the Arbore ritual leaders as well as leaders from other groups called out blessings, which the audience again endorsed by intoning the word “haaaa” after each blessing. Finally, the participants left walking through the gateways with smiles on their faces and visible expressions of rejoicing.

March 9: Suggestions for a Lasting Peace A Borana elder reemphasized the need to prohibit the sporting of the signs of a killer, such as ivory armbands, some special rings, and shaving one’s hair, with only one remaining lock, a prohibition that had already been instituted in Borana. A Hamar youth stated that peace had been made “so that the kites and hyenas no longer had human flesh to eat,” and that abandoning the marks of a killer, such as incisions on the chest, was positive. But, as a Borana representative added, there was also a need to ensure that there were representatives among each group who would be held accountable if someone from their group committed a crime. The chairman concluded by saying that the peace was for all groups and that all the participants should spread the word of peace when they returned. He requested that the elders conclude the meeting with blessings.

The Peace Ceremony as the Emergence of Convergence In the peace ceremony, members of different groups came together and expressed joint commitment to peace. The main features of the ceremony underscored this attempt to coordinate, to create resonance in a number of ways. First, and most simply, the very process of blessing peace and cursing war, which was repeated at the beginning and end of each stage of the proceedings, invoked and thus created a harmonious spirit while reviling conflict. This procedure was anchored in an idiom with which all the participants were conversant. The repetition by the chorus of attendants of the last word of the leading blesser acts as amplification and endorsement of the expressed wish, discussed in more detail below. In some cases, such as the Nyangatom blessing, despite the audience not knowing the language, they were familiar with the idiom of repeating the last word and participated enthusiastically.12 That every day was started with a blessing before the discussion, and that debates were closed for the day with yet another blessing, reminds one of other stage-models of ritual.

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The ritual frame imbued the daily discussions with a certain quality, which, however, we see not as a condition of liminality, but much rather an indication that the discussion was taking place in a socially and spiritually fully sanctioned space. The ritual frame, so to say, frames the entire event in an “as if ” condition, specifically, “as if all was ritual.” The stance suggested through the ritual actions is thus obeisance; and precisely the participatory ritual action with its repetitions and its redundancy of symbols had turned attendants into agents (see Hanks 2006: 313). Second, the blunting and burying of the spears, and the cursing of whoever would unearth the spears was a powerful expression of commitment for peace. Already by leaving spears behind in going through the gateways, participants were indicating their submission to the purpose of peace. In blunting the spears, Hunna Arshal, one of the Arbore ritual leaders, exclaimed “your mouth with which you bleed people, we have blunted it.” The spears were thus portrayed not as the instruments of fighting but—in a metonymic personification—as the perpetrators, personified with reference to their head and mouth, as a way of enabling the participants to transfer the blame away from the actors onto the instruments. The spears were placed toward the setting sun to symbolize13 casting evil away, and were placed on termite mounds to indicate their burial and destruction by the insects. The fact that Garrangudo clan members, who exist in different ethnic groups (Arbore and Dassanech), were selected to take the spears to the mound is another factor emphasizing cross-cutting ties and joint commitment. Third, the gift giving highlighted the positive developments possible after the destruction of the spears—swords to plowshares. It is significant that cultural symbols of three major participating groups, the Borana hororo, the Hamar koli, and the Arbore simirte, were selected. The first two of these represent the authority of elders, and are used in reconciliations, whereas the third is used in herding by many groups in the area as well as for punishing children and wrongdoers. It is significant that the fourth item distributed, the woko,14 is used by all the groups in the area and immediately resonates with the common pastoral values of the herder: In the bush the woko is a vital implement; it is also essential to build kraals for defense of livestock. Most significantly it is used in blessing, both for casting out sickness with its fork, and for calling in fertility and abundance with its hook. Fourth, the distribution of fatty necklaces and strips of hide as bracelets represents in physical form the bond between hosts and guests, and metonymically expresses commensality. Furthermore, the participants took fat to indicate “the cool,” lushness, and fertility.15 The recipients of the necklaces expressed excitement and joy when placing the fatty strips around their necks. Beyond their symbolic significance, the wearing of the bracelets has yet an-

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other social effect: it is an indication that the wearer has been hosted and can thus prompt questions about the circumstances. In returning to their respective home areas, the wearing of these items (which are common only in Borana and Arbore) would offer opportunities for the participants to discuss the events they witnessed and spread the message of the peace proposal. This is relevant, as one recurring theme of social relations in South Omo is indirection: the mendicha (also tilip) bracelets, obviously ritual accessories, will very likely be remarked upon as salient, and when asked to tell about their “meaning,” allow an emissary upon his return home to freely report on his experience. Reporting unprompted can easily be treated as a display of pride, increasing the risks of face-threatening acts and of being called a braggart and/or liar. The bracelets, therefore, unfolded their full communicative value only upon the delegates’ return home, but carried the promise of it from the moment they were put on. Fifth, the gift of agricultural implements—axes for clearing the bush, hoes for digging the fields—was a message of replacing destructive weapons with productive tools. When blunting the spears, Grazmach Surra made this point explicitly in addressing the spear: “We have destroyed your blade so you shall not harm; let your mouth disappear; let it be changed to an agricultural implement.” In this respect it is also significant that on the final day several speakers spoke about the need to establish joint development projects as a basis for peace.

Means of Creating a Sense of Consonance There are a number of specific ways in which speakers at the ceremony sought to create common ground, in a sense of joint purpose and commitment to peace. These include the evocation of mutual metaphors, allusions to shared kinship, reference to commensality, recalling economic linkages vital for social and political reproduction, reference to similar and interrelated forms of leadership and institutions, and shared conceptions of spiritual agency. This mutuality is a mutuality of affect; actors at the ceremony were imagining, trying to conjure up bonds between their respective groups—bonds which have been existing for a long time, but which fell into neglect recently. Since Edmund Leach’s early work, anthropologists have been familiar with situations in which “people may speak different languages, wear different kinds of clothes, live in different kinds of houses, but they understand one another’s ritual. Ritual acts are ways of ‘saying things’ about social status, and the ‘language’ in which these things are said is common to the whole” (1977: 279), the “whole” in this case being the South Omo region. As the following paragraphs show with some

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detail, this shared ritual idiom was used not only to state the existence of bonds between the group, but to very insistently assert their enduring relevance for all the groups’ spiritual and material well-being.

Mutual Metaphors Speakers often employed metaphors relating to the natural and socially molded world. These included reference to water, rain, and rivers associated with blessing and prosperity, to the shade of trees, symbolizing coolness, resting, and most importantly a meeting place for talking (and consequently making peace), and the sunrise as bringing peace with blessings performed facing the rising sun (in contrast with the setting sun taking away evil). The metaphor of the path was used to refer to the sense of convergence in the plains of Arbore. As Nakwa Dald’o, the Bashada leader, stated: “Cattle come by the path in the evening. The man from Ari and me, everybody, we should like each other. Some come from Addis Ababa. The ferenji16 who have stayed away, they shall come. The Hamar who have not come yet shall come. The path that has led us here, the talk I am thinking of has brought us together being so many.” The gateway (karr), which is seen as related to the power of the spiritual leaders, was referred to in terms of submission to peace, of leaving spears behind. As Nakwa put it, “The one who says, ‘I don’t stab the spear!’ shall enter through that gateway. The one who wants war shall not take the staff having entered through the gateway. My father’s gateway which makes people feeble exists over there. The one who will start war should be thinking about that and put the spear down.” The allusion to a shared, underlying pastoral way of life was pervasive throughout the ceremony, and this is what made the metaphors employed mutually intelligible. In addition, common jewelry and similarity in women’s clothing were referred to by Elema Dadi, an Arbore elder, as indicating that “we were brought up with one breast.”

Allusions to Shared Kinship Speakers often make reference to shared kinship, of being brothers, of intermarriage, and at times of a common Borana ancestry. During the discussion held the day before the ceremony, Welde Rufael, a Konso spokesperson, following on from Grazmach Surra’s speech, stated the following: As you pointed out earlier in your speech, the Borana and the Arbore are relatives. We too according to our history and from what our fathers told us originally come from Borana. It follows, therefore, that a Borana is a Konso and a Konso is a Borana. Likewise, the Guji are Borana. It is believed that all

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ethnic groups living in Borana environs sprang from Borana and that the Borana have ancestors in all of these groups! What a horrible thing for such a close family to turn against one another. What must we do about it? We have intermarried and produced offspring. So, instead of harboring evil intentions towards one another, why don’t we love and help one another, so that our children could grow together and our lives prosper together?

Reference to Commensality Several speakers referred to the salience of eating and drinking together. The main metonymy employed here was the shorqa, the drinking gourd used especially when drinking coffee together and blessing one another. For instance, during the discussions on the last day, a Konso representative referred to the previous day’s ceremony stating: “We buried the spears yesterday; we washed our hands together; we drank from the same shorqa; we ate together; we washed the blood.”

Recalling Economic Links Necessary for Social and Political Reproduction Some speakers emphasized the close economic interconnections and bondfriendships across ethnic boundaries, which are vital for economical and political reproduction. A good example is from the speech of Aike Berinas (Baldambe) on the eve of the ceremony. You man from Borana, listen carefully! I am a Hamar, here I am. It is the tradition of my father. I marry a woman having stepped on cattle. The cow is in Borana, the cow bought with goats, the cow comes through Ulde-country;17 this cow becomes my gar when I am initiated. I will not consume its milk, I will not eat its meat. I will not sit on its hide. I will be wrapped in it when I die. … This is a sheep that has not given birth yet, it is the one which brings peace to the country. Its fat shall enter up there,18 from there it shall come down again. Next the honey comes here. The young men will marry by the means of this honey. The tobacco comes here from Hamar, the elders, having eaten this, they will call forth barjo. Then the daughter will give birth. The bitta shall sit with his cloth. The cloth from Konso. The man from Marle, the man from Hamar, the man from Bume, the man from Kara, the father of the cloth is Konso. This is the way barjo has shown to us. Let us only look at it this way.

Even without providing much additional context, this passage, through the intensity with which Baldambe expresses himself, conveys the importance of a “sense of region,”19 a regional identity, as a modality for each ethnic identity in South Omo. The extract illustrates how economic exchanges are per-

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ceived as vital for social and political reproduction of the societies in the area, which thus form a larger union of interdependent parts. Baldambe explains how Hamar obtain cattle they need to marry from Borana, coming through Arbore; how sheep are taken up to Hamar ritual leaders and blessings come back down; how honey goes down from Hamar to be used by young men to marry; and how tobacco comes from Hamar and is used by elders in Arbore for blessings. Finally, the blankets used to clothe leaders come from distant Konso to all the other areas.

Reference to Similar and Interrelated Forms of Leadership and Institutions Many of the groups of the area share similar conceptions about leadership. First of all there is the age-grading, with many references by elders to the problems of restraining the youth. A number of speakers referred to the gada generation system, and Grazmach Surra noted that the current fighting was a dishonor for the officiating age set: “For this to happen during our gada, it is a living death for us.” Grazmach Surra also argued that the details of peacekeeping needed to be worked out with the raba gada of the Borana, who did not attend, to be binding. In addition to the age-grading, there is a common tendency toward a double duality of leadership. First there is a practice of separating leadership into two roles, with a more spiritual and a more secular pole. In addition, there is a tendency for the spiritual leadership to be divided again into two positions. The participants at the ceremony acknowledged the equivalence between the concepts used among different groups by using each other’s terms, even if there were considerable practical differences between powers, duties, and privileges of the office. For instance, Grazmach Surra spoke of the Arbore qa’ot spiritual leaders using the Borana term qallu, and referred to himself as hayyu, again using the Borana terms. However, it is not simply a matter of similar concepts and institutions of leadership but more importantly also of interdependences, some of which are institutionalized. One of the Arbore qa’ot spiritual leaders is also acknowledged as a spiritual leader for the Tsamai. Sometimes exchanges are made. For instance, the Borana qallu send presents of axes during the installation of Arbore qa’ot (Tadesse 1999: 271).

Shared Conceptions of Spiritual Agency The groups participating in the ceremony shared some similar conceptions of spiritual agency. However, whereas the idea and practice of barjo, com-

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mon to the Hamar cluster,20 translates into a rather loose concept that may be translated as “a good event, good luck, well-being” (Lydall/Strecker 1979: 255), the Borana and Arbore concept of waq may be seen as more connected with the idea of a sky-god (Bartels 1983:89). Nonetheless, in the ceremony the two concepts were used interchangeably. Indeed, barjo has experienced many changes over the last decades through contact with the Christian religions; and there are indications that among other developments barjo is now more personified, expressed as a being with a will, with likes and dislikes. But despite this fairly recent trend, the two conceptions still are rather different. However, for purposes of the ritual, that is, for the expediency of communicating unity, this was disregarded. Just as with the leadership institutions mentioned above, the commonalities were emphasized and the differences played down. So the two belief concepts, different though they be on the analytical level, were acknowledged as equivalent on the affective level. In Nakwa Dald’o’s blessing, we see how strongly cultural neighborhood—that is, positive social relations among the groups—is connected to barjo (and its variants, here bairo): “Bairo is standing up [rising?] from over there, come from the gal country [northern Ethiopians], come from Hamar country, come from Ulde country, come from Galeba. Bairo might give us something.” Furthermore there was a sense of a two-way interaction between barjo and humans as expressed by Baldambe, the Hamar elder. Barjo is not far removed from the human sphere. Quite the opposite is the case, as barjo mirrors, reflects, and reinforces human actions, just as well-meaning humans do themselves—as for example the chanting elders did during this very ceremony. Barjo may be portrayed as listening, and echoing, reverberating, amplifying, or endorsing the statements and wishes of the blessers, as is evident in the blessing by Nakwa Dald’o we started with. “Barjo which has made us, shall listen to our words—shall listen. When barjo listens to us it shall say that we have talked the truth.”

Blessing and Cursing as Archetypal Cultural Forms The peace ceremony as a whole was referred to by terms connoting the calling of barjo or of waq, which shows how central the notion of bringing good fortune was to the whole enterprise. We argue that this invocation and search for spiritual echoing was the main means of creating convergence through a shared performance and collective endorsement. The discussions about “truth,” about “what was the case,” could only be started within the ritual frame; the parallelism between actions, the repetition and the symbolic redundancy merged the different parts of the event “into a single indexical ground” (Hanks 2006: 318), where people were to converge during discussions as they were during chants. There seems to have been a sense that demonstrative, argumentative discourse,

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which was brought up quite forcibly at times, could be detrimental to the main issue at hand—creating peace. Indeed, looking at the separate meeting mentioned above, there is an indication that the Arbore indeed wanted to postpone all this “determining who was guilty,” and simply get on with the ceremony, sorting out the issues only once peace had been established. May Borana be peaceful, sabo and gona.21 May the morning be peaceful, may the evening be peaceful. Let all Ethiopia be in peace. Let the time be peaceful for us. Let us curse bad times. We have given each other peace. May the Borana fora be peaceful. May the gose be peaceful. We have cursed war. We have refused bad. We have taken bad things out of us and thrown them away.

Blessings During the peace ceremony, three different kinds of blessings took place, each within a specific context. The first was carried out in a group led by Arbore leaders, pointing their ritual sticks in unison eastward and raising and lowering them. One of the leaders would begin uttering the blessings, and the chorus would intone the word of assent “haaaa.” This procedure would be repeated four times by different leaders.22 The second type was the blessing of the ritual leaders and their sticks by anointing them with butter carried out by the senior-most Arbore woman, Buno Elema. She uttered the blessings and asked the leaders to bring peace; and they would answer “let waq do it.” In the third instance, orators from different groups got up and improvised blessings, in their respective language, calling forth good for common enterprise, and the audience would echo the last word in a chorus. In all cases blessings were essentially interactive in that they involved two parties, as well as the entire audience. The blessings consist of two segments: the first, a wishful declamation, usually a terse statement, compressed and sometimes repeated, and the second, a choral refrain expressing endorsement by the audience, often repeating the last words, stressing the action verb, creating a reverberation or feedback effect, and immediate unconditional assent and endorsement. The blessings transmit a high energy level, each phrase being relatively short, building up to a climax in pitch, tone, gesture, speed, and decreasing intervals between one statement and the next. The best orators are

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able to keep up the momentum somewhat longer, slowly building up to a climax; in all cases, the practice is very much embodied through the rhythm inherent in the blessing, also expressed through swaying and emphatic gestures, notably the raising and rapid lowering of the right hand. The blessings may be seen as creating a sense of unison, which then is a prototypical example of how “interaction builds participatory commitment among the parties” (Hanks, following Clark’s lead, 2006: 318). The interactions in the blessing process are continuous, cumulative, and coordinated; the longer they take, the more people seem to get caught up in the performance. The central issue is, though, that every further instance of cooperation promises yet more commitment, a positive feedback process that needs the formality of ceremony to find a beginning and an end, and which can only be persuasive and enticing when driven forward by individual actors with an understanding of the dynamics involved, both of body and associative faculty. However, what is the role of the individual in such a communal ritual, as agent or patient? We find a similar discussion in the work of Laura Graham (1995), usefully discussed by Christian Meyer (2005). The topic there is public speaking and its social context among the Xavante, and Graham’s analysis is very suggestive for our understanding of the events at Arbore, especially regarding the issue of emergence. There is a folk model of cultural change in here—ritual requirements (or in the case of the Xavante, the requirements of public decision making) demand playing down both individual agency, and individual responsibility (Meyer 2005: 261). Every utterance stands in the context of the ritual frame, and not as an expression of individual interest, but of the joint project of peacemaking. In our case, the ceremony seems homologous to Graham’s case in that even the original organizers of the ceremony apparently took pains to not dwell on their guiding role; in that rituals were uniformly performed by the entire congregation; in that speakers did not speak for themselves, but for their group (Graham 1995: 153); and in that the “discursive interaction” was such that the boundaries between individual utterances (and thus their respective speakers) were blurred (Meyer 2005: 260f)—agency was thus masked, so that every participant became a collaborator in crafting the ceremony, which then did not have one source, was not based on one responsibility, and thus did not leave much room for personal pride or vanity.23 The blessings are performed by leaders and skilled orators, in similar ways even if in different languages, and represent variations on the same, transcultural theme. There are similarities in terms of hand gestures, tone, and pitch as well as cultural and personal variations. For instance, the Wata, unlike all the other attendants, performed their blessings seated. This variation, even where it might be doubtful to assign one meaning to it, can acquire significance. This is the realm of vagueness, of assumption—to stay with the example mentioned,

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performing this ritual seated allows other attendants to speculate, or simply to assume that there must be a “spiritual,” or in some other way significant reason for this.24 In this way, a variation on a ritual has cognitive effects similar to a new metaphor—it energizes the audience, as they cannot not notice the variation.25 It is a stimulation to have to accommodate a ritual innovation in one’s forest of symbols. Every variation at the same time claims a specific meaning, referring to the performers themselves or their entire group, but—if performed with a sense for kairos—does not negate the general principle. So there is “difference which makes a difference,” to use the Batesonian expression, but this difference still reinforces the continuity of the basic form, and reminds people that a convergence of different yet related groups is emerging.

Blessings as a Form of Convergence Most of the blessings during the ceremony did not directly refer to war and peace. Rather the speakers tended to use familiar vocabulary of blessings for other occasions. However, some of the blessings referred to creating a sense of unity by referring to making the participants of one body. For instance, Baldambe stated “May barjo make us of one tongue and one mind,” and Buno added “May their stomachs be one.” The idea of all the participants becoming one was also expressed by Baldambe in kinship terms, muld’a referring to the patrilineage: “All these people shall become one muld’a. When they have become one muld’a, barjo shall listen to them.” This is a straightforward demand: differences and the claims to autonomy so typical of the pastoralist ethos have to be put aside in favor of commensality and declarations of interdependence, otherwise, the peace will have no spiritual sanction, and will therefore not come to pass.

Conclusion The peace ceremony at Arbore, which brought together twelve ethnic groups, can be considered an impressive attempt to enhance respect and seek as much to resolve issues as to simply “end” conflict. The different stages of the ceremony represented dramatic ways of addressing peacemaking. The collective blessings led by the Arbore ritual leaders, the blunting and burying of spears, the exchange of cultural symbols and gifts of agricultural tools, the wearing of symbols of commensality, and the consecutive blessings by members from the various participating groups all express variations on one theme. This chapter does not track and trace nuances of “meaning” for the cultural representatives present of each metonymy and metaphor. Nor do we analyze in exhaustion

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the different functions of ritual, initiating acts, consolidating acts, or rituals of culmination. There is, in the end, very little cosmology for a religious ritual. Instead, the main point is that every single ritual operation was in and of itself contingent (while claiming hidden meaning as discussed above), but that they were cumulative, and indeed redundant and even hyperbolic, in evoking again and again the “good life” that has been lived before in this “cultural neighborhood.”26 The calling of peace and cursing of war in a shared idiom, Leach’s “common language of ritual expression” (1977: 281), were attempts to create resonance, which we understand as a simultaneous urging and displaying of a spirit of agreement (leading to mutual augmentation), and a commitment to create conditions of mutual peaceful interaction and joint self-esteem. The separate meeting between Arbore, Borana, and Wata is again revealing in that it illustrates the constitutive importance of the act of peacemaking; discussions, going to the root of issues, are postponed, as the complexities of the situation threaten to overwhelm both goodwill and the capacity of the meeting. Common ground, then, sometimes has to be formed by excluding the possibility of schism through ritual action, which persuades to leave the everyday space (of enmity) and enter an artificial ritual space (of coordination), where dissension and disruption is cognitively and affectively hard to imagine. The “trick,” so to say, is that the situation is framed not as one group talking to another, but as people talking together—performers and audiences are merged into one through their acceptance of the ritual context. This was specifically marked by the crossing of the gate constructed especially for the event. Gary Palmer and William Jankowiak put it quite succinctly: “To the extent that performers are also audiences, they enter into reflexive and reciprocal processes of actors presenting themselves to one another, presenting each other to one another, and collectively presenting images of society to one another, as in many ceremonials and other dramatic public events” (1996: 240). But would such a view not run the danger of glossing over certain aspects of a situation, for example consideration of the order in which this happens? At which point do (as in our case) antagonistic individuals turn into this seemingly so coordinated collective? Can we admire the emergence of convergence and close our eyes to the issues of power and collusion? Is a ritual frame an empowerment, as it allows coordination, or is it a straitjacket, as it forecloses deviance? These questions are not posed for moral concerns, but for methodology, as it challenges us to yet again reconsider the work of agency and of will in seeming emergence.27 Stephan Feuchtwang recognizes this difficulty: But ritual does something strange. … It is deferral in yet another sense, deferred intentionality. Ritual occurs in a conscious process that deliberately sets aside a theory of mind, which would attribute a singular origin to the

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act of another, even if it is a principal-agent sequence. The normal propensity to impute or to infer intention is hazed by conscious deferral. Submission to prescribed action that mediates the intention of an imputed agency hazes one’s own intentionality. … Succumbing to repetition does not make the thinking and acting subject dumb. Instead, it lets something in, it is a medium for intention, an enactment of communication. (2007: 69)

For the convened elders in Arbore, this seems to be an appropriate analysis. It is also supported by the statements of Surra and other speakers quoted above, all of which quite reflexively refer the individual back to a group. They constantly indicated that they were willing to accept the suggested “as if ” frame, which sidelined personal issues, limited expressions of vanity and jealousy, and denied diverging interests. Returning to the initial issue of agreement and conviction, we consider the key to be how all speeches and negotiations throughout the event were framed by the transcultural ritual action, and it seems to have been well-understood that negotiations, and all hard talk between the groups, had to be embedded in these constant emphases of communality and cooperation. From this vantage point, we would like to close by raising (and leaving unanswered) the question to which degree the participants of the ritual at Gondoroba were really “convinced” of anything by the arguments produced, and to which degree it was the ritually excessive, ostentatious evocation of what it means to live in peace that enabled participants to perform the formal act of making peace.

