Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics 9780271080017

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RHETORIC’S PRAGMATISM

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RSA STR THE RSA SERIES IN TRANSDISCIPLINARY RHETORIC

Edited by Michael Bernard-Donals (University of Wisconsin) and Leah Ceccarelli (University of Washington) Editorial Board: Diane Davis, The University of Texas at Austin Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Debra Hawhee, The Pennsylvania State University John Lynch, University of Cincinnati Steven Mailloux, Loyola Marymount University Kendall Phillips, Syracuse University Thomas Rickert, Purdue University The RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric is a collaboration with the Rhetoric Society of America to publish innovative and rigorously argued scholarship on the tremendous disciplinary breadth of rhetoric. Books in the series take a variety of approaches, including theoretical, historical, interpretive, critical, or ethnographic, and examine rhetorical action in a way that appeals, first, to scholars in communication studies and English or writing, and, second, to at least one other discipline or subject area. Other titles in this series: Nathan Stormer, Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s Mark Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment Robin E. Jensen, Infertility: A Rhetorical History

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Steven Mailloux

RHETORIC’S PRAGMATISM Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mailloux, Steven, author. Title: Rhetoric’s pragmatism : essays in rhetorical hermeneutics / Steven Mailloux. Other titles: RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2017] | Series: The RSA series in transdisciplinary rhetoric | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays on the methodology of rhetorical hermeneutics. Takes a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation, focusing on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016059098| ISBN 9780271078472 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780271078489 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Rhetoric—Philosophy. | Rhetorical criticism. | Hermeneutics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P301 .M345 2017 | DDC 808.001—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059098 Copyright © 2017 Steven Mailloux All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30 postconsumer waste.

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In memory of Terry Lyle and Bill Stockert and for the futures of Cameron Mailloux and Emily Mailloux

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Contents

Acknowledgments | ix

Introduction | 1

part i 1

From Segregated Schools to Dimpled Chads: Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Suasive Work of Theory in Legal Interpretation | 13

2

Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism: Democratic Deliberation and Purposeful Mediation | 23

3

Humanist Controversies and Rhetorical Humanism | 34

4 Rhetorical Pragmatism and Histories of New Media: Rorty on Dreyfus on Kierkegaard on the Internet | 44

part ii 5

Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and Cross-Cultural Communication | 57

6

Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics | 71

7

Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric | 86

part iii 8

Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, Allegory

9

Theotropic Logology

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| 93

| 104

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10 Jesuit Eloquentia Perfecta and Theotropic Logology

| 113

11 Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding: Eloquentia Perfecta in U.S. Jesuit Colleges | 125

part iv 12 Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading | 137 13 Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome | 145 14 Conversation with Keith Gilyard | 158 15 Political Theology in Douglass and Melville | 176

Notes

| 193

Bibliography

| 211

Index | 231

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Acknowledgments

Besides all those listeners and readers who have made suggestions or raised questions about earlier versions of these essays, I’d like to thank, in particular, the group of people whose invitations were primarily responsible for the initial writing of each piece: Michelle Ballif, John Brereton, Stephen Browne, Rita Copeland, Diane Davis, Cinthia Gannett, Keith Gilyard, Philip Goldstein, Robert Levine, James Machor, Martin McQuillan, LuMing Mao, Wojciech Malecki, Gary Olson, Samuel Otter, James Phelan, Susanne Rohr, John Carlos Rowe, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert, Peter Struck, Miriam Strube, Victor Taylor, and Bo Wang. I gratefully acknowledge generous financial support from Loyola Marymount University, the University of California, Irvine, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. I’d also like to express my gratitude to the press readers of the collection as a whole, including Dale Bauer, Jack Selzer, and Chris Lundberg; the series editors, Leah Ceccarelli and Michael Bernard-Donals; and especially Kendra Boileau of the Penn State University Press. Thanks as usual to all the family members and friends for their support over the years in which these essays were written. I would have dedicated this book to Molly, to whom I continue to owe the most, but together we decided instead to name four beloved people who represent cherished memories and future hopes. Essays collected here appeared originally in the following books and periodicals. I am grateful to their publishers for permission to reprint. Chapter 1: “From Segregated Schools to Dimpled Chads: Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Suasive Work of Theory,” chapter 12 (pp. 131–42) as it appears in Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, edited by Gary A. Olson. Copyright © 2002 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University; reproduced by permission of Southern Illinois University Press. Chapter 2: “Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism: Democratic Deliberation, Humanist Controversies, and Purposeful Mediation,” from Pragmatism Today 2 (Winter 2011). Reproduced with permission.