References Ayalew Gebre. 1995. The Arbore of Southern Ethiopia: A Study of Inter-ethnic Relations, Social Organization and Production Practices. Addis Ababa: Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Administration, Addis Ababa University. ———. 1997. “Arbore Inter-tribal Relations: A Historical Account.” In: Pastoralists, Ethnicity and the State in Ethiopia, ed. Richard Hogg. London: Haan Publishing. Bailey, F. G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bartels, Lambert. 1983. Oromo Religion: Myth and Rites of the western Oromo of Ethiopia: An Attempt to Understand. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. Carrithers, Michael. 2005. “Why Anthropologists Should Study Rhetoric.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11 (3): 577–83. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2007. “On Religious Ritual as Deference and Communicative Excess.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 57–72. Girke, Felix. 2001. “Die Theoretischen Entwicklungen im Werk von FG Bailey: Handlung, Politik und Rhetorik.” Working Papers of the Dept. of Anthropology and African Studies (Mainz University) 8. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, eds Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. Vol. 3, New York: Academic Press.

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Graham, Laura. 1995. Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality Among the Xavante of Central Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz.” In Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? eds. Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hanks, William F. 2006. “Joint Commitment and Common Ground in a Ritual Event.” In Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction, eds. Nick J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson. Oxford, New York: Berg. Helms, Mary W. 1988. Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kertzer, David. 1988. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leach, Edmund. 1977 [1954]. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Athlone. Lydall, Jean, and Ivo Strecker. 1979. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia Vol. I: Work Journal. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner. Matsuda, Hiroshi 2003. “The Power of Region and Bond-Partnership in the Lower Omo Valley.” Paper presented to the 15th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, University of Hamburg. Meyer, Christian 2005. “Mahnen, Prahlen, Drohen …”: Rhetorik und Politische Organisation Amerikanischer Indianer. Frankfurt, London: IKO. ———. 2006. “‘Tranca Rus Schlachtete Seine Katze, Wollte Aber Nicht Alleine Essen …’: Deixis, Ritualgesänge und die Glaubwürdigkeit der Geistverkörperung in der Brasilianischen Umbanda.” Anthropos 101: 529–40. Palmer, Gary B., and William R. Jankowiak. 1996. “Performance and Imagination: Toward an Anthropology of the Spectacular and Mundane.” Cultural Anthropology 11 (2): 225–58. Pankhurst, Alula. 2006. “A Peace Ceremony at Arbore.” In The Perils of Face: Essays on Cultural Contact, Respect and Self-Esteem in Southern Ethiopia, eds. Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall. Berlin: Lit. Richards, Diana. 2001. “Coordination and Shared Mental Models.” American Journal of Political Science 45 (2): 259–76. Strecker, Ivo. 1979. The Hamar of Southern Ethiopia Vol. III: Conversations in Dambaiti. Hohenschäftlarn: Klaus Renner. ———. 1988. The Social Practice of Symbolization: An Anthropological Analysis. London: Athlone. Tadesse Wolde. 1999. “Warfare and Fertility: A Study of the Hor (Arbore) of Southern Ethiopia.” PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on Pankhurst (2006). The earlier text was written with a focus on cultural contact, whereas the current version expands on the persuasive aspects of the events at Arbore. J. Lindenberg and E. C. Gabbert provided helpful commentary. We also want to refer to the film “Bury the Spear!” winner of the Award of Special Recognition at the Bilan du Film Ethnografique in Paris 2004, by Ivo Strecker and Alula

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Pankhurst (2004), which shows the events of the 1993 meeting under discussion here, rendered in the context of one man’s vision of peace. Ethnonyms can be confusing here, as the Arbore are also known as “Hor” in the academic literature, as well as “Ulde” and “Marle” for their separate sections (see Tadesse 1999; Ayalew 1995, 1997), plus a variety of alternate spellings. “Arbore” has been chosen for this text as it seems the prevalent term used among the population for selfreference in everyday communication, and is also the term used for administrative purposes, while “Hor” or “Hoor” seems most strongly associated with reference to old cultural traditions (E. C. Gabbert, personal communication, 4 May 2007). The efforts of Ivo Strecker, Marco Bassi, and Ayalew Gebre were especially noteworthy. For more detail, we refer to Pankhurst (2006). Reporting about a state-sponsored peace conference he witnessed, a young Kara put his impression of how the government representatives steered the event this way: “And then the two leaders, Ari and Ejke, were made to shake hands, forcedly—just like sheep” (from Girke’s fieldnotes, 30 December 2006, Dus, Kara). The context here is that when small stock is slaughtered (sheep being preferred, having more fatty tissue, reproducing faster, etc.), the recipient of the honor (a guest) accepts the sacrifice of the animal by taking hold of its foreleg. There is a possible corollary in that coerced compliance might be instrumental even in “persuading of,” as in the interest of decreasing cognitive dissonance, human beings might be found to be prone to ex-post rationalization attempts, reframing their own actions in terms of logos. This however goes beyond the scope of this chapter. Rhetoric Culture Conference III: Rhetoric in Social Relations and Religion, held at Mainz University, 13–17 February 2005. It is our understanding of the transcultural field of South Omo that the rituals indeed were of decisive importance in making peace; the decisions reached during the event, while also important, would indeed be “just talk” if not connected to conciliatory ritual. The recent fieldwork of Girke on the conflict between Kara and Nyangatom confirms that in making peace, debates cannot compensate for improper ritual. Everybody at this event was certainly competent enough so that they could have, at any point, upset the entire ceremony, by using the wrong metaphor, by talking in an inappropriate style. This is not to say that there cannot be anything new, that there cannot be innovation in ritual (see Strecker 1988: 226); but for our understanding of “convergence” it is relevant to maintain that people could choose to diverge, to not “resonate” with the proposition of others. This statement contains in nuce a key motif of this chapter: the common idea that outward expression, signification, is causally connected to inner processes. Whoever wants to stop killing, really wants to stop killing, should stop acknowledging the bodily expression of killer status, should perform peacefulness—the hopeful expectation being that the indomitable young men will stop desiring the scars and jewelry of the killer. Killer status, apparently, is also not so much internal, but manifest in the privilege of certain decorations; in some metonymic or even fetishist transformation, what is actually desired, become that for which people are getting killed. The spittle of the Garrangudo is claimed both in Arbore and Dassanech to remove the danger of infection from wounds resulting from cuts made by iron weapons or implements. One could argue that precisely the fact that Nyangatom rarely reached the Woyto valley, and many participants were familiar with them only through stories, lent their

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blessing even more auspiciousness—as in general, people and mysterious things from distant countries are infused with aura (Helms 1988: 96f). The use of symbolize here is to indicate not an “inner meaning” but an elicitable explanation of “why” this was done. It is secondary whether this given interpretation might or might not correspond to an “inner meaning,” as long as people act as if it did. The woko has been linked to the Rhetoric Culture project for a long time, and was a recurring part of the exhibition framing the conferences at Mainz university (see also the images at http://www.rhetoricculture.org and Carrithers 2005). As examples, the peace ritual between Kara and Nyangatom would entail the ritual’s leaders washing their hands in liquid fat from the two animals the two sides sacrificially slaughtered; the peace ritual between Kara and Mursi also postulates fastening the fatty strips that were being used here around the attendants’ necks. Both use the fat in a different medium, but the “greater referent” is identical, namely the “cool” fatness of animals, associated with good pasture, rain, health, and general well-being. Ferenji refers to the “foreigner,” the crusading “Franc”; this term is common throughout Ethiopia. In this part of Ethiopia, the ferenji, regardless of what leads them there (anthropology, development work, and tourism being the big three activities), is often more welcome than the Ethiopian Other, the representative of Emperor Menelik’s conquest. See above, fn. 2; “Ulde” refers to one section of Arbore, as does “Marle,” further below. “Up there” refers to the house of the bitta, the Hamar spiritual leader. This idea was briefly explored by Matsuda (2003) for the South Omo region. This concept is called bairo by the Bashada, and bariyo by the Kara. Sabo and gona are names of Borana moieties; fora refers to a cattle camp, and gose to the corresponding sleeping sites. Four is a salient and often recurring number, for example, in Hamar ritual, and is linked to the four teats of a cow’s udder. In an as yet little understood way, there is a paradox involved: while these practices are conducive to the emergence of intersubjectivity, at the same time the subjectivity of the participants is denied. This is also present in Hanks’s remark about the “hieroglyph” (2006: 303), which is “known to be meaningful,” even if the meaning remains obscured. The main point is that there is no contingency in such a ritual setup. Referring back to Grice (1975), Kertzer (1988), and Strecker (1988), Meyer (2006: 539) is less harmonious (or less charitable) when he describes a deictic distortion as “exploitation of the hearer,” as the hearer is compelled to perform the cognitive work of translation. However, the basic effect, to sustain the hearers’ attention, and to render them more susceptible to further input, remains the same, as no matter whether it is phrased as exploitation or stimulation, it will be difficult to, again, not notice. Of course, an awkward variation can also be understood as a rescinding of the ritual context—in the same way that a badly chosen metaphor can sour the atmosphere at a party. For an upcoming discussion of this concept see the volume To Live With Others: Essays on Cultural Neighbourhood in Southern Ethiopia, eds. E. C. Gabbert and Sophia Thubauville (2011). With Leach, again, the systemic argument could be made that South Omo is in fact “one society” (1977: 281). Reading Stephan Feuchtwang’s recent paper “On Religious Ritual as Deference and Communicative Excess,” we found that while we agree that “most religious ritual is a

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performance which not only invokes but also performs communication” (2007: 57), and also want to analyze rituals without recourse to (unobservable) “belief ” (2007: 58), our approaches on who is “audience” or “performer” in ritual differ, so a cautionary remark is in order: the thrust of Feuchtwang’s analysis is directed toward the communicative stance of human actors toward a spiritual authority/audience, and their performance of this stance. We are much rather interested in the communicative stances solely between human actors, deferring the question of religious obeisance. Feuchtwang’s charter, his invitation to other scholars to test his approach in places outside of China and Taiwan, is therefore only tentatively accepted.










Part 3

Agency

CHAPTER 12

In Defense of the Orator A Classicist Outlook on Rhetoric Culture Franz-Hubert Robling








The following chapter presents the main results of a work in progress intended to reconstruct the ideal of the orator in classical rhetoric.1 Classical rhetoric, or school rhetoric, is a theory that is mainly based on rhetorical handbooks from Greek and Roman antiquity, and more recent ones written up until the end of the eighteenth century. I shall give here only an outline without detailed references of the sources. My aim is not just the reconstruction of the concept of the orator, but also its application to problems in modern rhetorical research. In many scientific fields today, scholars speak of a crisis of historical consciousness and ask where the value of historical reflection lies. I try to provide a contribution to this question, first with the reconstruction of the concept of “the orator,” and, at the end of this chapter, with its application to the interpretation of a scene originating from one of the earliest ethnographic testimonies: the scene of a speech in Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World from 1777.




In classical rhetoric the orator is a technician, which means a practitioner of the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric refers to the art and science of effective speech, discourse, and prose. As an art, it pertains to the practice of speaking and writing; as a science, it refers to theory and function of both ways of expression. In former times, rhetoric was influential not only in the writing of prose, but also in poetry. Eloquence or oratory refers to the orator’s personal faculty for effec-

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tive speech and prose. It also refers to the manifestations of this faculty: a good discourse, or the oratorial quality of speaking and writing well. The orator is skilled in using the techniques of the art of effective speech. The practitioner of writing is known as the (prose) author. The teacher or professor of rhetoric is the rhetorician (Robling 1992). An important topic of the oratorial theory is the subjectivity of the speaker. His way of using the art relies on his perspective and his way of looking at things, because he wants to exert an impact and persuade people of his individual point of view. His speech expresses his opinion about the matter in question; it is one element in the line of all the other speeches dedicated to the matter. Therefore the orator is always interacting; he is responding to questions, situations, and impulses from the audience. This is especially true for deliberative and juridical oratory that deals with controversial topics. The orator is no scientist; his opinions and conclusions are generally not based on detailed and long-lasting research, but on common standards of thinking and on popular ideas. They aim at pragmatic results and at action, in order to fulfill the demands of the circumstances where the orator and the assembly find themselves (Ptassek 1992). Therefore, the orator very often relies on plausibility, not on epistemic truths about things and matters. He also knows that it is important to wait for the right moment for his speech—the kairós (Kinneavy/Eskin 1998: 836ff.). The perception of the kairós depends on his technical skill and his experience; it is an important presupposition for the ensuing persuasion. The Sophists were the first rhetoricians who conceived subjectivity as a condition of speech. Protagoras formulated the idea of relativism as the basic principle of speech and of a world in constant movement. Gorgias articulated the concept of the credible as the basic fact of speech, even in opposition to truth, because the world cannot be perceived in full reality. So for the early Sophists the power of speech was an instrument of the orator for shaping reality. This challenged philosophy, and Plato and Aristotle tried to restrict this stance by showing where the art of rhetoric had to be refined and where the boundaries of rhetorical argument lay. Nevertheless, the concept of rhetorical subjectivity did not lose its attractiveness even for philosophers. This can be shown for example in the works of Nietzsche, whose understanding of “Wille zur Macht” (“will to power”) was, as I have pointed out, influenced by sophist ideas (Robling 1996: 87ff.).




Theories about the origins of culture offer several reasons for the emancipation of mankind from nature. One is the invention of techniques such as, for example, the use of fire in the myth of Prometheus that Protagoras reports

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to us (Plato, Protagoras: 320d–322a). Another one is the founding of a state, as related by Aristotle (Aristotle, Politics I: 2). A third theory is the cultivation of nature by work, as is demonstrated in Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (Marx 1961: 90f., 192ff.). For rhetoric, human beings develop from nature and become cultivated through the use of language. Rhetorical culture as seen from the viewpoint of the orator is based on two related aspects (Robling 2000: 43ff.): the civilization of mankind and the formation of the individual. Speculations in antiquity about the origins of human sociality point out that, in the beginning, human beings lived, dispersed like animals, from the gifts of nature. Yet they felt the requirement to join up, and a wise man succeeded in bringing them together by persuasion: he convinced them of the advantages of social life. From now on, mankind began to plough the fields, founded cities, adopted religion, married, and enjoyed the benefits of law and justice. This is the version that Cicero gives; it dates back to sophistic ideas of the origins of culture (Cicero, De inventione I: 2ff; Nestle 1925: 250ff.). The important point here is that people were civilized by persuasion. So this is the basic fact of rhetorical civilization. It is connected with the assumption of antique theorists that man differs from the animals by the use of persuasive language (Aristotle, Politics I: 2, 1253a10). These topics are essential for a rhetorical theory of culture. The process of civilization does not only pertain to mankind as a whole but also to the individual. Isocrates points out that “whether men have been liberally educated from their earliest years is not to be determined by their courage or their wealth or such advantages, but is made manifest most of all by their speech, and that this has proved itself to be the surest sign of culture in every one of us” (Isocrates, Panegyricus: 49).2 This means that rhetorical education must repeat certain steps of human civilization in order to achieve the formation of the orator. The formula of “nature, art, exercise and imitation” describes the principles of rhetorical education: it starts with the understanding of talents and gifts of the pupil as natural condition and limit for the pedagogical efforts of the teacher. The art provides the rules for effective speech. Then it is up to the student to learn the precepts, to get to know the canonical models of oratory and how to imitate them, applying the rules at first in declamation, then in real situations of public life (Rhetorica ad Herennium I: 3, III: 29; Marrou 1957: 287ff., 415ff.). These ancient precepts became the essentials of European education. They were valid until the end of classical rhetoric in the eighteenth century and influenced also pedagogical theories of the following time. Rhetorical education determined culture as the salient distinctive mark of human civilization also in another sense: it produced cultural types of oratory that were related to specific uses of speech as for example in the

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juridical, political, epideictical, and ecclesiastical fields. Influences were palpable also in the type of the humanist scholar and of the courtier. The aim in all these aspects of oratory was the same: to fulfill the demands of the ideal orator. This concept dates back to Hellenistic times, was fully developed by Cicero, and later had a great impact especially in humanism. The cultural ideal at that time was primarily based on language use, either written or spoken, in all fields of formation. In the eighteenth century, the end of classicism as a doctrine of learning and aesthetics also brought the end of school rhetoric as a system of precepts for speaking and writing well. But this was, of course, not the end of rhetoric at all. It spread out to related disciplines as stylistics or argumentation; the concept of the ideal orator also survived in other fields, as for example in the political sphere.




As I have pointed out in the previous section, rhetorical culture starts from nature; it is a result of man dealing with nature around him and within him. Classical rhetoric speaks of human nature in respect to the listeners, or rather to their passions, and in respect to the orator. The natural state of the orator is a topic of anthropology, a discipline that came up as a university subject in the eighteenth century and that understands man as a unit of mind and body (Linden 1976: 1ff., 18ff.).3 According to classical rhetoric, the anthropological approach to the orator concerns his will to persuade, and his body as tool for persuasion. The orator’s will to persuade is of course the emotional equivalent of his subjectivity. It is, as far as I see, no distinct topic of rhetorical theory before Enlightenment (e.g., Gottsched 1973: 51, 53), though in a sense it is present in the understanding of persuasion, namely in the function of the orator’s emotional force, the vis oratoris (Quintilian X, 2: 12). Quintilian is a good example for this. In a chapter of his Institutio Oratoria, he states that the judges should not only assume the accused to be innocent, but they should also feel it and they should want to acquit him (Quintilian VI, 2: 5ff.). Quintilian’s intention is to show that the orator can be successful only when he arouses the emotions of the judges. But the speaker must stir up his own passions before; he must use his fantasy in order to find suggestive pictures for his ideas and to get into motion himself when he is speaking (Quintilian VI, 2: 26–31). No doubt, a hint to the will of the orator can be found here, though Quintilian does not name it. The reason for this is, I suppose, that antiquity did not possess the concept of the free human will. It was always related with the function of intellectual judgment so that decisions were thought to be connected with the absence or presence of insight. The concept of free will as an own authority of decision was first formulated by Augustine (Dihle 1985). Baroque rhetoric at least thought of an independent will (voluntas) of the listeners, as for ex-

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ample in the Systema rhetoricae of Bartholomäus Keckermann (Keckermann 1614: 9f., 12f.). The will of the orator was still not indicated here, but at least presupposed. The second element of the orator’s anthropology is the body. It acquires rhetorical function by delivery, its language, or eloquence (sermo corporis). Nature has supplied man with voice and gesture, and rhetoric makes tools for expression and persuasion out of them. This is the task of the art that the student has to learn. Accordingly, the nature of the orator may never be considered without thinking of cultural and therefore historical influences. A proof for that is the difference between the theories of delivery in the ages of Baroque and Enlightenment: what was required in the one as the utterance of great emotion and as good behavior, was condemned in the other as false and unnatural (Geitner 1992). So this aspect of rhetorical anthropology refers not only to culture but also to ethics, which cannot be separated from one another with regard to the perspective of the orator. The female speaker has never been a topic of classical rhetoric and should only become one in the light of modern anthropology and cultural theory. Classical rhetoric as an instrument of effective and good speech was not simply male-biased, but women were mostly excluded from the public sphere in European history before the beginning of the twentieth century and consequently also from the learning and use of rhetoric (Lunsford 1995). The complaints of female humanists for example show that the lack of education and formation was an important cause for the absence of rhetorical knowledge among women (King/Rabil 1983). The anthropological and cultural approach starting from the concept of the orator today can provide a tool for a better understanding of these deficiencies as created by gender. Then female rhetoric becomes a question not only of the usage of words but also of the socialization of women. Scholarly research can find out how nature, art, exercise, and imitation, as principles of rhetorical education, were and are still working together, which social types of female speakers were and are still accepted and which not, and where the female expression of rhetorical—i.e., persuasive—subjectivity differs from that of male orators.




Rhetorical ethics concerns the social actions of the orator and their impact. It is important to distinguish between two aspects of rhetorical ethics: custom and morality. Custom refers to a people’s way of life as established in the course of history. It comprises habits and good manners and is often linked to the values of tradition. In rhetoric, customs and good manners are called the decorum of speech. They reflect the above mentioned original act of civilization that mankind has accomplished when it separated itself from the world of the

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animals, founded cities, and began to live together and be ruled by law. They began to solve conflicts by negotiations and juridical procedures, based on the use of language and rhetoric instead of violence. In this way the speech and persuasion became matters of ethics. The second aspect of rhetorical ethics is the individual morality of the orator. It concerns his use of rhetorical technique in order to achieve persuasion. A speech has often far-reaching consequences for people, as many examples from history and present time show. The moral decision, as for what purpose he speaks and how far he goes in directing the thoughts and emotions of his audience, lies exclusively in the responsibility of the orator. Persuasive and moral subjectivity are thus merging here. Cicero shows at the beginning of De Inventione how personal morality and ethical culture of civilization are coinciding in the ideal of the good orator (I, 3: 4). One example of his description is Cato the Elder, a man of great reputation in Roman history, who was a good farmer, a great statesman, and a successful orator. He coined the sentence that the orator ought to be “a good man skilled in speaking well” (vir bonus dicendi peritus). This formula became the mark of ethical oratory in the following time until the eighteenth century and had originally been introduced into school rhetoric by Quintilian (Quintilian I, praef. 9, II, 15: 2; Monfasani 1992: 171ff.). A main topic of classical rhetoric is the theory of éthos, of the orator’s character, because it is one of the most eminent means of persuasion (Robling 1994: 1516ff.). According to Aristotle, who has given the fullest description of it, the oratorial éthos consists of prudence, morality and goodwill (Aristotle, Rhetoric: 1377b24ff.). This attitude must be shown by the speech itself. But the ethical problem of rhetoric arises in the demonstration of morality: is it really true what the orator says, or is his éthos based on pretension, and does his speech consist in nothing but words? The moral problem of the orator is the coincidence of words and reality, of speech and action. Plato criticized in his Gorgias dialogue that sophistic rhetoric preferred opinion rather than knowledge, so that the orator could not commit to the truth of things. Moreover, he had not only to pretend to be a good man, but ought to have indeed a good character, if his audience should not merely be seduced (Plato, Gorgias: 454d, 459a, 463a, b, 464b–465b, 503c–e, 504bf). Aristotle does not solve the problem in the same way as Plato did, because he treats the oratorial éthos only as a technical means of persuasion, though it is clear from the connection of his rhetorical theory to his ethics that in the long run the orator must show by his deeds whether his words really contain truth and reliability (Hellwig 1973: 278f.). Yet this is not to be understood in the moral sense, as we would have it today. That shows the attitude of antique philosophers and rhetoricians toward the lie. Plato and Quintilian defend it as a helpful means for the good to gain

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victory. Especially Quintilian, who was so eager to maintain the ideal of the orator as vir bonus, he shows in his argumentation that the concept of virtue for antique rhetoric primarily refers to the state of the community and only in second line to the character of the individual (Hellwig 1973: 306ff.; Quintilian II, 17: 26ff., IV, 1: 9.11.42ff., XII, 1: 33). While Socrates had already challenged this idea, in later antiquity it was moral philosophers such as Seneca and Christians such as Augustine who rejected the lie (Plato, Apology; Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 75: 4; Augustinus, De Mendacio). Moral philosophy of modern times, especially in the eighteenth century, ended up at last in the identification of morality only within the behavior of the individual. The result was, as especially Kant’s critique of rhetoric shows, that the rhetorical attempt to exercise influence by speech was suspected as manipulative. This bad reproach against rhetoric and oratory still exists today. Yet it cannot be denied that public life needs persuasion in order to come to practical solutions for the demands of society, which does not necessarily entail a defense of the lie. The law of public life is action, even though it cannot always be supported by epistemic certainty that remains a matter of philosophical contemplation. But the orator belongs to public life, and so the idea of the prevalence of vita activa and of utilitarianism to pursue one’s goals is also traditionally part of rhetorical ethics (Otto 1986: 350–60; Robling 2006).




In the end, let us take the perspective of a cultural anthropologist, one who asks for the usefulness of the classical concept of the orator for understanding other, non-European cultures. It is the perspective of Georg Forster, as demonstrated in the following short passage of his Voyage Round the World, 4 June 1773, after breakfast: We went … on deck and saw [a] canoe about a musket shot from us, containing twenty-eight men, making towards our sloop, which from her size they probably took to be the commanding one. Our friends on board [a family of natives from New Zealand] very earnestly told us they would be our enemies, and persisted to fire at them; nay Towahanga, the head of the family jumped on the arm chest, which was placed on our quarter deck, and taking hold of a stick, made a number of warlike motions with it, and soon after spoke to them very violently, but with some degree of solemnity, at the same time brandishing, as it seemed in defiance, a large hatchet of green nephritic stone, which he had never shewn us before. In the mean time the canoe approached, without taking much notice of our friend, whom we persuaded at last to be silent. Two people of a fine stature, one at the stern, and another about the middle of the canoe stood upright, while all the rest continued seated. The

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former had a perfect black cloak of the close-wrought kind, patched in compartments with dog-skin; he held a green plant of the New Zeeland flag in his hand, and now and then spoke a few words. But the other pronounced a long speech well articulated, loud, and very solemn, and gave his voice great variety of falls and elevations. From the various tones in which he spoke, and a few gestures with which he accompanied his words, he appeared by turns to question, to boast, to threaten, to challenge, and to persuade us; he was sometimes running on in a moderate tone, then all at once breaking out into violent exclamations; after which he made short pauses in order to recover his breath. Having finished his oration, he was invited to come on board by the captain, who came to the ship’s side. (1968: 139)

Forster and his companions did not understand what was said in the speeches of the natives. Possibly they listened to two sorts of addresses: a warning and a friendly one, though the second, too, included some inclement elements (Salmond 1974: 192ff.). Also today we do not know exactly what was communicated. But it is not relevant for my purpose because I want to demonstrate the intercultural pattern of rhetoric that the orator-concept advises us to look for (Knape 2000; Robling 2007).4 The initial question is: which forms of custom and which manners of the speaker define a situation of an initial meeting that demands an address? What use of rites is linked to such a situation when for example the warrior brandished his hatchet during the speech? Here we can get a first understanding of the orator’s ethics. Furthermore: what function do his body, his gestures, and clothing have? What about the personal attitudes of the speaker toward the addressee, his means of persuasion from questioning to conjuring, his use of magical word power? The means of persuasion and the word power result from his will to exercise influence on his listeners. The orator’s subjectivity as basis of his agency is in question here, the manner, how he effectively communicates his perspective and his way of looking at things. The analytical value of this orator-concept in anthropology refers primarily to face-to-face communication as described in the quoted passage from Forster’s report. Stephen Tyler (chapter 15, this volume) criticizes this as restrictive. He states that today “we are often addressed as accidental audiences by ‘subject-less agents’” in modern technologies of mass media-communication used by commercial advertising or governmental information. While “impersonal agency” often disguised by “tropes of personification” is a fact, we must distinguish between the lack of bodies and the lack of subjectivity in communication. Even if there are no individuals to be seen, there is still a specific interest lying behind media-communication coming from the government or the respective company. The orator-concept emphasizes that persuading agents are always exercising influence by communicating their perspective

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on things and matters. If we renounce to refer to “orators” in rhetorical communication, we lose the tools to analyze the impact of messages.5 Of course, the rhetorical actions of personal or impersonal agents require different models of interpretation. In face-to-face communication we find body, gestures, and clothing as means of persuasion that are in line with the speech. In mass media-communication we have to look for the techniques that design the appearance of bodies, voices, and words, and we have to pay attention to the social or political groups that spend money for these techniques and products. Their will to persuade and their interests in the background of communication acts remains a fact. So the orator-model of classical rhetoric may be adapted and even extended to different communicative forms of culture. References Aristotle. 1977. Politics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1975. Rhetoric. Trans. John Henry Freese. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Augustinus. 1948. “De Mendacio, Contra Mendacium.” In Oeuvres de St. Augustin, 1èr série: Opuscules, II: Problèmes Moraux, ed. Gustave Combès. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Cicero. 1960. De Inventione: De Optimo Genere Oratorum. Topica. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Dihle, Albrecht. 1985. Die Vorstellung vom Willen in der Antike. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Forster, Georg. 1968. G. Forsters Werke: Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe. Ed. Georg Steiner. Berlin (GDR): Akademie. Geitner, Ursula. 1992. Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum Rhetorischen und Anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18 Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Gottsched, Johann Christoph. 1973 [1736]. Ausführliche Redekunst: Nach Anleitung der alten Griechen und Römer wie auch der neueren Ausländer. Reprint. Hildesheim, New York: Olms. Hellwig, Antje. 1973. Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Rhetorik bei Platon und Aristoteles. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Isocrates. 1980. “Panegyricus.” In Isocrates, Vol. 1. Trans. George Norlin. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Keckermann, Bartholomäus. 1614. “Systema Rhetoricae.” In Opera Quae Extant. Vol. 2. La Roche-sur-Foron. King, Margaret L., and Alber Rabil, Jr., eds. 1983. Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy. Binghamton, NY: Pegasus Press. Kinneavy, James L., and Catherine R. Eskin. 1988. “Kairos.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (HWRh), vol. 4, ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Knape, Joachim. 2000. Was ist Rhetorik? Stuttgart: Reclam. Linden, Mareta. 1976. Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegriff des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Lang.

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Lunsford, Andrea A., ed. 1995. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh, London: University of Pittsburgh Press. Marrou, Henri Irénée. 1957. Geschichte der Erziehung im klassischen Altertum. Freiburg, Munich: dtv. Marx, Karl. 1961. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie Bd.1. Berlin (GDR). Monfasani, John. 1992. “Episodes of Anti-Quintilianism in the Italian Renaissance: Quarrels on the Orator as a vir bonus and Rhetoric as the scientia bene dicendi.” Rhetorica 10 (2): 119–38. Nestle, Wilhelm. 1925. Vom Mythos zum Logos. Stuttgart: Kröner. Otto, Stephan, ed. 1986. Renaissance und frühe Neuzeit: Geschichte der Philosophie in Text und Darstellung. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Reclam. Plato. 1966. Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras. Vols. 1, 2, 3. Trans. Harold North Fowler et al. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Ptassek, Peter, et al. 1992. Macht und Meinung: Die rhetorische Konstitution der politischen Welt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Quintilianus, M. F. 2001. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Rhetorica ad Herennium. 1989. Trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press. Robling, Franz-Hubert. 1992. “Ars.” “Beredsamkeit.” In HWRh, vol. 1, ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1994. “Ethos.” In HWRh, vol. 2, ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1996. “Plastische Kraft: Versuch über rhetorische Subjektivität bei Friedrich Nietzsche.” Nietzsche-Studien 25: 86–98. ———. “Rhetorische Begriffsgeschichte und Kulturforschung beim ‘Historischen Wörterbuch der Rhetorik.’” In Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte, ed. Gunter Scholtz. Hamburg: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. ———. 2003. “Anthropologie des Redners.” In homo inveniens: Heuristik und Anthropologie am Modell der Rhetorik, eds. Stefan Metzger and Wolfgang Rapp. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. ———. 2005. “Redner, Rednerideal.” In HWRh, vol. 7, ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 2006. “Utilitarianism and Morality of the Orator in Quintilian.” In Papers on Rhetoric VII, ed. Lucia Calboli Montefuseo. Rome: Herder Editrice. ———. 2007. Redner und Rhetorik. Hamburg: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Salmond, Anne. 1974. “Rituals of Encounter among the Maori: Sociolinguistic Study of a Scene.” In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, eds. Richard Baumann and Joel Sherzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seneca. 1989. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.

Notes 1. The title of the project: “Redner und Rhetorik: Studien zur Begriffs- und Ideengeschichte des Rednerideals” (Hamburg 2007). A more detailed outline is given in the chapter “Redner, Rednerideal,” in Robling (2005b: 862ff.). 2. The Greek word for culture is here paideusis (sign of culture: sýmbolon tes paideúseones).

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3. Rhetorical anthropology is here not to be understood in a philosophical sense. For a criticism of this version of anthropology, that is represented by Hans Blumenberg, cf. Robling (2003: 75ff ). 4. For a pragmatical concept of the orator from the aspect of rhetorical communication, see Knape (2000); for critique from the cultural aspect see Robling (2007: 20ff.). 5. Tyler refuses the idea of impact as the goal of rhetoric, as he pointed out in a discussion at the first Rhetoric Culture Conference in Mainz. He said that rhetoric depending on and using the ever changing circumstances of speech causes ambiguity and uncertainty. Yet this is no rhetorical point of view but a skeptical concept derived from rhetoric. It comes from Protagoras and his theory of relativism. Tyler makes a universal principle of it to understand the world; but this is philosophy, not rhetoric. The rhetorical perspective refers to the question how to use ambiguity to attack the position of the opponent and to win the audience, and not all of it, only the majority. So this is a practical, not a philosophical problem.

CHAPTER 13

Rhetoric, Anti-Structure, and the Social Formation of Authorship 1

James Thomas Zebroski








Authorship and the Postmodern Moment We live in an age of ambiguity. At one and the same time, the cultures that we inherit at the start of the twenty-first century in Western Europe and North America are committed to and skeptical of Enlightenment discourses. The Enlightenment values of neutrality and objectivity in scholarship, of methodological rigor and purity, of scientific method, of disciplinarity, of professionalism, of progress narratives, of grand narrative and grand theory, but also of a static, clearly demarcated, and bounded subject, who acts as a kind of atom of a similarly static, clearly demarcated, and bounded nation-state—all are in question. But at the same time it is hard to see how we have really left these and other Enlightenment practices. Even the popularity of post-structural theory in US English departments has largely left intact an apparatus for organizing our work, an apparatus that has retained categories like literary period, genre, and author. At best, theory has called into question these concepts, but in the process has too often extended entrenched disciplines rather than dismantled them. What one might call “authorship studies” has arisen in the United States, largely in English studies, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, in a similarly ambiguous manner. Donald Pease argues that authorship studies have come to the fore in part because they highlight power relations that had been neglected in the study of texts given the formalism of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

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Unlike other works referring to a writer’s activities—such as essayist, or poet, or dramatist—the term author raises questions about authority and whether the individual is the source or the effect of that authority. It derives from the medieval term auctor, which denoted a writer whose words commanded respect and belief (Pease 1995: 105). The idea of auctor then comes from the pre-Enlightenment world where there is no progress narrative of humankind, a world where authorities, the elders, and the ancients are the authors and a writer simply transcribes and assembles what the authorities already in some sense knew. The post-structural critique of the subject was certainly a factor in questioning the concept of author. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s response “What is an Author” had become ubiquitous by the mid 1980s. As Michael North notes, “the single most influential contemporary statement on authorship is still the obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago. … If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it” (2001: 1377). What North goes on to show, however, is that Barthes’s earliest publication of the essay in English was in a photography and multimedia collection Aspen in the Fall/Winter 1967 issue. This is highly significant, as is the disappearance of this fact. Aspen critiqued traditional art (and disciplinarity) by being not a conventional journal but rather “a box in which loose pamphlets, recordings, art projects, diagrams, and films were collected together” (2001: 1378). So even with what English scholars consider the start of a sort of canon of authorship studies, we espy the ambiguity of a discipline (English studies) appropriating and occulting what had not been simply a critique of the author of writing, but of established disciplinary categories for understanding writing and art. But as crucial as theory has been to questioning the subject and hence the author, we must not neglect the material forces also at work. Socioeconomic forces have had a heavy hand in this matter. Obviously, the increasing importance of the Internet and electronic authorship in the 1990s, and the tandem questioning of intellectual property rights and copyright laws, has encouraged the reworking of the concept of author. But the early phase of authorship studies was well under way in the 1980s before the Internet became popular. We must turn to socioeconomic changes that put pressure on “authorship” to add another level of material analysis. Surely, the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist regimes of capital (also called flexible accumulation) that has been ongoing since the early 1970s must have had effects on theory, the Internet and electronic authorship, and author practices and study. As David Harvey shows us in The Condition of Postmodernity, there is an interrelation between the dynamic of post-Fordism (flexible accumulation) and changes in the aesthetic

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(1989: 156). The category of author is but one relatively stable structure—both of labor and aesthetics—that the new work order (Gee) must see redesigned. The category of author must persist to delineate capitalist property rights, yet modernist notions of the author as an independent source of rigidly bounded texts must also be eliminated to fit more precisely in the global reorganization of capital. New authorship practices began to develop in the US gay male community after the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Before this time writers rarely envisioned themselves as gay writers, but rather as writers who happened to be gay. The very idea of a section of a chain bookstore devoted to books of gay literature or books by gay authors is a social construction of the last forty years. The authorship practices can be seen to be developing during this time largely in countercultural publications of the 1960s and 1970s in certain cities in the United States. These practices are still evolving. Many of these changes in authorship were ultimately unsuccessful. Yet at least one set of authorship practices has succeeded. This chapter takes the social formation of gay authorship as one example—within living memory—of the more general process of authorship formation. To set the stage for the study of gay authorship, I forward the following argument: 1. The Appeal of Rhetoric. The concept of authorship benefits from the incorporation of rhetoric into the work. But I also note that while we can make great use of rhetorical studies focusing on the body and the processes of identification (and hence, authorship), there are tendencies in current rhetorical work toward individualism, formalism, and an acceptance of the status quo that we often find in traditional rhetoric. To counter these formalist trends, we also need a dynamic notion of culture. 2. Culture Theory for Cultural Rhetoric: Victor Turner’s anti-structure cultural theory, especially his work on social structure and social antistructure—he calls the latter communitas—provides a corrective to some of the Enlightenment and formalist tendencies of rhetoric. Turner argues that social structure must be seen as a process reproduced constantly, momentarily. Social structure is an effect of social anti-structure. According to Turner, anti-structure can be seen in liminal moments of equality, in countercultural movements, and in rites of passage that seal off “dangerous” antistructure within the walls of accepted ritual processes. 3. The Social Formation of Gay Identity and Authorship. Authorship can be seen as part of a collective rhetorical and cultural process of formation arising from a moment of social anti-structure. I provide one frame that integrates these understandings that I apply to the social formation of gay writing.

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4. Gay Male Authorship in the Post-Stonewall USA. I present published literary material as well as some archival materials that support my claim that authorship came out of a liminal, anti-structural moment in US and gay history and that several possible alternative kinds of authorship that existed in the early 1970s were eventually abandoned for more conventional understandings.

Throughout this chapter, I assume a working definition of authorship as “all of those practices that connect writing, identity (collective as well as individual), and power relations.”

The Appeal of Rhetoric If we are to study the social formation of gay authorship over the last forty years or so, we need a concept of rhetoric that helps us to theorize the local, the specific texts and values that emerged in the post-Stonewall period. There are several reasons for the current appeal of rhetoric to scholars working in the human sciences. Rhetoric would seem to provide a readymade approach for analyzing culture in terms important for postmodernism. Rhetoric like postmodern thought is more concerned with probability rather than certainty, with community commonplaces and values rather than the search for absolute truth. Rhetoric has less need for a grand progress narrative, since it tends to focus on specific situations, trying to understand text as unique performance rather than part of some wider universal law. The tendency of rhetoric to focus on maxims or on shorthand formulations for action is not far from the little stories that we are told supplant the grand narratives, including that of human progress, in the postmodern moment. Writers find rhetoric appealing for the view that writing is more the assemblage of pre-existing materials, more a temporary bounding and stabilizing of the inter-textual materials under the byline of an author, and tethered to situation, than a divinely inspired creation of a genius from nothing. The rhetorical idea of topoi, of locations or places one goes in order to gather these materials out of which one constructs argument and trope, sort of the treasure house of a culture’s commonplaces, has a seemingly concrete realization in the Internet and the links that we put into our websites. But rhetoric also seems quite postmodern in its lack of interest in the origins and in singular, linear cause and effects, stressing instead effects of discourse regardless of their no doubt overdetermined “origins.” The body—including text as embodiment as well as the materialization of ideas and the book as embodiment of texts—ever since Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” has either been made invisible or has

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been reduced to merely a vehicle carrying the more important soul. Rhetoric has contested this, making a place for at least some consideration of the body in the rhetor’s use of gesture and nonverbal communication. Finally, the postmodernist focus on fragmented identity and multiple subject positions seems to be paralleled by rhetoric’s long running concern with identification (Kenneth Burke). Yet is rhetoric postmodern? Stanley Fish thinks so, arguing that rhetoric has for over two thousand and five hundred years had a long-running battle with philosophy about anti-foundationalism, whether there are any absolutes on which human conduct can and should be premised. Fish sees this as the crux of postmodernity, and he argues hat rhetoric has consistently taken this stance. In the twentieth century, Fish tracks rhetoric and its anti-foundationalism through the work of a variety of scholars. The full story of rhetoric’s twentieth century resurgence would boast among his cast of characters: Kenneth Burke, whose “dramatism” anticipates so much of what is considered avant garde today; Wayne Booth, whose The Rhetoric of Fiction was so important in legitimizing the rhetorical analysis of the novel; Mikhail Bakhtin, whose contrast of monologic to dialogic and heteroglossic discourse sums up so many of the strands in the rhetorical tradition; Roland Barthes, who in the concept of “jouissance” makes a (non)constitutive principle of the tendency of rhetoric to resist closure and extend play; the ethnomethodologists (Harold Garfinkel and company), who discover in every supposedly rule-bound context the operation of a principle (exactly the wrong word) of “ad hoc-ing;” Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, whose The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation provides a sophisticated modern sourcebook for would-be rhetoricians weary of always citing Aristotle. Still, might this need to see a long-running and overarching argument with a consistent and stable rhetoric taking the anti-foundationalist stance for over two thousand and five hundred years itself be a sort of grand narrative that is fairly foundational and modernist? Can we claim that simply because rhetoric and postmodernity share so many qualities that they are identical or at least not mutually contradictory? James Comas (2001: 341f.) takes up this line of argument and sees the dovetailing of postmodernism and rhetoric to be more the result of the fact that both share an anti-modernist philosophy. Comas notes: “The main difficulty in examining the relationship between the concept of rhetoric and postmodernity lies in determining the extent to which a postmodern thinking of rhetoric can be distinguished from the antimodernist current that characterizes rhetorical theory in the modern age. The root of antimodernist rhetorical theory is Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione, originally presented as the convocation address to the University of Naples in 1708” (translated and published in English as On

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the Study of Methods of Our Time). Drawing on recent work by Gianni Vattimo, Comas concludes that this issue is far from certain. Comas finds in Vattimo and others a possible connection through the concept of post-history (posthistoire from Vattimo—drawing on Arnold Gehlen). For Vattimo, the postmodern is characterized by experience of the twentieth-century culture of “the end of history,” the sense that the future no longer holds anything genuinely new. Progress has come to be regarded as a routine secularizing of Christian ideals and the increasingly rapid rate of technological advances deflates the impact of the “new.” Still, Vattimo evaluates rhetoric as a closed system that does not fit with the openness of postmodern insistence on the uniqueness of each and every event. Comas concludes that at this time the issue remains undecided: “It would seem, then, that concept of rhetoric is not circumscribed entirely by modernity. And it remains to be seen how it might be used in developing a postmodern philosophy of event” (2001: 345).

Culture Theory for Cultural Rhetoric: Victor Turner’s Anti-Structure Rhetoric takes the situation given as its start. Yet doing so runs the risk of simply working within, rather than against, the established social structures. To be sure, working within and against discourses go together. But there is a tendency in existing rhetorical approaches to accept the status quo for now, working with what we have, and save the work against the status quo for a more opportune time that sometimes never comes. This is why we need the work of the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. He shows us in fairly precise terms how the existing situation (and its rhetoric) is embedded in a social structure that itself is a process that incorporates anti-structural elements. Turner’s work then supplements and corrects rhetoric’s blind spot, its tendency to reduce all situations, as diverse as they be, to a given situation in an existing social structure. Turner provides a way to simultaneously see ourselves both in and out of the social structure and discursive limits of our culture. Further, he provides a collective rather than individualist means for doing this. Victor Turner, of course, does not dismiss social structure and its effects. In his work, including the key book The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (1969), social structure is important certainly, but there’s a lot more to culture and institutions than simply social structure. Ritual, for example. Symbols. Moments of collective insight. Phatic moments. Epiphanies, both social and individual. And Turner argues, these two tendencies of institutional gravitation, of institutional pull and push, are related: “social life is a type of dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, com-

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munitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality” (1969: 96f.). Turner spends a good deal of his book The Ritual Process exploring these liminal moments of equality, these breaks in the social structure that sometimes are incorporated as regular events in a society and sometimes simply erupt into history and take people totally unawares. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions (1969: 95). Turner’s work then keeps rhetoric a cultural rhetoric rather than a formalist rhetoric. His work reminds us continually that a rhetoric is part and parcel of its location within the social structure and what usually is viewed as the rhetoric of a culture is on closer examination seen to be the rhetoric of those who have power within that culture and social structure. Turner argues that “liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, philosophical systems and works of art” (1969: 128). It is this symbolic aspect of antistructure, the attempt, doomed to failure, to try to articulate, to put into symbols including words, an experience of oneness with others and often the universe, that cannot be worded, cannot be symbolized, which interests us and in which we find the embryo of shifts of authorship, a movement from the death of authorship to the rebirth of new forms of authoring and authorship. The spontaneity, immediacy, now (Turner’s words, 1969: 113) of this moment, correspond surprisingly well with Roland Barthes’s description of the social structures of authorship being dissolved and dying, and his other famous characterization of writing as sexual pleasure and orgasm. Sex, like the very inscribing of a text and the social construction of authorship, for the moment and at the moment, “emerges where social structure is not” (1969: 26). Turner in his later work pursues his studies of anti-structure into other cultures and into our own time. He notes that communitas often cuts right across tribal and national divisions and can be found especially early on before socialization by the larger culture takes place, in millennial movements, in the movement of Francis of Assisi, and most germane to this study in the hippie movement and the counterculture of the 1960s. Writing in the late 1960s Turner observes that “in modern Western society, the values of communitas are strikingly present in the literature and behavior of what came to be known as the ‘beat generation’ who were succeeded by the ‘hippies’. … While our focus here is on traditional preindustrial societies it becomes clear that the collective dimensions, communitas and structure, are to be found at all stages and levels of culture and society” (1969: 112f.).

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And what Ethan Mordden in his Buddies series of novels simply calls Stonewall, that anti-structural social formation that he records, participates in, and, to this day, advocates for, has its very beginnings in precisely the counterculture and its communitas that Turner describes.

The Social Formation of Gay Authorship The social formation’s stage of development strongly influences the construction of personal and social identity, the construction of the body as emblem of society, and the construction of authorship. A social formation of gay authorship and authorship practices can be said to develop through four stages:

1. Proto-Community, or The Unconscious Collective Stage This is the long historical moment when individuals as individuals are unconsciously developing a felt sense that existing social structures are increasingly failing to address critical newly arising needs. Individuals in their own pursuits are also beginning to make contact with like-minded others. This is the moment when keywords begin to emerge and embody far more than it seems possible to fully articulate. In the US gay community, this is a period from World War II through the 1960s, when large numbers of people were mobilized into the armed services, saw parts of the world they never would otherwise have seen, discovered there were other gay people, and began the great migration to the large and more tolerant urban centers and debarkation ports such as San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. It is no accident, then, that these ports became, twenty-five years later, some of the largest and most visible gay communities in the US (Katz 1995). The writers of this stage of the social formation tend to anticipate the more conscious articulation of identity in the next stage of social formation; yet they often do not, at this time, identify themselves as strictly as “gay authors” in this social formation. So for example, Gore Vidal wrote The City and The Pillar in 1948, yet did not, and does not, see himself as a “gay writer” but rather as a writer who happens to be gay, writing occasionally about gay themes and experiences. Christopher Isherwood wrote A Single Man in 1964, and as prophetic as this book is, it is hard to classify it as being a part of Mordden’s “Stonewall,” the social formation that emerged in the 1970s. John Rechy provides a nice case of writing straddling the generations. His City of Night, published in 1962, chronicles the seedy world of a hustler. While it deals with gay content from a gay perspective, it is only with Rechy’s The

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Sexual Outlaw (published in 1977, but set a few years previous) that we see a fusion of individual identity (the gay protagonist) and social identity (a gay movement, community, social formation explicitly related to Stonewall). In this stage of collective unconscious identity, then, motifs are circulating mostly in talk and deeds. In a sense, the community does not yet have a fully articulated and widely accepted identity, regardless of how fully developed the identity of certain individuals.

2. The Myth-Making First Generation Stage An event occurs that serves to crystallize the process of social formation. Out of this event, itself later retrojected as a mythic origin, come individuals in community, authoring texts. Later, these individuals (and their work) will themselves take on mythic status. The great insight of this stage occurs when members of the social formation begin to see themselves and then their world primarily in terms of affiliation with the social formation. This is the period when what the social formation calls itself, what name and, hence, identity it chooses, rather than what society labels it, becomes important. Crystallizing events (plural) during this period are later reinterpreted and one is tapped as the origin of the social formation. In the US gay community, the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 have often, well after the fact, been constructed as the mythic origin, though many other events could be tapped. It is interesting to see Andrew Holleran, perhaps the preeminent “member” of the Violet Quill Club, fiddling with the dates and, by implication, the historical narrative of the social formation in varied editions of his book Dancer from the Dance.2 In these cases, there are difficulties labeling an origin because allegiances in the second stage of the formation are still mixed, if more conscious and articulated. Many of the gay writers of the 1970s went through creative writing programs (University of Iowa, for example). For them, there was a continuing contradiction between believing you were a creative writer who wrote universal truths and made art, versus affiliating yourself wholly with the gay community and identifying your writing with its concerns, experiences, language, and readers. The questions of this stage include: What does it mean to say one is a gay writer? What might gay writing and gay literature look like?

3. The Revolt of the Second-Generation Stage Every social formation reaches a crisis point by the time of the second generation. As the social formation continues to grow and solidify, a crisis of authority begins as a new generation takes over power positions and exercises its

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prerogatives. There tends to be tension between generations, often breaking out into open revolt. This is the moment when establishing credentials in terms of authority is key, and this is the moment when it begins to get very important who said what and who “owns” what in writing. This is the moment when histories are needed, though the histories written during this period tend to tell more about the conditions of this stage than about supposed events of the generations before. In the social formation of Stonewall, the beginning of ACT-UP, Queer Nation, the very use of term queer itself an affront to the previous generation of “gays,” signifies the revolt of the second generation. Around 1985 or so, we can begin to see the accumulation of several forces that explode in this second generation revolt. Above all, the impact of AIDS, which had been decimating gays all through the early 1980s, became clear to US society at large through the media coverage of Rock Hudson’s sickness and then death from AIDS as well as his outing, in July and August of 1985. The apparent willingness of the larger society to allow gay men to die in huge numbers without even notice, let alone concern, action, or remorse, is perhaps the shaping event of this second generation of gays. Given the conditions of extermination—in the Normal Heart in 1985, Larry Kramer called it a holocaust—gay identity was no longer a matter of strictly personal choice, but a public necessity embodied in the slogan “We’re queer. We’re here. Get used to it.”

4. Third-Generation Consolidation and After By this point, the social formation has either fragmented or it has constructed new means for sustaining its identity. If it has fragmented, one fragment may predominate and erase all other traces of other parts of the social formation. Such absolute, enforced boundaries either bring to a close a certain corpus of writing that becomes canonized (the writing of the Violet Quill Club is closed even for the three surviving members) or provide an impetus to break off and compose a new social formation.

Gay Male Authorship in Post-Stonewall USA The social formation theory described in the last section, embedded in a cultural rhetoric, allows us to see the development of dynamic phenomenon that otherwise would be considered unimportant. This theory makes visible the outburst of writing, publishing, and even graphic art that the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s created. In 1972 we can see a visual paraphrase

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of this when we examine the cover of The Gay Insider: USA, by John Francis Hunter, an early 630-page treasure trove of information about Stonewall culture. The cover of this guide, surely one of the first trade books on gay culture, put out by Stonehill (a division of Dell Publishing), shows a nude male figure in silhouette on bended knee, releasing a similarly silhouetted dove of peace. When we look at the beginnings of many gay publications in the San Francisco Bay Area, we also can see their start in the counterculture. “Free presses” sprung up all over the country.3 Free alternative newspapers, pamphlets, political tracks and broadsides, magazines, record album covers, and then even books, suddenly—within a couple of years—take over the scene. Some of these materials have been preserved in archives; a few can be found in libraries and in microfilmed serials like the San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. Most have been lost to history. In 1972 Sasha Gregory, writing in the San Francisco alternative newspaper Gay Pride, notes that “in one year after the riot, there were more than sixty new gay organizations calling themselves after the riots in the front-line struggle for gay rights, the Gay Liberation Front” (1972: 8). Gregory continues, “Today most major cities have two, three, five, or more gay groups, sometimes at odds with each other, each speaking a different rhetoric, each striving for gay liberation through its own tactics and philosophies, each serving the specialized needs and interests of its members.” The explosion of gay groups is paralleled by the proliferation of writings and publications. What is most striking about these writings is the energy put into them. Allen Young, writing as a co-editor with Karla Jay of After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Women, recalls those days, reflecting on them only a couple of years later in 1975: It’s hard to remember all the details of those days in late 1969 and early 1970 when my consciousness was overwhelmed—my mind blown—by the ideas of gay liberation. What gay writers wrote then was very important to me. I especially remember an interview with members of the New York Gay Liberation Front published in Rat, articles by Konstantin Berlondt which were published in the Berkeley Tribe, and which were reprinted by Liberation News Service, and Carl Wittman’s classic “Gay Manifesto,” initially published as an article in the San Francisco Free Press which was shown to me by Jimmy Fourett in his apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City in December of 1969. (1975: ix)

In one of the early uses of the term gay writer, Young connects the exuberance of the social formation with the birth of a new kind of author, not simply the author who happened to be gay, but rather the “gay author” who writes out of gay life for gay readers. I do not want to reduce the movement or counterculture, let alone gay liberation, to writing and to the forging of new authorial

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forms, but it is difficult to deny the extensive evidence, a fraction of which was preserved we can be sure. Never since has so much writing happened so suddenly and momentously onto the scene. This renaissance in alternative writing would fill volumes. Much of it is high quality. Much of it is not distinguished from “artwork.” Creative writing is not distinguished from expository writing, and nearly all of it is a part of the forming of communities and collectives. It all is intertangled and interwoven and is just splendid. Laud Humphries captures this spirit at one of the earliest New York City gay parades commemorating Stonewall on 27 June 1971: It is a humid Sunday, and the sun now shines clearly, the temperature rising up into the 80s. Marchers pass beer and orange slush, canteens and cokes, along the lines. The camaraderie is deep and blatant, with much embarrassing embracing, kissing, and hand-holding both between and within sexual divisions. There is an unmistakable sense of jubilation and victory among the demonstrators—a spirit I seldom felt in six years of civil rights and peace marches … this time there is the spirit of dance, a ritual exorcism of the city’s sexual hypocrisy. (1972: 3)

Charles Shively, who wrote for Fag Rag in Boston a few years later in 1975, describes how hopes especially rested in the new publications: “Somehow all the hopes of the gay liberation front have come to be pinned on a few magazines like Amazon Quarterly, Lesbian Tide, Body Politic, Detroit Liberator, Gay Sunshine, and Fag Rag. Almost through no choosing of our own, we have become a national publication” (1975: 239). Thus a clear liaison is constructed between the movement and new forms of authorship. In tracking these texts, we observe the break in the old social structure, the flood of liminality and communitas, the start of a collective—a social formation—and the development of that social formation and its forms of authorship. It is extremely significant that early in this social formation, writing is anonymous; rarely are authorlines attached to documents. The old form of authorship has died and the new forms of authorship have yet to solidify. Early publications even change their names frequently. One example is the San Francisco Free Press (1969), which seems to have become in 1970 the San Francisco Gay Free Press, which becomes Gay Pride, which becomes Gay Pride Crusader, which becomes San Francisco Crusader, which becomes Crusader: Voice of West Coast Gay Liberation, which begets West Coast Crusader, which begets Gay Crusader News, which begets Crusader, which begets the San Francisco Crusader—which is the name of the publication in 1977. In seven years the alternative newspaper has undergone, as near as I can tell, nine changes in name. This reflects a variety of things, but certainly one of them is the instability of alternative publishing. I believe this also points to instabilities in newly emerging forms of authorship. Shively says

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as much later in his article “Getting It Together: A View of Fag Rag,” which says much about the state of these changing relations in 1975 and the choices facing those involved in such forms and forums. Should we become a professional journal of opinion—sort of the New York Review of Books/Encounter/Commentary for gay liberation? Doesn’t the “dignity” of gay liberation require something more slick and impressive than Fag Rag has been? … “Professionalism” also involves what kind of writing gets published. It means “high quality” writing: no half-digested, sloppy, lackadaisical work which would be rejected if we did not know the author The professional also seeks “brand names” like Gore Vidal or W.H. Auden. These names inevitably sell more papers because they are known and people want to know more about celebrities. (1975: 239f., emphasis added)

Shively considers the consequences and perils of “going professional”: “Nor are our readers trained to accept an article by content rather than by the identity of the author. In the early issues we did not include by-lines; everyone’s name was simply listed in alphabetical order at the beginning of the paper. But our audience best responds to big names and a paper must always be shaped by social context—the society out of which it arises. We can criticize that society but at the same time we are caught in it” (1975: 232, emphasis added). So at least by 1975, “we” are caught in a contradiction between social formation and “professionalism.” Almost simultaneously, in 1976, the very professional gay publication Christopher Street begins in New York City and publishes mostly “creative writing.” One can track these shifts in author formations over the next twenty-five years as a creative writing ideology coming from US creative writing programs, especially the University of Iowa, begins to take over and shape gay writing, especially gay novels. AIDS shatters the creative writer ideology’s hegemony by 1985 since it cannot adequately deal with, or represent, the magnitude of the crisis and of the despair. Around 1986 or so, the idea begins to circulate in the gay centers that in retrospect, disillusion had begun to set in well before AIDS and had begun to shape gay writing even by the late 1970s. J. Michael Clark, in his fine pioneering study Liberation and Disillusionment: The Development of Gay Male Criticism and Popular Fiction in the Decade after Stonewall, notes that there was a “change,” perhaps even a temporary “decline” in gay novel writing in the early 1970s after Stonewall. He says: The late 1960s witnesses the emergence of gay presses and an increasing quantity, if not quality, of more open and explicit gay novels. Changes in the fiction and its quality depended in large part on the general coming out of the gay community because as liberation and politicization of gay persons

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enabled sexual issues to become less shocking and coming out to become less individually traumatic, gays who no longer needed the vicarious outlet of fiction turned to other competing media (nonfiction, theatre, and film) for pleasure and information. From the standpoint of the mid-seventies Austen even feared the total disintegration of “distinctively homosexual fiction.” (1987: 30f.)

For Clark, the decline begins in 1977 and 1978 with three events—the fire at the Everard Baths in New York City with its “resultant gay deaths [which] reproved the frenzy of some post-Stonewall gay lifestyles” (1987: 33), Anita Bryant’s anti-gay victory in Florida, and the 1978 assassination of the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk. The “advocacy fiction” of the early 1970s was replaced with what Clark terms “non-propagandistic openness” of work which naturalized gayness, criticized its excesses from within the community, or was crossover writing that included gay, but also straight elements. This fits well with what the characters in Paul Reed’s Longing say. This novel published in 1988 looks back on the events of the late 1970s and early 1980s from the point of view of a small group of gay men who are friends and lovers in San Francisco at this time. At one point that night I stopped short, pulled Keith close beside me for security and took a deep breath, “I never imagined …” I started to say, but he only smiled. “Yes, I suppose,” he mused, “but really it’s nothing like it used to be, even all of this …” He waved his arm about, “even all of this is not as it used to be. Just a couple of years ago, I guess about the time of Dreamland opened and closed, there was more … how do I say it? … more joie de vivre.” … “What I meant to say was that it was more fun than this when it was all so new. But that was before the fall of the gay community. … Look, they shot Harvey Milk, okay?” (1988: 70)

Yet it was more than the “fall” of the gay community—certainly this was news to this youthful protagonist, not to mention those who lived in places not in the big coastal urban centers. This shift was more than a response to the tragic events that Clark takes as the turn. The social formation and the forms of authorship being constructed in this formation were already beginning to experience stress by 1975, as Shively shows. What was happening was that the counterculture was dying and new forms of economic control were being imposed in its wake. Post-Fordist regimes of capital were beginning to displace the Fordist capital relations and have effects on social relations including textual relations. Class relations are beginning to re-compose sexualities. The period of liminality and communitas closes. The structures clamp down.

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Starting on 24 May 1976, two years before the events that Clark narrates, Armistead Maupin, hired by a local San Francisco newspaper (the Chronicle) away from the Marin county newspaper called The Pacific Sun, wrote the first installment of a fictional serial he had created at the smaller, funkier newspaper, a serial that turned into the novel, Tales of the City and the five subsequent Tales novels. In the first volume, published in the Chronicle throughout the remainder of 1976, Vincent, who like his namesake Vincent Van Gogh, keeps cutting off body parts, works at a crisis switchboard center. Vincent is clinically depressed because he has lost his wife, but also because—as Joaquin Schwartz noted earlier in the novel at a dinner party at Anna Madrigal’s—“there’s not single fucking place left where it is still 1967!” (1976: 48). Vincent, working at a suicide prevention agency, decides to commit suicide. His thoughts: “There were mornings when Vincent felt like the last hippie in the world. The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear. If you couldn’t be first, there was something bittersweet and noble about being the last. The Last of the Mohicans. The Last Supper. The Last Hippie! … It was time to split” (1976: 232f.). A few hours later, the book’s hero Mary Ann Singleton comes to the hotline to do her volunteer work. As she strolls down the street toward the center, and toward Vincent’s hanging body—he killed himself by hanging himself with his wife’s macrame—Mary Ann summarizes this shift from social formation to structure, just as Vincent’s act similarly enacts the shift. “The world was changing, she decided. Even to her untrained Midwestern eye. Twenty-fourth Street seemed almost quaintly anachronistic. Men still wore their hair in ponytails here, and women slumped around in vintage granny dresses. ‘Far out’ had the sound of ‘Oh, you kid.’ So what’s next? she wondered. What will come along to take the place of free clinics and crisis switchboards and alternative newspapers and macrobiotic everything?” (1976: 243). Tales of the City, by tracking in its weekly columns the shifting everyday experiences many people, gay and straight, had in 1976 San Francisco, preserves here a sense of the link to the counterculture obscured by subsequent histories. Gay authorship—like gay liberation—is an offshoot of the counterculture and “the movement” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The sunburst of activity that social formation theory makes visible helps us to see gay authorship as it is being formed. But the counterculture began to wane by the middle of the 1970s. And while what we now know as gay literature continued to evolve in its own way to our present moment, other forms of authorship ended with the counterculture. We must begin to make visible the other forms of authorship at play in this liminal period immediately after Stonewall. Emerging from an explicit theoretical formulation of cultural rhetoric, this chapter begins that much larger recovery project.

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References Austen, Roger 1977. Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America. New York: Bobb-Merrill. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill. Bay Area Reporter (B.A.R.). 1 (1): 1 April 1977. In San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. Clark, J. Michael. 1987. Liberation and Disillusionment: The Development of Gay Male Criticism and Popular Fiction in the Decade After Stonewall. Las Colinas: The Liberal Press. Comas, James. 2001. “Rhetoric.” In Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, eds. Victor Taylor and Charles Winquist. London, New York: Routledge. Fish, Stanley. 1995. “Rhetoric.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “What is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gay/Liberate. 1971. 1 (1). Ohio Historical Society Collection, Columbus. Gregory, Sasha. 1972. “Gay Liberation Front.” Gay Pride. Christoper Street West Issue, 25 June 1972. In San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. “Homosexual Declaration.” 1967. Vanguard 1 (7). 1967. P. 2 in San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. Microfilm. UC Berkeley. Reel 45. Holleran, Andrew. 1986 [1978]. Dancer from the Dance. New York: Penguin. Plume book edition. ———. 1988. Ground Zero. New York: Penguin. Humphries, Laud. 1972. Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Hunter, John Francis. 1972. The Gay Insider: USA. New York: Stonehill Publishers. Isherwood, Christopher. 1964. A Single Man. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Katz, Jonathan Ned. 1995. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Penguin. Kinsey, Alfred, et al. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders. Kramer, Larry. 1985. The Normal Heart. New York: Plume. Lentricchia, Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. 1995. Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maupin, Armistead. 1978. Tales of the City. New York: Harper and Row. Mordden, Ethan. 1986. Buddies. New York: St. Martin’s Press. North, Michael. 2001. “Authorship and Autography.” PMLA 116 (5): 1377–85. Pease, Donald E. 1995. “Author.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rechy, John. 1963. City of Night. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1977. The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Reed, Paul. 1988. Longing. Berkeley: Celestial Arts. San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. 1991. A joint project of the San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and the University of California/Berkeley. Special funding provided by the UC Shared Purchase Program. 1991. Shively, Charles. 1975. “Getting It Together: A View of the Fag Rag.” In After You’re Out, eds. Alan Young and Karla Jay. New York: Links Books.

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Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vanguard: The Magazine of the Tenderloin. 1966. 1 (1). In San Francisco/Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Serial Collection. Microfilm. UC Berkeley, 1991. Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. Jon Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Edmund. 1996. “Remembrances of a Gay Old Time.” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review. Summer: 7–10. Young, Allan, and Karla Jay, eds. 1975. After You’re Out: Personal Experiences of Gay Men and Women. New York: Links Books.

Notes 1. I want to thank Syracuse University for granting me a research leave for the academic year 1997–98. A good part of the archival work on which this chapter rests comes out of the research I was able to do on this leave. I also want to thank the Ohio Historical Society for help finding local counterculture and gay documents from the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, I wish to thank the University of Houston, Department of English, for its support of this project. 2. The Bantam fifth printing (1983; 1st Bantam, 1979) paperback of Dancer sets the protagonist Malone in the Village in August of 1969 (71). The first edition, ninth printing of the Plume paperback version of Dancer places Malone there in August of 1971. This was some time before Malone’s affair with Frankie commenced. The opening of the second chapter of Dancer that introduces us to Malone through the eyes of the narrator at a new disco called the Twelfth Floor places us in the autumn of 1971. It is noted that this is after Malone’s affair with Frankie had ended in violence. Holleran’s retroactive reinterpretation of the narrative of the novel and the events of this period is but a small example of what the historical narratives, which necessarily emerge from the next period of the social formation, do. They create identity by creating myth. 3. I have done extensive work tracking the reviews in the early alternative newspapers and publications in the gay community. These columns that as I noted were there right from the start (though the books and films they started to review were not specifically gay) opened up an important space to begin to conceptualize the gay author and gay literature. In a sense, the reviewers called for and “created” gay writing by encouraging contemporary writers to move beyond the confines of straight or pre-Stonewall notions of homosexuality that emphasized its dysfunction. B.A.R. in particular presents a complete record of reviewing long before there was gay literature or gay authors in the sense this chapter uses those terms. Starting with J. D. Miller’s reviews (the first of Carlos Casteneda’s A Separate Reality on 1 May 1971; he also reviews The Best Little Boy in The World in the 11 July 1973 issue of B.A.R. practically as soon as it came off the presses), and continuing through the 1970s under various reviewers, these columns did the crucial work of imagining what gay literature and authors might look like. Key to this enterprise throughout the decade is the work of Roger Austen. His end of the decade review of gay writing and gay criticism in the 11 January 1980 issue of the San Francisco Sentinel is simply one of his many amazing and prescient accomplishments, for which he seems so far to have received little credit. Austen had been doing reviews all along in various venues and he had been collecting and analyzing gay novels from

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the 1930s to Stonewall during this time. This work eventuated in his book Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America in 1977. What is important about his book is that Austen does not go to elite literature as most academic critics of this time were doing to trace gay, but rather went to dime-store pocket novels and trade books that often had a big impact on readers, but rarely were noticed by the elite press and its reviewers. I do not always agree with Austen’s judgments, but there can be no denying that he did the pioneering work in the study of gay literature—in and out of the alternative press—and that this work needs to be recognized more than it has been.

CHAPTER 14

Attention and Rhetoric Prolepsis and the Problem of Meaning Todd Oakley








Introduction One day in the final months of 1999 as I was passing a law office on my way to my favorite cafe, I spied in their window a poster of a large mail-in questionnaire with the Census 2000 logo above it and a superimposed pen poised to fill it out. In large black letters just below the image read the following message: This is your future. Don’t leave it blank.

This was the first of many times I saw or heard this exhortation during the last few months of 1999 and the first six months of the year 2000. The census is long concluded and other events and messages presently invade the semiotic landscape of my hometown, but this one is worth examining for three reasons. First, it exemplifies a predominant rhetorical practice in modern industrialized cultures: the dissemination of the same message over time and across space. Second, its continuous presence suggests that traditional models of the rhetorical situation with their sharply defined sense of subjectivity and occasioning are of limited use in a culture where the orator (or “rhetorical will”) proffering the message appears to be both everywhere and nowhere. It is precisely this odd feeling of an omnipresent “rhetorical will” addressing everyone everywhere that epitomizes what it means to belong to the postmodern, Western public sphere. Third, the message itself, a prime example of the rhetorical

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figure prolepsis, captures a general characteristic of the modern rhetorical will as it relates to culture, self, and society. If one overarching generalization can be made about the rhetoric in the West (if not everywhere else), it is that texts are artifacts reflecting our propensity to live both in the world of actuality and the world of potentiality. Human cognition and culture coevolved to create the conditions of anticipating the future, of recreating the past, of functioning in the here-and-now but of attending to the there-and-then.1 Imaginative mental simulation of the there-and-then is a base condition of self, culture, and society. Following the psychologist Michael Cole (1996), I define culture as those “forms of activity” believed appropriate to a group of individuals whose subsequent behavior conforms to those forms, which in turn renders them meaningful, valuable, and powerful. The practice of imaginative mental simulation testifies to Cole’s contention that “culture-using human beings” regularly “‘reach’ into the cultural past, project it into the future, and then ‘carry’ the conceptual future ‘back’ to the present to create a sociocultural environment … that guides thought and action” (1996: 186). Prolepsis—representing the future in the present—names much more than a verbal trick: it implicates attention and memory as fundamental cognitive determinants permitting the dialectic interplay of the here-and-now and the there-and-then. One common denominator emerges among theorists like Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca: rhetoric is the practice of one individual or group directing the attention of another individual or group about a past, present, future, or imagined situation. Seizing, focusing, and sustaining attention in harmonized synchrony defines a tacit dimension of rhetorical theory. Each of these theorists tacitly grants attention an important role in initiating and regulating discourse. Richard Lanham has taken the next logical step by making attention an explicit feature of rhetorical practice, going so far as to redefine the entire Western rhetorical tradition from the Sophists onward as the study of “how human attention is created and allocated” (1993: 227). The purpose of this chapter is to take up Lanham’s programmatic call and treat attention explicitly and deliberately as both a cognitive and cultural set of operations. As a preface to the extensive remarks on the cultural aspects of attention in the body of this essay, I will offer a few words about attention as a cognitive operation. Of all the tasks the human brain performs, perhaps none is more consequential for the performance of other tasks than attention. To paraphrase Raja Parasuraman in his introduction to The Attentive Brain: when human beings attend, they perceive. When human beings attend and perceive, they remember. When human beings attend, perceive, and remember, they learn. When

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human beings learn, they can act deliberately and with forethought (1998: 3). When performing a task, one must, conversely, reduce the need for constant attention to some of its specific components, allowing those components to be carried out automatically, yet the very act of pushing these elements into the background of consciousness occurs only because one must attend to something else. In short, perceiving, thinking, learning, deciding, and acting require that we “budget” our attention. The attention allocating system discussed in these pages consists of seven elements: alerting, orienting, sharing, selecting, sustaining, controlling, and harmonizing. The first three name the primordial conditions of “subsidiary” awareness upon which the four “focal” elements of attention operate.2 Importantly, these processes operate along a continuum of conscious awareness. This means that items within the field of attention can occupy a place on a scale from “inactive” to “active” to “salient,” with inactive items occupying “subsidiary awareness” and active and salient items occupying conscious attention.

Purpose and Method It is my purpose to present the elements of attention as a phenomenology of rhetorical engagement and to apply it to texts from the Census 2000 advertising campaign. Such an application needs a linguistic model predicated precisely on the idea that human beings routinely use language and other sign systems to model “proleptic” thinking. The principal analytic framework for this study comes from be Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of “mental spaces” (1994) and his current collaboration with Mark Turner (2002) in the form of “blending theory.” As a decade-long research enterprise, mental spaces and blending theory (MSBT) currently enjoys application, extension, and revision in diverse discipline affiliated with the wider field of Cognitive Linguistics. A few words about Cognitive Linguistics and its relationship to the rhetorical emergence of culture are in order.3 In contrast to formal linguistic theories, Cognitive Linguistics works under the assumption that (1) knowledge of language structure, use, and acquisition emerges from other general cognitive operations and processes and does not constitute an encapsulated module in its own right, and (2) that language structure emerges from use, in which great variation on the mappings of form and meaning across language is to be expected, even though invariants across languages will remain; however, these invariants are not likely to appear in the form of morphosyntactic categories and rules, but general scenes and scenarios that are inherently meaningful to human life-worlds. In Cognitive Linguistics, form and meaning cannot be separated. The twin notion that linguistic structure is inherently meaningful, and that they arise, develop, and change in context-specific situations for spe-

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cific expressive purposes, aligns the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise with the Rhetoric Culture project. More specific to the focus of the present volume, the theoretical framework adopted here and the disciplinary formation that gives rise to it, may offer anthropologists interested in the rhetorical emergence of culture a systematic way of addressing the twin concerns of creative action and sociality. A detailed ethnographic account of an individual’s engagement with a strategic communication within the material landscape of his home opens a window into the real-time mental improvisations or “riffing” inspired by a symbolic artifact therein, at the same time that such riffing cannot be understood except through the complex processes of “intentional attribution” that underscores any social situation. The fact that these improvisations are an individual member’s on-the-fly, proleptic responses to a public message epitomizes the process of meaning construction as moving from attention to intention and back again. A few brief words about method are likewise in order. The method of this investigation is both introspective and archival. The analysis I am about to provide depends significantly on my own encounters with this message as it relates to information I was able to gather from Census Bureau documents about the history and strategy of the campaign. Many cognitive and social scientists consider introspective methods as extraordinarily weak and unreliable. While introspection certainly can be unreliable, the kind of introspective method developed here has its defenders, both in the social and neurosciences. Within the social sciences, Anthony F. C. Wallace (2004: 17f.) defends introspection as an unavoidable aspect of ethnography. Within neuroscience, Bernard Baars (2003) surveys recent brain-imaging studies focusing on human consciousness showing significant and repeated congruence between functional MRI (fMRI) findings and the participants’ own accounts of their experiences, suggesting that conscious mental introspection does indeed reveal mind. Within linguistics, Leonard Talmy (2000) identifies introspection as central to language analysis. Therefore, introspection is a legitimate method so long as one remains cognizant of it limitations.

The Campaign During the six months or so of the Census 2000 campaign, I repeatedly encountered this message as I walked across Case Western Reserve University’s campus; as I drove my car and listened to the radio; as I watched television; and as I read the newspaper—in short, as I selectively attended to the sum total of my lived environment. The analysis of this campaign brings into prominent view the processes by which cultures sustain themselves and change themselves by showing how

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individuals within it might imagine the future. From a semiotic perspective, these imaginings require constant construction, completion, and elaboration of mental space networks, with some of the specific spaces being “blends” of other spaces in an array of other mental spaces. Such networks constitute what Fauconnier (1994) calls “the backstage organization of language and thought.” The task of the next section is to illustrate the mental spaces and blending framework.

Mental Spaces, in Brief Mental spaces and blending theory offers a general model of meaning construction in which a small set of partially compositional processes operate in many semantic and pragmatic phenomena, including but not limited to analogy, metaphor, metonymy, conditionals and counterfactuals, nominal compounding, adjective-noun phrases, and other grammatical constructions. Discussed at length by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), conceptual blending involves a set of operations for combining dynamic cognitive models in a network of “mental spaces” (Fauconnier 1994), which, when applied to verbal communication, pertain to the mental simulation of past, present, future, and imagined scenes and scenarios cued as we think, talk, and interact. The phenomenology of attention begins with the basic assumption that language provides discourse participants with cues for constructing, integrating, and altering imagined scenes and scenarios, thereby focusing attention for specific rhetorical purposes. Mental spaces are developed and deployed in specific situations, such that what we do, how we do it, and how we conceive of what we do, arise in specific rhetorical situations, which, in turn, are the products of individuals acting and thinking in the here-and-now. Because discourse participants share many basic cognitive processes, the various coalitions of mental spaces we construct are sufficiently similar to ensure that mutual understanding occurs regularly. Mental space theory provides a flexible notational system based on the assumption that meaning arises from the construction of mental space networks. The mode of analysis I will be using has several modifications from Fauconnier and Turner’s original model and corresponds more closely to the model developed by Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt (2005). Preference for their “Aarhus mode of analysis” rests in part on the added attention they give to modeling local context, the importance they give to the notion of relevance, and the more constrained criterion by which analysis posits a new mental space. Their approach to mental spaces and blending analysis directly addresses the problem of meaning as a problem of how discourse participants are constantly constructing, elaborating, modifying, and effacing mental spaces as they think, talk, listen, act.

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The Elements of Attention A search for a concise definition need go no farther than this famous quotation from William James: attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously present objects or trains of thought” (1998: 403f.). Current thinking among many cognitive scientists is that all mental tasks require the commitment of limited cognitive resources; therefore, an individual attends by spending the resources necessary to prime the relevant cognitive processes: she operates within a limited “attention budget.” The economics of “attention budgeting” dictate that human beings can do multiple tasks simultaneously only if the requisite cognitive load is within their “budget,” and that performance will suffer (or break down entirely) if the cognitive load exceeds the attentional budget. This explains why individuals cannot understand two verbal messages at the same time: the verbal stimulus entering an unattended channel will not be understood because the resources needed to process it will not be primed (even though the individual will remain aware that the unattended message is a message). Broadly speaking, attention is the initial prerequisite for making inferences used to construct “readings” of the world. Furthermore, attention adds a directional component to behavior, modulating responses to the environment by focusing the mind on specific objects, locations, and persons while suppressing or attenuating surrounding irrelevancies. It is a family of effects, together promoting the processing of one set of elements over another in a complex scene. Attention is simply the global activity that initiates and maintains goaldirected behavior in the face of multiple, competing distractions. The general account of attention prepares a proper grounding for thinking about the problem of meaning. The seven elements of attention discussed above can be classified into two components of “subsidiary” awareness and “focal” attention, with subsidiary awareness concerning the cross-modal coordination of sensory perception and motor routines and focal attention concerning the coordination of motivation systems with memory systems. The three elements of subsidiary awareness include “alerting,” “orienting,” and “sharing.” The four elements of focal attention are “selection,” “sustaining,” “control,” and “harmonizing.” The ensuing account avoids extended discussion of sharing, but it must be emphasized that none of the elements of attention operate optimally in the human world without shared or joint attention (i.e., attending to an object that is another’s object of attention). Complex human behaviors and abilities never occur in a vacuum; in fact, they will not even get off the ground without shared attention. One fundamental condition of the human infant seems to be that she comes into the world expertly prepared to appropriate the entirety of her caretakers’

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attentional budget. She spends nearly all of her precious mental resources attending to the caretaker as the caretaker in turn attends to her. Together, they engage in shared attention. The present analysis assumes the presence of sharing attention at all stages of meaning construction.

Alerting and Orienting Altering refers to the processes of maintaining a general readiness to process novel items, while orienting refers to the factors that dispose one to select particular items over others. Alerting operates along a quantitative gradient, while orienting operates along a qualitative gradient. I begin with these axioms: not all information is equally important, and different organisms are alerted to different items. Human beings are highly attuned to human speech of any kind (i.e., phonetic recognition). In any given situation, the auditory cortices are primed to recognize incoming sensations of human voices. When a human voice fills a silent space, I am automatically alerted to pay attention and process its message. The mere presence of voice “disturbs” present consciousness. Language is a powerful tool because we nearly always mind it; audible or scripted voice is doubly powerful, because it can alert us to something not present, operating as a virtual alerting system portable from situation to situation, moving addressees from the world of actuality to the world of potentiality. In a greater semantic and pragmatic context, this element names the class of prosodic devices, such as syllabic stress, intonation peaks, and other suprasegmental phenomena, eliciting attention. In a similar vein, alerting correlates with typographic phenomena in written communication, such as ALL CAPITAL spellings or bold face type, for example. Orienting, on the other hand, refers to an individual’s disposition to select particular kinds of incoming information over other kinds of information. When I occupy a space filled with many voices, I am undoubtedly alerted to voice but now have to select one and filter out the others while remaining peripherally aware of those other voices. Phonemic recognition is largely a function of orienting, insofar as I am more likely to be alerted to the sounds of English than any other language. Therefore, in a room filled with foreign voices, I will be specifically attuned to the sounds of English. Linguistic constructions are primarily used to construe events, actions, and states of affairs in particular ways from particular perspectives and vantage points. In this larger semantic and pragmatic context, orienting can be understood as the forms of speech for construing perspective and vantage point. Let us consider these elements of attention with the ritual sites of public performance that define prototypical rhetorical practices. Orations in auditoriums, lecture halls, and churches are rarely if ever about giving orations in au-

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ditoriums, lecture halls, and churches. Similarly, it is often noted that printed texts, such as books, pamphlets, and magazines, are seldom explicitly about their own status as printed texts. This seemingly banal observation brings to light the important issue of the existential dimensions of rhetorical engagement. These dimensions impinge directly upon human perception and sensation, which, in turn, bear directly on the alerting and orienting of attentional dispositions in the public space. Why is it that the orator is free to represent something entirely unmoored from the immediate here-and-now of the speech? Over time, oratorical cultures of the West have manipulated material conditions of our immediate environment for influencing the reception of messages. The lecture hall is a prime example of an architectural structure designed to orient the attention of the audience onto the focal participant(s) and to minimize possible distractions away from the focal participant(s), as is the function of theaters and other exhibition halls. If we take face-to-face communication as the primordial condition for symbolic action, then it seems that lecture halls and auditoria incorporate into their very physical structures a strategy for ensuring that audience members can make visual contact with the performer. The alerting and orienting of attention brings about a conceptualization such that the many spectators can feel more like an individual listening to another individual, rather than a group listening to one person. I am not arguing that this is the only configuration, or the only optimal one. Rather, its one optimal condition of persuasion is that the audience member has to concentrate on the speech itself and lose the feeling that she is a member of the crowd. “It seemed like he was speaking directly to me,” intones an enthusiastic auditor. I contend that the alerting and orienting mechanisms of attention rely on the specific structures of common spaces and of artifacts, providing what Peter Harder (1996: 71) has termed the “reliance conditions” on which we construct meaning. The architectural layout of the lecture hall evolved to maintain the conditions that are not part of the explicit cognitive content of the participants but which ensures the successful execution of message proffering. The specific case of the Census 2000 slogan affords a unique opportunity to understand how alerting and orienting of attention operate over the material conditions of a different form of rhetorical practice—the advertising campaign.

Alerting and Orienting: Census 2000 Analysis In contrast to a speech in an auditorium, the Census 2000 campaign saturated many public spaces with a short, crisp, and memorable montage of word and

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image that looks nothing like the extended canonical forms of reasoning alluded to in Aristotle’s theory of civic discourse. If a message or set of relevant messages saturates that landscape, it is more likely to claim the attention (i.e., become active or salient at opportune moments) of those who dwell therein. Recall that alerting refers to a person’s general readiness to process items, while orienting refers to a person’s disposition to select particular kinds of items over others. An internal document describing the media campaign for the Census 2000 reveals that the Census Bureau and their advertisers created more than two hundred and fifty different TV, radio, print, outdoor, and Internet advertisements in seventeen languages, each of which carried some version of the tagline, “This is your future. Don’t leave it blank.” It estimates that individuals read or heard the message an average of over fifty times during the six months of the media campaign—from 1 January 2000 to 15 April 2000. In addition, it estimates that 99 percent of all US residents had heard or seen the message (Census 2000 Publicity Office 2002: 3 para.). The persistent, punctuated appearance of this message created a situation where residents all over the US were continually exposed to the message. The message invaded their daily existence so that the main slogan became a permanent background condition that could easily become the selected object of attention. My own experience can serve as a guide. I certainly recall hearing the slogan during commercial breaks on all channels, seeing the signs posted on the sides of busses as they sped past me, on roadside billboards as I traveled on the interstate highways, seeing posters peppering storefronts and legal offices. Evidence gathered from the Census Bureau’s website suggests strongly that one would also see these posters plastered on legal offices, stores, and community buildings in “ethnic” neighborhoods with the same message in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, and Arabic. In short, during the first six months of 2000, it was nearly impossible for any resident of the United States not to be exposed to the Census 2000 message. This is not to suggest that everyone paid attention to it; rather, it is to suggest that the semiotic landscape was in effect rigged for residents to experience the message. This is especially true of the messages addressed to specific ethnic and national groups, for many would notice that the exhortation was in a language other than English. In a semiotic landscape saturated with English messages, messages in a different language appearing in an advertisement presenting a census form in English are likely to enjoy what theorists of attention call a visual “pop-out” effect: the automatic narrowing of attention to an oddball item. In addition to the strict controls over the content of the message, there were strict rules governing the presentation of the message. First, the tagline

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cannot appear without the “form and pen” graphic or without one of the approved versions of the Census 2000 logo. Second, the logo itself can only be displayed in certain colors and the logo may not be less than 5/8-inch wide. Any deviation from these rules must be approved by the Census Bureau (Census 2000 Style Guidelines 2002). Variations in the form do occur, as we shall see. Certain posters addressed to ethnic and national groups, such as residents of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, the American Samoa Community, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands contain the form graphic without the pen, perhaps because the dominant mode of compliance for Census canvassers was to record the spoken responses of these residents. Alerting and orienting influence what can be selected for focal attention, thereby influencing the kinds of reference points from which addressees will be exhorted to imagine the future ten years from now.

Selecting Attention Selecting refers to the element of attention attributable to James’s oft-quoted definition and is perhaps the most widely researched of all the elements. Selectivity of processing is required because, as stated previously, human cognition must operate within a finite budget. The primate brain evolved mechanisms for data extraction based on selective attention for coping with the environment, and information processing is really a matter of making readings of present, past, future, or imagined happenings in the world. Selection of attention depends on bottom-up processing to the extent that it is at the mercy of the spatial origin and intensity of immediate perception. Selective attention facilitates mental processing of one task while inhibiting the completion of others tasks. Without selective attention, organisms would be unprepared to act coherently in the face of competing and distracting sensory information. Selection, so understood, is the cognitive process of the initial assignment of an item or items from perception or from short-term and working memory into the attentional budget. Selection refers to incoming information that becomes the content of a mental space: a unit of selection can be a participant, a role, an object, artifact, event, action, or abstract idea. Proper nouns, common nouns, indefinite articles, verbs, prepositional phrases, and other linguistic foci are typical elements of linguistic construction designed to select entities, objects, and relations for further processing. In verbal communication, the introduction of a distinct lexical item implies a high degree of salience in the mind of the speaker; however, by introducing it she presumes a low degree of attentional salience in the mind of the hearer. Pragmatic notions of old information and new information, and Paul Grice’s cooperation principle (1975) and his maxims of conversation (particu-

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larly relevance) entail selective attention, for the objective is to say something you think someone else does not already know. The prototypical linguistic units of selection—first person pronouns, nouns, noun phrases, and verbs—function as “stable attractors” or reference points. For example, the act of calling out a person’s name in a crowed party will alert the person so named and will likely cause him to orient his body toward the sound source. From the speaker’s perspective, however, the utterance reflects an already well-developed micro-event, whereby she has scanned the crowd, selected attention on a person, recognized him, and classified him. From the addressee’s perspective, hearing the sound of his own name is a reliable cue to shift his attention. The micro-event of hearing his own name being called out perturbs present time-space, bringing about a sudden change in the hearer’s conscious state. Stable attractors, then, are reliable structures for bringing about such catastrophes.

Selecting: Census 2000 Analysis The above analysis of the semiotic landscape provides suggestive evidence for what messages are likely to “resonate” within a given culture at any time: those messages that repeatedly saturate the public landscape and that are distinguishable from other persistent messages are likely to direct our attention. The process of directing attention, then, is the process of selecting one element from many competing elements. It is at this level of focal attention that the mental spaces and blending framework comes in as a useful analytic model. Consider one such poster addressed to rural communities within the lower forty-eight states.4 Let us assume that it appears in a small village with little signage to compete with it. Let us further assume that the very first image to catch the addressee’s eye is the painting by J. C. Huntington, where selective attention focuses on images of trains and little red schoolhouses, metonyms of rural life. In addition, let us assume that the addressee subsequently follows a Western reading path from left to right and top to bottom. It is likely that the addressee will first examine that which appears in the upper left hand corner of the first piece of text, followed by the tagline just below it, followed by the form and pen image. He will then proceed to reexamine the print of “School Scene,” followed by the slogan How America Knows What America Needs just below it. This initial analysis assumes this general reading path, as described in Gunther Kress and Theo van Leuween’s grammar of visual design (1996). As figure 14.1 depicts the situation, the Grounding space corresponds to the perceptual moment when the addressee sees the tagline and image, where the reader interacts with the text. The icon of the form and corresponding tagline serve as the anchor for the mental space network. Almost instanta-

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Figure 14.1. Mental Spaces Composition of “Blank Future” Blend

neously, the addressee is invited to integrate the concept of a blank form with some conception of my future. On analysis, such a conceptualization entails the construction of three different mental spaces in dialectic interaction with the Grounding space. From the initial state of the Grounding space issues the Reference space. In this space, the form and pen icon functions as a unit of selection for representing the familiar act of “filling out a Census form.” We can then say that selective attention to the left side of the poster prompts the addressee (me) to construct a mental space for the Census form. In this space, the addressee becomes a respondent who completes the questionnaire. Temporally, this space corresponds to the immediate present or near future. Although variable, the represented temporal duration of this activity is usually imaged in terms of minutes rather than hours. Once constructed, this mental space can be as sparse or as detailed as imagination will allow. Rhetorically, the advertisers hope that the mental scenario in the space will be construed as easy, painless, and non-intrusive. Readers can infer this because it is usually a salient part of the situational relevance that the perceived inconvenience of filling out such forms is a prominent reason for resident non-compliance. The activation of this space corresponds linguistically to demonstrative pronoun “this,” allowing the addressee to apply

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the new category “future” to it. However, the predicate “your future” prompts the addressee to construct a different mental space, the Presentation space, or the mental scenario through which one comes to understand the reference. At this point in the analysis, all we have is a reference to a Census form and to the vague emotionally resonant notion of “the future.” If we assume that the addressee has working knowledge of the Census as information gathering every ten years, then we can further assume that the meaning of “future” corresponds to the generic scenario about what may happen to the addressee and his community in the next ten years;5 hence, the argumentative relevance of notions relating to self- and community interests. At this very moment, however, immediate attention shifts to a third mental space, the Virtual (or Blended) space. Selective attention focuses in less than three seconds—the time it takes to read and understand a clause (see Pöppel 1997; Pöppel/Schwender 1993)—on the Virtual space, which can be classified as a performative blend (Brandt N.d.). Represented as a thick black circle to underscore its salience, this space construes the punctual act of filling out the form is endowed with direct causal force. What is, upon reflection, an exceedingly indirect and complex relationship—filling out a Census form and future regional development—is being condensed into a direct causal relationship, the illocutionary relevance of which is to describe the act in the reference space, the pragmatic implication of which is that it is a task deserving one’s urgent attention. The completed form represents the respondent’s identity (reference space) and completing the form determines her or his future (virtual space). Of course, the slogan comes in two distinct clauses, each of which represents a different state of the same mental space network. The imperative clause “Don’t leave it blank” generates an alternate scenario of not filling out the Census form. At this point, the addressee in the Grounding space is cast in the role of the recalcitrant respondent, effectively shifting attention from the performative Virtual space to its negative counterpart in the Meaning space, or the space containing the negative scenario aptly glossed as a “blank future.” In the Meaning space, but not in the other spaces, the person does not exist, because, apropos of in the virtual performance space, one’s existence is assured only to the extent that one provides information to the Census Bureau. This “blank future” blend creates emergent structure, an existing addressee who does not exist according to the Census Bureau. Shifting attention to the Meaning space of virtual negation changes the illocutionary relevance and pragmatic implication of the entire mental space network. As figure 14.2 depicts the current rhetorical situation, attention to a “blank future” alters the illocutionary force of the entire utterance, such that the addressee will likely interpret this slogan as both a request and a warning, with the pragmatic implication that the addressee’s needs, interests, and concerns will go unaddressed in the future.

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Figure 14.2. Mental Spaces Completion of “Blank Future” Blend

The two states of the mental space network together provide the conceptual basis of prolepsis: they create scenarios that bring future consequences/ effects into the present, for purposes of influencing future civic acts. The initial blend has a positive or neutral emotional valence, whereas the second blend has a strongly negative emotional valence because one’s very existence is being questioned. The immediate meaning of this slogan is to first construe a typified and mundane activity as a relation of succession (i.e., cause) and immediately metamorphose the same scenario into a relation of coexistence, such that the blank form brought before the addressee’s eyes comes to signify a “blank future.” The emergent structure becomes something of a “dehortative exhortation”: do not not do this!

Sustaining Attention While selective attention supports the choice of goal-directed tasks of all sorts, sustaining attention ensures a task’s completion by taking up the lion’s share of the attentional budget. The need for focused attention defines a component of attention distinct from selection in that it involves concentration. While selec-

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tive attention is subject to the contingencies of bottom-up perception, focused attention depends on top-down framing of a situation or scene with extensive contributions from long-term memory. Sustaining a focus of attention means adding new but closely related information to the attentional budget. Together, selection and sustaining of attention constitute the attentional budget as it composes, completes, and elaborates a network of mental spaces developed to represent and interpret real or imaginary thoughts and actions.

Sustaining: Census 2000 Analysis The message invades selective attention only to the extent that it conveys urgency or obligation to the addressee, providing a vague sense, as the advertisers and bureau describe it, that the addressee has everything to gain and nothing to lose by completing it but has nothing to gain and everything to lose by not completing it. Further imaginings of the desirable or undesirable consequences requires sustained attention, which, in this analysis, means the construction and linking of additional conceptual structure to Presentation space, which is now the primary focus of attention, as depicted in figure 14.3. Other advertisements made mention of public schools, services for the elderly, roads, and public transportation. Therefore, the Presentation space provides the addressee the opportunity to flesh out this nebulous notion of “the future” in its positive and negative versions in the Virtual and Meaning spaces by considering the many events or actions that may happen over the next ten years and link them causally to the addressee’s immediate behavior. On the positive side, an accurate Census could bring more money to public schools, or increased government representation on local, state, and national levels. On the negative side, an inaccurate Census could deny money and resources to public schools, at the same time that it decreases government representation, ensuring that your own interests and the interests of your community go unaddressed in the next decade. If we link this analysis to the poster mentioned above (page 292), it is quite possible that the images of trains and schoolhouses presented in Huntington’s painting would prime the activation of these categories in working memory. In summary, the Virtual space creates a causal scenario that, with sustained attention, can be elaborated by creating further specifying mental spaces corresponding to representations of public works cast in the future. Sustained attention, however, requires an investment in time and cognitive effort that is difficult to maintain for more long stretches of time, if at all. Therefore, I conclude that these ruminations outlined above are rare occurrences among the general population and more likely characterize the kind of meaning-making activities endemic to rhetorical hermeneutics itself. This fact, however, does not

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Figure 14.3. Mental Spaces Elaboration of “Blank Future” Blend

invalidate the analysis, for sustained attention builds on the exact same mental space needed for understanding the gist of the message. In other words, the meaning of “This is your future. Don’t leave it blank” requires the construction of a positive and negative version of the same virtual performance scenario, however “monochromatic” and ephemeral it may be.

Controlling Attention Sustaining attention over time in the face of distraction is one means of maintaining goal-directed behavior. The activity may need to be stopped (in order to respond to some other contingency) and then be resumed. Other concurrent activities and their future fulfillment may arise and need to be coordinated with the primary task. This is a uniquely human capacity that has emerged in the past forty thousand years during the Upper Paleolithic period of hominid evolution and reflects, as Merlin Donald (2001) might put it, a “hijacking” of the perceptual motor brain by the executive brain. Controlling refers to the executive function of performing two tasks simultaneously (i.e., divided attention), or of starting one task, putting it on hold for

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something else, attending to that something else, and returning to the primary task (i.e., switching attention). In other words, control of attention means coordinating more than one mental space network in the here-and-now of consciousness awareness, as when I switch between going to the class, thinking about what I am going to teach, and thinking about the Census 2000 slogan. Rhetoric culture theory assumes addressee’s are always subject to distraction, and even when they are fixating on something, a great deal of empirical research suggests that visual attention is rarely sustained on one target in a stimulus-rich environment for more than fifteen seconds at a time, a speculation I extrapolate from Ernst Pöppel’s neuropsychological and behavioral experiments (1997) supporting the idea that we attend to matters in two- to three-second intervals, with three-second intervals focusing on the exact same item being the typical upper limit. Observations of adults and children as they watch television in naturalistic settings reveal that duration of screen gazes are frequent but brief. Gazing is punctuated by regular glances away from the screen, some lasting as long as twenty-two seconds. Further, continuous visual attention of sixty seconds or more is extremely rare (Prince 1996: 80). In spite of this impulsive nature of attention, we still have little trouble understanding the messages radiating around us. The formally circumscribed situations that constitute prototypical examples of rhetorical address have evolved as a means of controlling attention, as many experimental psychologists confirm what we already know from experience about human cognition and behavior: it is hard, if not impossible, to secure the undivided attention of one’s audience, be they readers or auditors. Therefore, one has to manipulate the ambient conditions to control attention. When I lecture, I assume that audience members seated in the lecture hall will not pay attention to everything I say; they will inevitably be distracted by competing sensory information always in competition with the vocal and gestural information emanating from me. At the same time, they are prone to give attentional priority to my expressions. The structure of the lecture hall allows for these momentary distractions; nevertheless, the structure of rhetorical situations biases information in my favor. In print cultures, the modern book (and the bookmark) ensures that readers can stop reading, do something else, and pick up where they left off, extending the time frame of attention. In contrast, standing on a corner in downtown Mainz proffering a theory of rhetoric culture would constitute a less-than-optimal rhetorical arrangement, because the bias is in fact against me in this situation. The attention of those who pass is necessarily divided so that my message enjoys a very low priority to other tasks, be it catching a streetcar or crossing a busy street. These same conditions are precisely the conditions advertisers presuppose as a more-orless permanent condition against which they ply their trade. Advertisers have

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developed ways to bias divided attention in their favor, such as repeated showings of the same commercial in a short time space, developing catchy slogans that connect to issues, needs, and concerns likely to occupy the addressee’s attention, and so on.

Controlling: Census 2000 Analysis Although pervasive, this message was not intended to disrupt daily life such that addressees would be so preoccupied with it that they could not complete primary tasks. My own experience suggests that the optimal persuasive condition that the Bureau could hope for is that addressees connect the filling out of the form to everyday existence. One reconstructed encounter of my own can serve as an example. I encountered this message when walking from my office to a classroom across campus. As I was walking, I saw the sign on the bus and began to think about how public transportation in Cleveland might improve if I tell them how I travel to and from work each day. Will we receive more funds for public transportation if enough respondents put an x next to “bus or trolley bus”? I also thought of what might happen if my fellow patrons of public transportation and I do not answer that question. Would we see a decrease in services over the next ten years concomitant with an even greater increase in automobile commuters? This prompted me to imagine a future scenario of bumper-to-bumper traffic and all the unpleasant associations that follow. I suppose that this thought took roughly nine–twelve seconds to complete. All the while, I was able to walk to my classroom and prepare to teach my class, even though I had managed to process this message and think about the ramifications of the Census 2000. I remember distinctly suspending my ruminations to attend to a blaring horn from oncoming traffic, but I quickly recovered and continued my ruminations as I crossed the busy street. This ability to control attention, to carry out one task while attending to another, and to periodically switch between the two seamlessly is a common facet of human cognition.

Harmonizing Attention I had argued earlier that sharing attention is the sine qua non of human symbolic development, that without it, human beings cannot take their place as individuals in successive cultural environments. The focal attention correlated to sharing is “harmonizing.” Harmonizing attention is the metaphoric name I use to identify the element of focal attention that is nearly unique to human beings. Adult meaning making is paradoxically an individual act dependent upon the individual’s singular attitude, temperament, and knowledge, while

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simultaneously and paradoxically a richly social act dependent upon a community of shared signs, values, and needs. I adopt the position that meaning does not arise without the presence of the other (either real or imagined). Human learning is predicated on joint attention. I attend to the same objects in space as my companions. Suppose I point to the poster on the side of the bus while walking across campus with three colleagues. All three of us came to focus on the same symbol as props for creating a “three-part harmony” of meaning. We produced a set of simultaneous “tones” on a common theme: the potential meaning of the slogan, thus creating an opening for additional discussion. Discourse is all about harmonizing attention, but language and gesture puts in place many resources for directing the attention of others, such that the object of attention is not the individual but the group. I use the term harmony to suggest two crucial points: we pay attention to the same objects and run similar mental simulations of the same scenario but from subtly different perspectives. The result is a rich harmony of meaningful experiences with each “tone” at different “intervals.”

Harmonizing: Census 2000 Analysis The Census Bureau, working in conjunction with the Chisholm-Mingo Group, tested the tagline and found it message effective, but also decided to rework it for specific groups. African-American’s responded even more positively to the message, “This is our future. Don’t leave it blank,” while American Indians and Alaska Natives responded more positively to the message “Generations are counting on this. Don’t leave it blank.” These variations suggest some interesting prospects for future research in rhetoric and attention, in particular, and rhetoric culture theory specifically. Specifically, it reveals that different groups choose different reference points from which to build representations of a collective identity, even though the scenario is sufficiently similar to that of other groups. These are different units of selective attention activated in harmonic synchrony. With the standard tagline, the unit of selective attention is the individual. Directing attention begins with the individual and his or her own self-interests. That is the reference point from which the reasoning process begins. To the extent that the standard tagline reflects the worldview of a largest cultural block in the United States, one can hypothesize that the reference point of reasoning for the dominant culture is typically individualistic. Thus, it takes sustained attention and effort to scale up the representation to the community or group. The rhetoric of the civic-minded individual begins with the individual. With the African-American tagline, the unit of selection begins with the group; thus, the reference point of reasoning for this racial group begins with

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community interest. Conversely, it takes sustained attention to scale down the representation to self-interest. With the American Indian and Alaska Native tagline, the unit of selective attention is with future generations, suggesting a propensity to project farther into the future as an initial reference point, more so than with populations responding most positively to the standard address. It takes sustained attention to proceed from the future back to present selfinterest. This analysis suggests that different groups speaking the same language deploy their linguistic resource differently.

Conclusion Rhetoric culture theory has to confront the problem of meaning. This chapter confronts the problem by first understanding that what human beings in general and Westerners in particular do is use the world of actuality to pay attention to the possible worlds of potentiality, switching attention back and forth between these two worlds. A theory of rhetoric grounded in attention as a cognitive and cultural phenomenon is critical for understanding and, ultimately explaining, how human beings construct past, present, and future versions of others and us for the purpose of guiding thought and action. A system of attention comprised of seven distinct but related elements—alerting, orienting, sharing, selecting, sustaining, controlling, and harmonizing—provides the phenomenological grounding of rhetoric culture theory. In addition, the mental spaces and blending framework offers rhetoricians a promising analytic model for linking a theory of attention to specific rhetorical practices, as illustrated in case study of the Census 2000 promotional campaign. Taken together, this system of attention and analytic framework provide a glimpse of what one solution to the problem of meaning looks like.

References Aristotle. 1991. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. G. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baars, Bernard J. 2003. “How Brain Reveals Mind: Neural Studies Support the Fundamental Roles of Conscious Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9–10): 100–114. Brandt, Line. N.d. “Conceptual Integration Typology.” Unpublished manuscript. Brandt, Line, and Per Aage. Brandt. 2005. “Making Sense of a Blend: A Cognitive-semiotic Approach to Metaphor.” Arbejdspapirer fra Center for Kulturforskning 132-05. Centre for Cultural Research, University of Aarhus. Census Bureau Publicity. 1999. Census Marketing: Advertising Campaign. http://www .census.gov/dmd/www/advcampaign.html, accessed 29 May 2001.

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Cole, Michael. 1996. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Donald, Merlin. 2001. A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Evans, Vyvyan, and Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Mawah: Laurence Erlbaum & Associates. Fahnestock, Jeanne. 1999. Rhetorical Figures in Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Modern Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Grady, J. 2000. “Cognitive Mechanisms of Conceptual Integration.” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (3–4): 335–46. Grady, Joseph E., Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. 1999. “Blending and Metaphor.” In Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, eds. R. Gibbs and G. Steen. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, eds. P. Cole and J. L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Harder, Peter. 1996. Functional Semantics: A Theory of Meaning, Structure and Tense in English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. James, William. 1998 [1890]. Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lanham, Richard A. 1993. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oakley, Todd. 2002. “Mapping the Museum Space: Verbal and Non-verbal Semiosis in a Public Art Museum.” Almen Semiotik 16: 80–129. Parasuraman, Raja. 1998. “The Attentive Brain: Issues and Prospects.” In The Attentive Brain, ed. R. Parasuraman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Polanyi, Michael. 1962. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pöppel, Ernst. 1997. “A Hierarchical Model of Temporal Perception.” Trends in Cognitive Science 1 (2): 56–61. Pöppel, Ernst, and Dierk Schwender. 1993. “Temporal Mechanisms of Consciousness.” International Anesthesiology Clinics 31 (4): 27–38. Poulakos, John. 1983. “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric and Philosophy 16 (1): 35–48. Prince, Stephen. 1996. “Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Missing Spectator.” In Posttheory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. Noel Carroll and David Bordwell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics, 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 2003. “Driving to Work.” In Modernity & Wind: Essays on Culture Change, vol. 2, ed. R. Grumet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Notes 1. A particularly relevant definition of rhetoric appears in Poulakos (1983: 36): “Rhetoric is the art which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible.” 2. I am borrowing these two terms from Polanyi’s discussion (1962: 55–65) of the two central processes implicated in the art of knowing. 3. See Evans/Green (2006) for a detailed introduction to cognitive linguistic theory. 4. All the posters used in the Census 2000 campaign can be found on the Census Bureau’s website at http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/advposters.html. 5. This analysis posits an addressee like me who possesses easily accessible relevant background knowledge about census taking in the United States, namely that the Census occurs every ten years. Voluntary recall of esoteric knowledge, such as the history of census taking in the United States or and the specific uses different agencies put it to, is not assumed.

CHAPTER 15

Emergence, Agency, and the Middle Ground of Culture A Meditation on Mediation Stephen A. Tyler








When we speak of rhetoric/culture, anthropologists and rhetoricians might well ask, “What kind of rhetoric do you have in mind—the rhetoric of inquiry (Megill 1987), the rhetoric of argument (Perleman 1969), or perhaps the rhetoric of the ingenium (Grassi 1980), or some version of Burke’s dramatism (1966)?” Then, too, it might be reasonable to inquire about the parts of rhetoric that capture our interest. Do we focus on such concepts as inventio, topic, and memory, or are we concerned with issues of arrangement, style, and figuration? Are we focusing on the structure of our own textual production as in Writing Culture (Clifford/Marcus 1986) or are we interested in the comparative study of rhetoric in different cultures, and if the latter, do we seek to critique the discipline of rhetoric or do we merely aim to give an account of the functioning of rhetoric by documenting the use of maxims, enthymemes, examples, and metaphors in exotic contexts (see Kennedy 1998)? Rhetoricians might even question our motives, thinking we are engaged in some kind of disciplinary colonialism. Rhetoric aside, is it not also legitimate to ask how our idea of rhetoric/culture differs from earlier anthropological programs such as the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, and discourse analysis? Is there anything here we haven’t already tried? Don’t we already do rhetoric? Some anthropologists might even think it is dangerous for us to acknowledge outright the rhetori-

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cal bases of our practices since that would confirm the suspected “softness” of our work in the eyes of those who purport to do “real” science. Shifting from a rhetoric of demonstration and reference to a rhetoric of persuasion and expression, if that is what we intend, would be tantamount to damaging our credibility among the disciplines. Postmodernist critics might well regard our invocation of rhetorical themes as a kind of atavism, the rhetorical interest in speech and the intentionality of the subject being the certain stigmata of a return to the ideas of presence and agency. “Techies,” on the other hand, might similarly accuse us of degeneracy, of a feckless turning away from the realities of contemporary discourse as revisioned in the technological wizardry of computers and the Internet. For them, the old ideas of rhetoric and culture are simply outmoded holdovers from an earlier primitive mentality that functioned either in the world of fixed text objects or in the unstable and evanescent world of orality.

Genre, Persuasion, Demonstration All of these concerns may well be legitimate within the context of the peculiar assumptions with which they are associated. In the first place, we need not specify in advance what themes and parts of rhetoric we seek to appropriate and rework. Since our aim is not to theorize rhetoric, we can pick and chose among all the parts and possibilities as they may seem useful to us. Thus, the rhetoric of inquiry might serve us in critiquing the fundaments of some discipline, or the rhetoric of argument might be deployed in a field study of dispute. Moreover, some features of rhetoric, such as figuration, ethos, pathos, and logos, are so deeply embedded in the structure of communication that they might well seem indispensable. For example, we readily translate ethos, pathos, and logos into those foundational features of communication that we call speaker, hearer, and message, respectively. Like Vico, we might even associate them with different moments in the evolution of culture, or following Habermas, identify them as a hierarchy of genres that specify forms of discourse and methods of proof. The essential idea is that the forms of a discourse correspond to the character of its “aboutness.” According to this triumvirate, any discourse is about me, you, or it—or as Habermas has it, pertains to the speaker’s internal world, the social world, or the external objective world (1976: 66ff.). The corollary to this division is that the discourse genre associated with each of these is fundamentally different in purpose, grammar, form of argument, and relation to truth. Consequently, it has been generally accepted that mixed genres are to be prohibited.

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As is well known, however, one of the characteristics of postmodernism has been the rejection of this dictum. So, we have had “hybridity,” “dialogism,” and “reflexivity” as forms of discourse that cut across or undermine the boundaries of fixed genres. Part of the motivation for mixed genres derives from a suspicion that determinism of objective form conceals lapses and gaps in proof and is possible only when these lapses and gaps are papered over by various tricks and devices of grammar and mathematical figuration. To put it differently, what is being contested here is not only the presumption of genre distinction, but also the supposed difference between demonstration and persuasion, the difference that, at least since Vico, has founded the separation of rhetoric from philosophy-cum-science. The traditional argument has been that rhetoric works with a defective logic, that truncated form of a syllogism known as the enthymeme. The most recent version of this argument in positivism and elsewhere also rests on a claim about linguistic form. Since fact-stating sentences are the only sentences capable of falsification, they alone constitute the means of demonstration. The consequence of this ukase is that one has to work with a truncated form of discourse in which most of the interesting uses of language have been extirpated and in which communication is restricted largely to pointing, grunting, grimacing, and an occasional “if and only if.” To put it differently, this parody of discourse is possible only if it is enabled by the other forms of discourse that it discredits even as it is inextricably embedded in them. What then can we make of the long-standing idea that demonstration and persuasion are two fundamentally different forms of discourse if the founding linguistic difference is only an illusion? The usual ploy is to call on a difference of speaker intention. When speakers seek to persuade they may deploy whatever means will most effectively bring about a change in the hearer’s beliefs or opinions. By contrast, speakers intending to demonstrate are expected to forswear those tricks and sleights of hand that appeal to the hearer’s emotions. One ought not seek to deceive. Demonstration thus presents itself not only as a logic, but as a moral and ethical system as well. But it achieves this by a more fundamental and powerful kind of trick. Demonstration is nothing more than a high-powered form of persuasion that enables speakers to forsake lesser forms of “appeal.” It will have been noted that the preceding sentence sets demonstration clearly within the territory of persuasion. Demonstration is called a “higher powered form of persuasion” and speakers are said to use it to “appeal.” This deliberate manipulation of demonstration demonstrates that there is no demonstration that is not already a persuasion. Whomever seeks to demonstrate seeks to persuade and there is then no interesting difference between persuading and demonstrating. The founding separation of rhetoric and science is merely an illusion created by an abuse of language and a subterfuge.

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Even though demonstration is only a variety of persuasion it still differs from persuasion in several ways, most especially in practices impinging on the agency of the speaker/writer (hereafter, speaker). While both start from the speaker’s intention, persuasion seems more accessible to the speaker’s manipulation and control. By contrast, we might think of the constraints of argument and method in demonstration as a limitation on the speaker’s agency. Speakers are not free to pick and choose arguments and facts unless those arguments and facts cohere or accord with some sort of standard, norm, or mechanical structure. This limitation partly reflects the function of demonstration as an “objective” procedure that seeks to marginalize speakers. It achieves this effect by conjuring a sense of autonomous structure and action in the form of reason, logic, and method in which speakers are captured and function only as drones carrying out automated processes that they may monitor but cannot effectively control or manipulate. We could say that speakers are displaced in favor of a mechanical system that could seemingly operate without them. This fantasy of autonomous process is achieved by eliminating chance interventions external to the mechanism of demonstration. Demonstrations appear to occur in a social and communication-free vacuum in which the intent to prove or show something to someone for some reason through effective means resulting from choice and selection of facts, reasons, and arguments is conjured away. Much as this is a parody of demonstration, it does attune us to the fact that rhetoric, and especially persuasion, overemphasizes the agency of the speaker. With the possible exception of reader-reception critique, one does not immediately think of hearer-centered rhetorics, and even in this case, readers are not really receptive since the role of critique merely transposes the speaker author position to the reader. The reader usurps the author as the creator of the text. One could say that hearers or audiences are not simply passive constituents since they can reject the speaker’s intent or fail to respond appropriately to it. This resistance, whether active or passive, however, occurs in response to the agency of the speaker and is not independently generated in the absence of the speaker’s provocation. Even so, there is something illusory about this agency, especially when we change the imaginary role of the speaker, envisioning no longer in our minds eye a picture of an orator speaking to an assemble multitude, in full presence, as we might say, and imagine instead another scene—that of the lonely author composing his text in the absence of any hearer save that alter auditor gibbering in the back of his mind. Or again, change the image to that mixed medium of television where the speaker is manipulated by the hidden mechanisms of camera angle, focus, backgrounding, and simultaneous editing. As Marshall McLuhan long ago noted, the medium displaces the speaker, or at least alters and constrains his agency. In both text

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and television speakers usually have no immediate sense of audience reaction and cannot gauge the effect of their performance. The imaginary construction of the response of an absent audience is a daunting task and that may be one of the reasons many television shows take place before a token audience whose responses function as a kind of surrogate for those of the absent audience. Herein lies a fertile field for manipulation, as anyone selected to participate in the audience for a televised political speech can attest. In any event, we may take it as demonstrated that rhetoric overestimates the speaker’s agency. Finally, it must be noted that the whole idea of speaker agency is illusory even under the best of circumstances, whatever they may be. Both structuralism and deconstruction provide strong arguments against the idea of the totalitarian speaker. An author’s or speaker’s sense of control over words, thoughts, themes, arguments, figuration, linguistic structure, intertextual, and extra-textual connections is a kind of self-induced hypnotism that obscures the way these elements of composition have a life of their own that resists manipulation and domination. If speakers have so little control over their own words, how much less control must they have over their effect on their audiences. Much as one may try to manipulate and persuade, everything ultimately slips out of control and slides away toward some unwanted or unanticipated effect. Once upon a time, the contrast between anthropology and rhetoric focused on this sense of authorial agency. Anthropology, or more precisely perhaps, ethnography, marginalized the author in an attempt to present a realist text that pictured the object. The ethnographic text was made, as much as possible, to give the appearance of being driven by the object, the reality it sought to depict. The author’s agency was constrained by the structure of the object. Reality impressed itself onto the text—through the medium of the author’s impressions. Even though the authority of the text was founded in the author’s subjectivity—the “I was there, I saw”—this subjectivity was disguised as the ultimate form of presence that guaranteed objectivity in the untouched passage of the real from its source into and through the medium of the author’s perception and description. Here the emphasis is neither on the author’s agency nor on the autonomy of the medium of showing. It is instead founded in the object. The author’s agency is seemingly constrained by the obtruding structure of the object and by the inexplicit norms of realist discourse that limit what can be said and how it can be said. But there is no refuge in the object, for it too is a fantasy created out of what we can say about it and we will ever feel that our words exceed it at the same time as it exceeds them. A major result of the critique of writing in anthropology has been the restoration of the author’s agency in the construction of ethnography, and thus once again to make contact with rhetoric. Some might argue that we have al-

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ready gone too far and have made ethnography little more than an expression of the author’s imagination, but given my earlier remarks on the limitations of authorial agency, this reaction is clearly overstated. There are other arguments against this canard that more adequately address the issue of subject and object that underlies the problem of agency. These arguments focus on autonomous and largely unconscious processes of thought that are possibly universal, but are more likely particularized by different languages.

Autopoeisis The basic argument here is that the idea of independent and autonomous objects described by independent and autonomous subjects by means of independent and autonomous media of description is too simple to account for what is known as ethnographic description, or for that matter, any kind of description. The idea of objective description is confounded by too many impossibilities, and similar objections apply as well to the converse idea that objective reality if only a subjective construction. This easy dichotomy between subject and object obscures the intricacies of an interaction in which subjects, objects, and descriptions are produced simultaneously and reciprocally. To put it baldly, objects and the discourse about them are co-emergents. Thus, the anthropological object called culture is produced by the rhetoric called ethnography or more generally, anthropology, just as that rhetoric is reciprocally produced by the object called culture. Anthropology is a rhetoric of culture that produces an Other, a difference at the same time as it reduces that other, that difference to a same by means of the rhetoric of culture. Thus, the culture of the so-andso is embedded within the rhetoric of culture writ large as “man,” “mankind,” “the human,” and so on. There is a basic amphibole in the concept of culture, a split between the big “C” and the little “c.” On the one hand its rhetoric produces a particularity, a difference called the culture of the so-and-so, while on the other hand, the rhetoric of culture produces a universal. This co-determination produces such familiar objects as culture, the primitive, savagery, and origins as indices of difference that are then dissolved in such concepts as the psychic unity of mankind, evolution, acculturation, enculturation, and other determinants of change. An ethnography is a complex rhetoric that presents its object at the same time as it dissolves it into rhetorical categories, topics, and interpretive organization—that topology of a familiar mindscape of understanding. Clearly it is not a representation and there is no sense in asking if it corresponds to some reality outside itself. It is this autopoeisis of the object and its solicitation, its descriptive dissolution/solution that underlies the formation rhetoric/culture. The slash in

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the compound signifies the action and interaction that produces both object and subject as self-organizing systems. In the familiar case of ethnography, the object emerges out of the description only as the description emerges out of the object. As we seek to account for the object our account structures the object in a series of linked and amplified responses to the object’s emerging features and in consequence of emerging constraints within the description itself. Object and account are thus reciprocally produced. The now familiar processes of feedback, amplification, and inhibition that characterize all complex systems are apparent here, but that is not the real issue. We might want to press further and identify the sequence of developmental moments, or isolate those critical turns that set off a train of related or implicated characterizations that establish a developmental direction or a thematization. Thus the moment of an enabling figuration or key term as the incipient focus of a constellation of terms and figures would comprise the traces of an emergent whole. We may know that all of these are reciprocal, cyclic, and mutually constraining, but we need to understand where figures, terms, constellations, and thematizations come from.

Rebus/Rhyme We typically distinguish between two modes of constructive understanding. One is that kind of conscious, task-oriented activity that we associate with analytic reason and tend to characterize as atomistic, logical, inferential, inductive, generalizing, and generally scientific. Its other we think of as being intuitive, undirected holistic, alogical, creative, and largely unconscious. The distinction is overdrawn for it is a parody of thought to suppose that it might proceed independently in either of these forms. Even so, it has been a persistent dualism and it is at least partly responsible for the supposed difference between rhetoric and philosophy or science. Thought may have its different modes, but they are distinct from one another only by virtue of an after-thefact reconstruction. These modes necessarily interact with one another and with images, feels, twitches, and other purely sensuous impulses. In what follows, I will not pursue these phenomena, but will instead focus on two seemingly interpenetrated forms that are important as enabling conditions for what we like to think of as reason. Recall the common expression, “there is neither rhyme nor reason,” in which rhyme, in some sense of the term is paired with reason seemingly as a form of reasonableness. Is it only the idea of structured sound that is expressed here, or is there something akin to what the poet Ezra Pound invoked as “object rhyme,” indicating by that expression the way different objects may mutu-

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ally call one another to mind and possibly set off a whole sequence of other mindful objects. Sometimes this does occur by means of sound similarity, but more often it results from collocations, which in the most obvious cases are linguistic as in “ham-n-eggs,” “coffee-n-cream,” “heart-n-soul,” but they need not be overtly linguistic. They might as easily be complementary and mutually reciprocal images. Although collocations may be experiential complements or perhaps sophistically traced to some experiential or functional complex, they may as well have no experiential history apart from the fact of their cooccurrence in someone’s mind. Whatever they may be, they are not associations in the usual psychological sense of that term. They are, as Benjamin Lee Whorf long ago argued, connections that do not derive from anyone’s experience apart from some supposed originary auditory context. But this is not the whole point. The important thing about these collocations is the fact that they evoke responses and connections across several different modes of perception and understanding. Thus, something as mundane as “hammer-n-nails,” for example, evokes kinesthetic and visual sensations. We see in our mind the hammer, “sense” the smoothness of its wooden handle, and “feel” in our shoulders, arm, wrist, and elbow the force of the hammer striking the nail, and we hear the crack of the hammer striking the nail, and we imagine the movement of the nail into the wood. These “senses” constitute our aesthetic experience of a nail well struck. Most, if not all, of our experience of things and words is like this, even when the collocation is completely abstract, as in “law-n-order.” Here we feel a slight straightening of the spine as if to “police” the body and get it properly lined up. Seeing and hearing are not just the processing, abstraction, and generalization of visual and auditory stimuli. They are instead a simultaneous, multi-modal perceiving/conceiving. But again, this is not quite the point about object rhyme. Object rhyme also involves the movement of thought in which sequences of objects are automatically conjured from a single so-called stimulus. Thus, for example, “hammer-n-nails”  “hammer-n-tongs”  “yellow peril”  “yellow dog democrat.” These chain complexes are not associations as such. They are object implications driven sometimes by sound similarity—rhyme in the usual sense—at other times by taxonomic implication, and at still other times by possible concatenations of a key term working through its constellation of subordinate terms. Such a sequence may have an after-the-fact direction when we so to speak “see” where our minds are taking us, but it is not directed by us in the sense of conscious thought. The sequence unfolds according to its own potentially self-organizing reciprocities. It is the secret communication of objects in the mind organized by rhyme and rebus. It is likely that all of the world’s originary writing systems—Chinese ideograms, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, and the Indus script—arose

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from the rebus principle. A rebus, as its name indicates, is writing by means of things, but not just by the instrumentality of picturing things, for a rebus also requires homonymy, or if you like, rhyme in the sense of sound. It is a dual principle that effectively combines in a single form the absolute concreteness of the imaged object with the sound-induced movement toward abstraction. Thus, for example, a picture of a triangle representing a pyramid or ziggurat or a mountain would have a phonological correspondent, such as ko, meaning mountain, but the picture of the triangle would not always mean ko “mountain,” it could also mean something phonologically similar, for example kon, meaning “king.” The abstract concept “king” is presented indirectly by both picture and sound. Clearly this is a multi-modal way of writing, and I am arguing that this rebus form is one of the mind’s most productive machinations that continues to function fully even in minds “corrupted” by systems of alphabetic writing. I need not have invoked the pyramids here, for we know that Freud’s analysis of dreams also involved the rebus principle. A thing in a dream was not necessarily that thing, but something conjured by it through various processes of sound similarity and repressed experiential complexes. We need not accept Freud’s peculiar machinery of repression or interpretation in order to understand the movement of thought he often illustrated. We might note, however, that the normal idea of rational thought does entail repression of this kind of movement at the conscious level even as it exploits it beneath the surface of conscious acknowledgement.

Identification, Intention, Time The orator is the enduring figure in the imaginary of rhetoric. This figure projects the image of the speaker and hearer in face-to-face communication. They come to an understanding through mutual identification and by means of an already constituted background of semiosis and knowledge derived from a shared linguistic structure and cultural/social experience—the grammar and phronesis of earlier rhetorical texts. Attractive as this image is, it does not capture the accomplishment of intersubjectivity as emergent in circumstances where cognitive sharing is absent, problematic, or irresolvably conflicted. Nor does it take into account the suppression or contortion of speaker/hearer roles and expectations in different technologies of communication involving disembodied, distributed agency, undeclared audiences, and unfamiliar cultural identities. These are the situations that now constitute many of our daily encounters with texts, advertising, the Internet, and many of the directives and regulations that emanate from government sources. In these contexts we are often addressed as accidental audiences by subjectless agents. The expressions

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“government agency” and “advertising agency” evoke precisely the image of faceless agents beaming out dictates to more or less random, and abstract receivers. The sense of impersonal agency, however, is often deliberately occluded by tropes of personification that seek to give a sense of “real” agency. The famous poster with the phrase “Uncle Sam Needs You!” is a classical example. This manipulation of address is one of the most common devices in advertising. Advertisements first construct identities and then by manipulation of pronouns and other linguistic features insinuate “you” into the virtual audience (Stillar 1998). Though these techniques are ubiquitous in our communication-saturated culture, they are not unknown in so-called “oral” cultures. Communion with the gods through oracles, shamans, and the possessed are common means of ancient and primitive virtual communication in which abstract and impersonal agents speak through intermediaries. We are all familiar with distributed agency in the form of texts issued by multiple authors or “by committee.” Here too, various linguistic practices of personification and direct address are deployed as a way of dispelling the sense of absent personal agency and declared audience. We were already programmed for the notion of undeclared audience by all those explicit exhortations in early novels in which the phrase “dear reader” invoked us as the absent audience and imparted a sense of a real person speaking directly to us. Perhaps the most obvious technique for creating the illusion of speaker/ hearer presence is the use of narrative, dialog, and stream of consciousness in text. Readers are invited to “overhear” a dialog or narrative and to identify with the participants. Participation through overhearing is also a general audience modality in television and radio. In sum, the ideal image of rhetoric in which speakers and hearers are in face-to-face communication in mutually understood contexts is no longer the norm. Even so, these displacements of speakers and hearers is often disguised, as if there is a recognized need to concretize and naturalize these departures from the ideal and make them seem not to be departures. We have learned to make do with a simulacrum of face-to-face communication. Cultural fragmentation and transcultural communication also undermine the commonplace knowledge structures that form the background of understanding, organize memory, and provide the content of communication. In our contemporary world of globalization, technology, and borderless violence, we need some analog of the systems of memory and mnemotechnics of classical rhetoric—something more transculturally sensitive than archives and data banks. The idea of organized commonplaces in classical rhetoric is clearly related to the idea of culture. Commonplaces, like culture, were knowledge structures and semiotic systems. They were organizations of ideas and concepts in the form of topics representing the common knowledge that speakers drew on

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in composing speeches. Systems of commonplaces had many different forms, ranging from concrete, theatrical analogies to abstract diagrammatic representations (Yates 1966). In many ways these systems of commonplaces resemble the idea of semantic memory in psychology or Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of cultural memory. In the later case, it is worth noting the use of buildings and monuments as memory places in a way that is reminiscent of the architectural features used in classical rhetorical mnemotechnics. Commonplace books embodied all the ideas of computer memory and data banks before computers. Ideas were at or in a location, they could be accessed by hierarchical nodes and in some systems, notably those of Ramus, the search procedure consisted of “flow charts” organized by dichotomous contrast. Commonplaces were critical to inventio, the means of the speaker’s access to topically organized ideas (Grassi 1976). Seeking to speak of Apollo, for example, speakers could find listed under that name all the features and necessary characteristics of Apollo. These then became the sources of predication, of what could be said of Apollo. Topics in commonplace books were organized in terms of cultural salience. Apollo, being the most important deity, would be listed first, followed by other deities and less important topics. Later commonplace books were organized by other rational principles that sought to reveal the hidden pillars of knowledge and their secret or occult linkages. Invention, in the classical tradition, was not the discovery of the new, but was literally the “coming-in” (in-venere) of what was already known. Creativity, as the recombination of the known, was guided and facilitated by tradition. Tradition was thus not the burden of the past, it was the past as the means of the present and future, the concrete image of the co-implication of the moments of time. These ideas contrast strongly with modernism where invention is understood as the discovery of the new and is regarded as the engine of enlightenment that overcomes the obstacles of tradition, and time is only the present/future. All the idolatry of science and modernism is captured in this contrast. The “production” of new knowledge is the industrial metaphor of modernism. This topic is too complex for this short chapter, but what I am suggesting is that this production metaphor and all the baggage associated with it is suspect in an age where exchange is the central theme and the circulation and recirculation of recombinant virtual products is the dominant metaphor. Rhetoric/culture seeks to understand this emergent return to the transcultural context of classical rhetoric. It is a kind of detour through the past in which the past is not just something to be discredited or overcome in the production of the new, but it will have been instead the means of a kind of appropriation of the future already present. Rhetoric/culture is thus neither a new methodology nor just a bag of tricks suitable to any occasion. The occasion of rhetoric/culture is this juncture.

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Via Media If rhetoric typically overemphasizes agency, anthropology has generally erred in the opposite direction. Such organizing concepts as culture, society, structure, and rules focus on super-organic systemic features that determine, or at least strongly constrain, the choices and strategies of individual actors. We could say that such concepts displace the idea of agency from persons to structures. The entailed grammatical shift is to speak of cultures and systems in the active voice and metaphorically to personalize them while depersonalizing individual actors as passive objects puppeted about by the controlling demiurge of culture. As one might predict, this opposition between agency and structure has impelled a search for mediating concepts. Ideas like “practice,” “structuring,” “structuration,” “praxis,” and “performance” are among the common proposals for talking about processes rather than entified action/agents and system/structures. In effect, these mediating concepts are merely analogues of the original rhetorical idea of ethos (praxis), the speaker’s practices that mediated and performed logos and pathos, just as the notion of practice now mediates culture and personal agency. This same triad is also analogized in the cognitive categories of rules (logos), association (pathos), and schemata (ethos). In both analogs the same patterns prevail. The need for a way to mediate the opposition between logos and pathos ultimately produces a third concept that is neither a superordinate nor a dialectical overcoming of the opposition, but is instead a kind of hybrid, a both/and, neither/nor that combines within itself some, but not all, of the possibilities of its two counterparts while at the same time creating an emergent process that is not directly deducible from the opposed categories themselves. An easy way to grasp this operation is to remember how such ordinary things as examples work. Examples are simultaneous combinations of the opposites specific/general and concrete/abstract. They are what they are as particulars, but they also portend more than their particularity because they enable us to apprehend some generalized principle or entity that is more than the example itself. Moreover, they do this without an explicit formulation of derivation or processes of implication. In this sense, examples are both rational and irrational. They are irrationally formed means of rationality, as Ernesto Grassi might have observed. As for the question of agency, we could say that mediating concepts like schemata and examples either distribute agency across the whole range of opposition, or locate it entirely within their own self-originated sphere. The former is the temptation of system theory, which has the unfortunate result of eliminating any possibility of ethics as a feature of individual action. Since everything is displaced onto the totality, there can be no direct assignment of individual responsibility for anything. Theories of practice, even though they

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seek to locate themselves in the via media, have the same problem. To speak, for example, of individuals calculating possibilities and deploying strategies, as in the classic examples of practice theory, is a way of having your cake and eating it too. Individuals calculate and deploy strategies (all in the active voice), but the calculus and the strategy are pre-given instrumentalities in which the active voice of process is embedded and disguised. In effect, we have agents as individual actors who have no more agency than the puppets of culture. That is to say “strategies” and “possibilities” begin to look very much like the ubiquitous “how-to” books of contemporary culture that, though they are not normally formulated in set theoretical systems of rules, still function as guides and sets of instructions for behavior. Strategies and possibilities are logos-like recipes for behavior in the same way some of the formations of culture-ascognition were. Practice, as its name implies, always stands in an already constituted relation to theoria. It is either the doing of its enabling theory or the work that goes into the acquisition of its enabling theory. It is the performance of what enables it. It is possible to conceive of performance as an activity that engenders its own theory or logos, but it goes against the grain of our normal understanding of the “pre-formed” that performance actualizes in the sense of a “plot,” “score,” “script,” “plan,” or “design.” Although we might want to invoke the notion that a performance is a self-induced improvisation that performs nothing but itself and exhausts itself in the evanescent moment of its occasion, its event still becomes a thematized object of interpretation and consequently necessarily returns us to the normative context of performance, its anarchic impulse thus negated. The ghost of grammar inhabits and vitalizes this whole discussion of rhetoric/culture. The documented shift of agent/agency between persons-as-cultures and cultures-as-persons is largely a play on the grammatical categories of active and passive voice. So too, much of the discussion in the critique of ethnography involving the idea of reflexivity entails the grammatical category of reflexive voice. Much of what I have detailed here is an implicit critique of reflexivity. Reflexivity is simply inadequate to the task of emergence and autopoiesis. It entails only a return to the agent in which agent and object, self and other engage in a kind of to-and-fro where both participants sequentially exchange the roles of agent and object. The attraction of dialogical anthropology similarly derives from the notion of equality of exchange in the roles of agents and patients in which this same image of a kind of back-and-forth becomes a moral and ethical imperative. Apart from the fact that dialogue, conceived as an anthropological or rhetorical method, cannot be based in equality in the distribution of roles, there is the more important problem of emergence, of what is beyond the moment of dialoguing. Lurking in the background of most

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arguments for dialogue and conversation as models of behavior and textualization is either some notion of a dialectical process, an Aufhebung, or a consensual resolution of conflicting positions. Again, the idea is that of equality, in this case, equality of what, for lack of a better term, we might call “justice.” It involves the notion that consensus achieves an equal distribution of rights, privileges, and consequences among participants. Disagreements can be resolved to the equal and mutual satisfaction of all parties. As Jean-François Lyotard has shown, this equality of result is frequently not the case. Someone wins and someone else loses. Many intractable oppositions cannot be consensually resolved. I am not interested here in Lyotard’s notion of finding “new phrases” to express the unsayable of irresolvable conflict, but am simply pressing his arguments about the differend into the service of my arguments against reflexivity. If the issue here revolves around the role of grammatical voice understood as a philosophical problem, and reflexivity so understood is no better than active and passive voice, then we might turn to other candidates of grammatical voice. The idea of the middle voice as a philosophical paradigm addresses the concepts of subject and object and argues for their relativization as potentialities activated within the competence of the verb. Their differentiation emerges as a process of the verb in a kind of grammatical parthenogenesis. They thus come after the verb, not before it. Entification then, is not a precondition for process. Consequently, most linguistic theorizing about the middle voice misses the point inasmuch as it starts from the assumption that subject and object exist independently of the verb and are only mutually “involved” in its process. In fact, linguists commonly take the role of the agent or subject as the focus of the middle voice more or less in parallel with the reflexive where activity typically emanates from the agent and returns to it, as in the English sentence “I shaved myself ” (see Benveniste 1971; Kemmer 1993). Here the subject is defined as being affected by the action of the verb or as undergoing change within the action of the verb. Since the subject (agent/actor) is necessary to the definition, the definition merely recapitulates the difference it ought to overcome. The very name, “middle,” conjures this same problem. It encourages us to think of two “somethings” simultaneously separated and joined by a process, exactly in the way old-fashioned textbooks on logic portrayed the idea of a “relation” (R) as standing between two “entities” a and b, as in a R b. We would do better to think of the middle voice as a “pure process” manifesting itself simultaneously as its kinesis and dynamism, the latter being its possible characterizations as quasi-entities. A middling sentence like “the corn grows,” for example, is not to be understood as an agentive corn object acting on itself, but is instead all of the possibilities entailed as momentary stages in the endless process of change that we can think of as a cycle of manifestations that go from seed to seed. This is not an argument for some kind of aestheticization of the sort familiar in

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the philosophical literature descending from Kant’s meditation on the unity of subject and object in the work of art as a vision of identity, or even less of the romantic idea of some ineffable primal unity that achieves objectivity outside of the ego. The middle voice articulates the structure of the via media without disposing of difference in the unity of subject and object.

Conclusion My invocation of autonomous processes of thought and my critique of agency are not intended as an argument for a return to structuralism of even less as another voice in that requiem for the death of the subject that has so captivated contemporary philosophy. I am not arguing that the subject is merely a grammatical place holder that only creates an illusion of the ego’s conscious mastery (cf. Nancy 1991). Instead, I am arguing that the self is still sovereign in its own quotidian realm, even though that realm is constantly shifting and being colonized and redefined in response to virtual, non-personal modes of individuation that simulate persons or egos. The gravamen of my argument is that psychic and cultural structures are not autonomous. That is, neither these opposites nor their mediation are independent. Each presupposes and exploits the other. They are co-dependent and co-emergent in activities that evoke but do not produce or cause them. In short, “will” and “representation” are simultaneously cause and effect and that is why I do sometimes work my will on the world even though the world and I may both be little more than simulacra. References Burke, Kenneth. 1966. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grassi, Ernesto. 1976. “The Priority of Common Sense and Imagination: Vico’s Philosophical Relevance Today.” Social Research 43 (3): 553–80. ———. 1980. Rhetoric as Philosophy. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Kennedy, George. 1998. Comparative Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Megill, Allan. 1987. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nancy, Jean Luc. 1991. Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge. Perleman, Chaim. 1969. The New Rhetoric. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press. Stillar, Glenn F. 1998: Analyzing Everyday Texts. London: Sage. Yates, Francis. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Notes on Contributors








David Boromisza-Habashi is assistant professor at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder. Donal Carbaugh is Samuel F. Conti faculty research fellow and professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. John W. Du Bois is professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Felix Girke is research coordinator at the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies (ZIRS), Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Gerard A. Hauser is professor at the Department of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder. Alexander Henn is associate professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe. Pierre Maranda is professor emeritus and director of research at the Département d’Anthropologie, Université Laval, Quebec. Christian Meyer is assistant professor of qualitative methods and anthropology at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. Todd Oakley is associate professor and chair of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Alula Pankhurst is Ethiopia Country Director for Young Lives Research Project run by Oxford University, and was associate professor at Addis Ababa University in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology.

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Franz-Hubert Robling is lecturer at the Seminar für Allgemeine Rhetorik, University of Tübingen, and assistant editor of the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Filipp Sapienza is former professor of technical communication at the University of Colorado at Denver, and today works as an information designer, usability practitioner, and content management consultant. John Shotter is emeritus professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. Bernhard Streck is emeritus professor and former director of the Institut für Ethnologie at the University of Leipzig. Ivo Strecker is professor emeritus of anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and founder of the South Omo Museum and Research Center (SORC) in Jinka, Ethiopia. Stephen A. Tyler is Herbert S. Autrey professor of anthropology at Rice University, Houston. James F. Weiner is visiting fellow in the resource management in the Asia Pacific program, Australia National University. James Thomas Zebroski is professor and director of graduate studies at the Department of English, University of Houston.

Index








action/actor, 2–4, 6–21, 25–27, 31n5, 31n7, 37–38, 40, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 50, 53–55, 62–64, 67, 69, 72–73, 75, 79, 87–90, 95, 102, 104, 146–49, 161–63, 166, 179–80, 183, 189, 227–31, 236–37, 241, 243, 245–46, 248n6, 250n27, 254, 257–59, 261, 267, 273, 283, 285, 288–89, 291, 296, 301, 307, 310, 315–17 addressivity, 8, 13, 71 aesthetics, 2, 121, 133, 161, 211, 256, 265–66, 317 agency, 3, 5–6, 8–10, 12, 16, 21, 23, 25–27, 31n7, 32n9, 37–38, 40, 42–43, 45, 47–48, 51n3, 86, 102–3, 106, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 205, 227, 236–37, 240, 243, 245–46, 260–61, 278, 304–5, 307–9, 312–18 distributed, 312–13 allusion, 220, 237–38 anthropology, 1–3, 15, 17, 22, 27, 31nn6–7, 52, 93, 120–33, 141–45, 158, 249n16, 256–57, 260, 263n3, 308–9, 315–16 anti-structure, 26, 264, 266, 269–70 appetence, 91–92 Arbore of Southern Ethiopia, 225–27, 230, 232–38, 240–46, 247n1, 248n2, 248n11, 249n17 Aristotle, 10–11, 16, 254–55, 258, 268, 283, 290 art, 10, 24–25, 31n5, 37–38, 97, 119–21, 126, 128–30, 143, 161, 170, 191–92, 203–4, 206, 214–15, 255, 257, 265, 270, 272–73, 275, 303n1, 303n2, 318 poetic, 214

of rhetoric/speaking, 10, 11, 25, 120–21, 129, 164, 253–55, 257, 303n1 popular, 164 of herding goats, 150 assimilation, 212, 217–18, 221 association, 13, 87, 91, 95–97, 198, 203, 238, 243, 249n15, 299, 305, 310–11, 314–15 attention/attentiveness, 7, 12, 16, 21–23, 26, 40, 45, 49, 54, 58, 61, 73, 94–97, 105–6, 112–13, 157, 181, 226, 228, 249n25, 282–301 audience, 3, 7, 11–13, 21, 24–25, 58, 61, 86, 88–89, 93, 96–97, 101–2, 122, 133, 161, 169, 231, 235, 242, 244–45, 250n27, 254, 258, 260, 263n5, 276, 289, 298, 307–8, 312–13 aura, 22, 105, 119–134, 136n9, 249n12 authorship, 26, 264–67, 270–71, 273, 275, 277–78 autonomy, 163, 193, 244, 308 autopoeisis, 309, 316. See also self-organisation Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3–4, 6–8, 13, 16, 20, 23, 35, 41–42, 44–46, 48, 54, 58, 60, 62, 71, 162–65, 172n2, 194, 204, 268 Bateson, Gregory, 22, 67, 142–44, 244 Benedict, Ruth, 22, 125 Blackfeet, 21, 102–6, 108, 110–12, 114–117 blessing, 25, 149, 152, 225, 227–228, 232–36, 238–44, 249n12

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and cursing, 227–28, 232–33, 235–36, 241–42, 245 blinding, 125–26, 132–33 Blumenberg, Hans, 4, 263n3 Burke, Kenneth, 7, 11, 13, 16, 23, 52, 54, 61, 75, 158, 161–62, 164–65, 268, 283, 304 Category Adaptive Resonance Theory, 85–86, 93, 96 Catholicism, 87, 211, 216–18, 220, 224n10, 224n14 Census 2000, 26, 282, 284–85, 289–96, 298–301, 303nn4–5 Christians/Christianity, 25, 76, 87, 129, 210–21, 223n1, 224n14, 241, 259, 269 Cicero, 11, 255–56, 258 citizens, ordinary, 158, 165–66, 168–69 co-emergence, 26, 31n7 cognition, 15, 17, 92, 283, 291, 298–99, 316 distributed, 17, 61 cognitive linguistics, 284–85 sociocognitive relations, 53–56, 79 colonialism, 124, 126, 130, 158, 218, 220 commensality, 236–37, 239, 244 common ground, 17–18, 202, 228, 237, 245 commonplace, 21, 24, 165–66, 204, 267, 313–14. See also topoi, topic communication face-to-face, 260–61, 289, 312–13, intercultural, 87 mass media, 260–61 nonlinguistic, 21, 102, 104, 112, 114, 117, 268 rhetorical, 261, 263n3 speech, 6, 35, 44 transcultural, 207, 313 verbal, 286, 291 comparative discourse analysis, 114 conceptual blending, 286 conceptualization, 286, 289, 293, 295–96 consciousness, 9, 12–13, 36–37, 62, 67, 69, 97, 108, 114, 193, 196, 198, 200, 205, 216, 245–46, 271–72, 274, 284–85, 288, 292, 298, 309–313, 318 contingency, 3–4, 13, 17, 27, 32n8, 47, 133, 193, 249n24, 297 conversion, 24, 210–12, 217, 219 conviction, 26, 55, 121, 229–230, 246

Cook, James, 25 co-presence, 22, 57–58, 140–41, 146 creativity, 9, 15, 17, 19, 78, 314 cyberspace, 24, 191, 193, 202 decoration, 122, 126, 215, 248n10 costume, 22, 126, 130–33 masking, 132–33 veiling, 128–33 delivery, 257 demonstration, 305–7 Descartes, René/Cartesianism, 8, 21, 36–37, 39, 48, 123, 267 dialogue, 3–4, 6–9, 12, 20, 31nn2–5, 46–47, 59–60, 66–67, 69, 163, 316–17 auto-dialogicality, 71–72 discourse 3, 5, 10, 13–14, 20, 23, 32n7, 53, 55–56, 59–65, 67, 69–70, 74–78, 80, 87, 97, 101, 104–5, 111–12, 114–17, 123, 127, 133, 141, 144–46, 157–59, 163–66, 168–69, 173, 175, 180, 183, 189, 190, 192, 194, 196–97, 199–200, 202, 241, 253–54, 265, 267–69, 283, 286, 290, 300, 304, 305–6, 308–9 civil, 53, 290 ethics and, 7 non-linguistic, 14, 18, 22, 102–4, 112, 115–16, 117, 158, 194, 229, 231 public, 61, 189 rational, 2, 12, recorded, 56 dispute, 180–82, 188, 305 echo, 6, 21, 84–86, 89, 140, 241–43 eloquence, 11, 253, 257 emergence, 2–7, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 17–20, 23, 26, 31n6, 32n8, 235, 243, 245, 249n23, 276, 284–85, 304, 316 ephemerality, 2, 13–14, 24, 55, 144, 149, 153, 220, 297 ethnography, 2, 22–23, 25, 31n4, 32n8, 76, 104, 121, 125–28, 132, 142, 144–46, 159–60, 168, 247n1, 253, 285, 308–310, 316 of communication, 104 of speaking, 1, 304 rhetorical, 23, 157, 168–169, 172n7 ethnomethodology, 13, 31n7, 134, 268

index

ethos, 22, 24, 142–44, 168, 193, 205–6, 229, 258, 305, 315 evocation, 22, 84, 88, 126, 145–46, 226, 237, 246 Foi of Papua New Guinea, 23, 173–78, 180–84, 187–90 folktale, 3, 21, 89 form, 13, 22–23, 36, 46–47, 122–25, 129, 132–33 Foucault, Michel, 37n7, 52, 54, 60–61, 69, 75, 219, 224n12, 265 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 40, 48, 51n2, 122–23 Garfinkel, Harold, 31n7, 41, 268 genre, 10, 23, 163, 214, 217, 264 Gestalt, 13, 123–24 globality, 24, 168, 191–93, 196, 198–99, 201, 203, 205–7, 266, 313 Goa, 24–25, 210–14, 216–19, 223nn2–3, 224nn10–11 grammar, 2, 67, 84, 89, 91, 210, 224n6, 292, 305–6, 312, 316 cultural, 89, 91 social, 84 Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, 22, 146–153, 226–27, 232–36, 238–41, 249n18, 249n22 harmony, 11–12, 25, 84, 225, 300 Heidegger, Martin, 122 hermeneutics, 211, 219, 221, 296 Hinduism, 24–25, 210–11, 213–21 Hobbes, Thomas, 36 Hume, David, 18–19 hybridity, 205, 207, 306, 315 hyperbole, 231 I-and-thou, 77 iconoclasm, 129, 220–21, 224n13 idealism, 5, 7–8 identity/identification, 2, 11, 21–22, 24, 40, 60–63, 158, 164, 167–68, 176, 191–96, 198–207, 230, 239, 266–68, 271–73, 276, 280n2, 294, 300, 312, 318 imagination, 13, 21, 36, 74, 85–86, 89, 91–92, 195, 293, 309 improvisation, 15–17, 19, 21, 285, 316




323

India, 44, 88, 210–213, 216–21, 223nn1–3, 224n6, 224n14 intelligibility, 18, 220, 224n12 intention/intentionality, 5–9, 11, 13–17, 27, 32n9, 45, 145, 148, 183–84, 229, 239, 245–46, 285, 305–7, 312 interaction dialogical, 3 face-to-face, 53, 58–59, 73, 77, 79 human, 9, 14, 17–18 public, 59, 70, 79 rhetorical, 14, 79 social, 13, 19, 20, 55, 73, 78–79, 163, 188 talk-in-, 57–58 internet, 24, 168, 192, 202–3, 265, 267, 290, 305, 312 intersubjectivity, 8–10, 13–14, 17–18, 20–21, 23–26, 32n9, 52–56, 69–74, 76–79, 231, 249n23, 312 intuition, 45, 64, 92, 173 irony, 103, 116–117, 163 Isocrates, 10–11, 255 Jesuits, 24, 210–21 kairos, 14, 16–17, 25, 244, 254 Kennedy, George, 13, 304 kinship, 24, 126, 143, 146, 176–77, 183, 188, 237–38, 244 knowledge embodied/intuitive, 2, 88–89 local/shared/cultural, 3, 18, 72–73, 164, 189, 312–13 Leontini, Gorgias of, 10, 254, 258 listening, 21, 48, 58, 101–6, 108, 111–14, 116–17, 241, 289 logos, 122, 229, 248n6, 305, 315–16 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 18–19 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 22–23, 127, 141–42, 157–58, 160–62, 164 materialism, 7 Mead, George H., 5–6, 8, 54, 56, 60, 66–67 mediation, 26, 304, 318 memory-organization, 84–100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 41, 43–47

324




index

metaphor, 1, 21–22, 24–25, 86, 88, 96, 115, 121, 128, 139–43, 146–53, 191, 197–99, 202, 228, 230–31, 237–38, 244, 248n9, 248n25, 286, 304, 314 metonymy, 24, 147, 239, 244, 286 middle ground, 11, 26, 304 middle voice, 27, 317–18 mind/mental spaces, 282–303 mnemotechnics, 313–14 monologue, 59, 63 Montaigne, Michel de, 60 music, 20, 22, 42, 85, 122, 127, 137–38, 141, 143, 153, 161, 210, 218 mutuality, 17–19, 24, 57–58, 139, 144, 188, 203, 230, 237–38, 286, 312, 317 mystery, 10, 22, 38, 78, 85, 105, 111, 114, 116, 122–23, 127, 129–30, 132, 249n12 naming, 149 nature, 13, 21, 101–05, 108, 111, 114–15, 194, 254–56 neural networks, 93 new media, 2, 191–92, 206–7 New Rhetoric, 11, 268 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 11, 16, 119–20, 123–25, 127, 254 orator, 5, 7, 11–12, 25, 27, 85, 88–89, 91, 93–97, 163, 231, 242–43, 253–61, 263n4, 282, 289, 307, 312 othering, 196 otherness/the other, 4, 8, 17, 22, 37–42, 45, 47–49, 120–21, 126, 204, 221, 226, 229 parody, 17, 119, 163, 306–7, 310 participation, 8, 20, 53, 72, 166, 197, 201–2, 213, 227–28, 313 pathos, 122, 125, 141, 147, 229, 305, 315 peace, 25, 225–28, 231–46, 248n1, 248n5, 248n8, 248n15, 274–75 performance, 1, 6–7, 16, 23, 25, 91–92, 94, 96–97, 126, 132–33, 157–58, 161–66, 169–70, 224n10, 226, 231, 241, 243, 250n27, 267, 283, 287–88, 294, 297, 308, 315–16 persuasion, 1–2, 4, 7, 9–12, 15–16, 21, 26–27, 52, 55, 61, 120–21, 133, 139, 144, 194, 226, 228–30, 254–61, 289, 305–7

place/emplacement, 23, 47, 102, 105–6, 109, 113, 127, 133, 169, 173–90, 191, 194, 196, 200–201, 234, 238 territoriality, 174–75, 176, 179 land, 24, 174–82, 187–90 Plato, 11, 128, 254–55, 258–59 pope, 87, 218 postmodernism, 26, 92, 123, 127, 264–65, 267–69, 282, 305–6 post-Stonewall gay male literature, 267, 273, 277 power, 6–8, 18–19, 73, 75, 109–13, 159, 162, 164–65, 167, 168, 170, 226–27, 229, 234, 238, 240, 245, 254, 264, 267, 270, 272 probabilistic modeling, 21, 84, 86–90, 99n1, 267 prolepsis, 16, 26, 282–83, 295 propriety, 164–65, 168–69, 175, 180, 189 Protagoras, 10, 254–55, 263n5 psyche, 59, 67, 70, 78, 80 Quintilian, 120, 256, 258–59 rebus and rhyme, 310–12 reciprocity, 19, 39, 67, 176, 245, 309–11 religion, 87, 123, 132, 146, 215, 221, 241, 248n7, 255 representation, 21, 27, 39, 43–44, 63, 71, 78, 86, 88, 92, 96–97, 133, 163, 165, 231, 296, 300–301, 309, 314, 318 resistance, 166–67, 192, 307 resonance, 12–14, 16, 20–21, 23, 25, 27, 71, 84–86, 93–94, 96, 113, 127, 139–41, 226, 235, 245 consonance, 237 dissonance, 85, 248n6 responsivity, 3, 6–7, 9, 12–13, 16–18, 20, 25, 35–39, 41–43, 45–47, 49, 51, 58, 62–65, 69–72, 74, 77, 85–86, 89, 94–97, 115, 141, 158–59, 161–62, 166, 169, 195, 224n15, 254, 276, 285, 287, 291, 293–94, 297, 299, 300–301, 307–8, 310–11, 318 revelation, 14, 21, 101, 105, 114, 119 rhetoric classical, 229, 253, 255–58, 261, 313–14 anti-vernacular, 165, 172n5

index

quotidian, 165, 167 rhetoric culture, 25, 27, 55, 76, 79, 92, 122, 133, 159, 163–64, 168–69, 253, 304, 309, 314, 316 conference, 195, 230, 248n7, 263n5 project, 1, 22, 26, 35, 50, 249n14, 285 theory, 2, 22, 84–86, 95, 142, 144, 298, 300–301 rhetorical education, 255, 257 rhythm, 4, 13, 40, 43, 127, 243 ritual, 23, 25, 44, 65, 74–75, 123, 126–27, 132–33, 148, 150, 210, 217–18, 225–26, 228, 231–38, 240–46, 248nn8–9, 249n15, 249n22, 249nn24–25, 249n27, 266, 269–70, 275, 288 Robespierre, Maximilien, 14 Schurtz, Heinrich, 22, 131–32, 136n8 science, 37, 48, 50, 119–22, 131, 160, 231, 253, 267, 305–6, 310, 314 natural, 141–42, 144 neuro-, 86, 93, 99n1, 230, 285 social, 3, 11, 59, 123, 229–31, 285 selection, 287, 291–93, 295–96, 300, 307 self, 4, 7–9, 20–22, 38–40, 43–50, 52–83, 87, 95, 108, 111, 113–14. 119, 128, 131, 142–44, 147–48, 153, 167, 195–96, 221, 226, 245, 283, 294, 300–301, 308, 316, 318 self-organization, 27, 31n6, 310–11. See also autopoeisis self-referentiality, 4, 18–19, 195, 230 semantics, 21, 40, 84–85, 87, 120, 139, 160, 176, 189, 286, 288, 314 semiosphere, 87 semiotics, 11, 14, 75, 87, 200, 219, 224n12, 282, 286, 290, 292, 313 sincerity, 149, 230 social formation, 26, 54, 264, 266–67, 271–78, 280n2 sociality, 10–11, 15–17, 19–20, 53–57, 59–60, 69–70, 72–80, 175, 192, 255, 285 socialization, 2, 21, 61, 77, 257, 270 solitude, 54–56, 59, 65, 70–71, 74–75, 78–79 sophists, 10–11, 25, 96, 254–55, 258, 283 soviet propaganda, 7




325

speaker, See orator spontaneity, 20, 35–39, 41, 43, 45–48, 270 stance-taking, 4, 20–21, 55, 60–62, 66–67, 69, 72–73, 75, 77–78, 226, 229, 231, 236, 250n27 story-telling 3, 16, 89, 93, 110, 120, 128, 165, 174–75, 185–86, 213, 215 subjectivity, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 52–54, 66, 69, 72–76, 79, 146, 182, 190, 249n23, 254, 256–58, 260, 282, 308 substance, 11, 132, 137, 141, 190 symbolization, 6, 11–12, 25, 87, 96, 105, 113, 120, 124, 127, 131, 134, 157–64, 167, 168–70, 192–94, 197–98, 219, 226, 228, 231, 236, 238, 241, 244, 249n13, 262n2, 269–70, 285, 289, 299–300 synecdoche, 121, 132, 146–47 syntax cultural, 87 dialogic, 71 system, 27, 31n7, 73, 75, 78, 86, 92, 94–97, 99, 104, 110, 125, 165, 219, 269, 284, 287, 310, 313–16 tenor, 22–23, 94, 96, 137–53, 175 theoria, 316 theory of mind, 9, 17, 245 toe, right, big and green, 147–48, 151–52 topic, 18, 89, 91, 199, 304, 309. See also commonplace, topoi topoi, 204, 267. See also commonplace, topic transculturality, 24–25, 191, 193–96, 200–207, 225, 243, 246, 248n8, 313–14 translation, 8, 24, 120, 121, 210–11, 217, 218, 219–221, 224n12, 233, 249n25 transnationality, 191–93, 196, 198, 200, 202–3 trope, 24, 26, 121, 128, 260, 267, 313 trust, 88–89, 229, 231 Turner, Victor, 26, 266, 269–71 vernacular, 23, 157–59, 164–70, 172n1, 172n5, 210–11, 213, 224n12 Vico, Giambattista, 11, 36–37, 39–40, 44, 49–50, 268, 305–6 violence, 23, 128, 168, 211, 219–20, 258, 313

326




index

voice, 4, 6, 8–9, 12–13, 42, 49, 60–67, 71–72, 74–79, 117, 123, 137–38, 148–50, 163, 165–66, 181, 184, 257, 260–61, 288, 315–18 volonté générale, 14, 32n8 Voloshinov, Valentin, 35, 44, 48, 54, 60, 62 Vygotsky, Lev, 8, 44, 54, 56, 60, 62, 67

will, 6–11, 13, 19, 25, 27, 32n8, 45, 111, 148–49, 225, 228, 230–31, 241, 254, 256–57, 260–61, 282–83, 318 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 8, 20, 35, 40–44, 48–49, 51n1, 51n4, 56, 122, 129