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Chapter 3: “Humanist Controversies: The Rhetorical Humanism of Ernesto Grassi and Michael Leff,” in Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 2. Copyright © 2012 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Chapter 4: First published as “Rhetorical Pragmatism and Histories of New Media: Rorty on Kierkegaard on the Internet,” in Amerikastudien/American Studies 58 (Winter 2014). Chapter 5: “Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and CrossCultural Communication,” from Post-Nationalist American Studies, edited by John Carlos Rowe (University of California Press, 2000). Reproduced with permission of the University of California Press. Chapter 6: “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics,” in Theorizing Writing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). Chapter 7: “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 34, no. 3 (Taylor & Francis, 2015). Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis. Chapter 8: “Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, Allegory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter Struck. © 2010 by the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. Chapter 9: “Theotropic Logology: J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke,” in The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic, edited by Martin McQuillan. © Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Reproduced with permission of the Edinburgh University Press via PLSclear. Chapter 10: “Jesuit Eloquentia Perfecta and Theotropic Logology,” in Studies in Philosophy and Education 34 ( July 2015): 403–412. © Springer Netherlands. With permission of Springer. Chapter 11: “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding: Eloquentia Perfecta in U.S. Jesuit Colleges,” in Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, edited by Cinthia Gannett and John Brereton (Fordham University Press, 2016). Reproduced with permission of the Fordham University Press. Chapter 12: This material was originally published as “Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading,” in New Directions in American Reception Study, edited by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press: http://global.oup.com/ academic.

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Chapter 13: “Narrative as Embodied Intensities: The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome,” Narrative 21 (May 2013). Reproduced by permission of Narrative. Chapter 14: “Conversation with Steven Mailloux,” in Conversations in Cultural Rhetoric and Composition Studies, edited by Keith Gilyard and Victor Taylor (Davies Group, 2009). Reproduced with permission of the editors and The Davies Group, Publishers. Chapter 15: “Political Theology in Douglass and Melville,” in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, edited by Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Reproduced by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.

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Introduction

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms— in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people. —Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” Incredible, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. —Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven: A Novel

Most of these essays were written over the last dozen years. All of them illustrate rhetorical hermeneutics, a critical perspective on using language and making sense in theoretical and historical contexts. This combination of rhetoric and interpretation works within two broad interdisciplinary domains: contributing to ongoing theoretical debates, it represents a rhetoricized form of neopragmatism; in practicing historical interpretation, it exemplifies a cultural studies focused on the production, circulation, and reception of rhetorical effects. The sequence of these essays moves from emphasizing the former, rhetorical pragmatism, toward stressing the latter, cultural rhetoric study—though it is a characteristic of rhetorical hermeneutics that these two components often overlap or appear at the same time. This simultaneity is captured in a slogan: rhetorical hermeneutics often uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. The collection as a whole demonstrates how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together. I argue throughout that these two modes of thought are mutually supportive and productively interpenetrate. Thus the title Rhetoric’s Pragmatism can be read both as an assertion about the centrality of rhetoric’s pragmatist concern with practical effects and a claim that pragmatism itself can be viewed as deeply rhetorical in its traditional preoccupations. Not only is rhetoric pragmatist, but pragmatism is rhetorical. It was not simply

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a coincidence that the so-called “Return of Rhetoric” and the “Revival of Pragmatism” took place concurrently during the 1960s and 1970s and continue to develop together in the twenty-first century. The following essays range over several disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, including literature, history, law, religion, philosophy, education, and cultural studies. Rhetoric, itself an interdiscipline, provides a vehicle for crossing disciplinary borders to do critical work in various intellectual spaces. Traveling through the disciplinary landscape, rhetoric brings with it certain methods and traditions that can transform the environments it visits even as it is transformed by those environments, absorbing and reflecting on their practices, theories, and histories. A form of rhetoric study, rhetorical hermeneutics is transdisciplinary in the particular way it moves over, across, and through disciplines. As a theory of rhetorical pragmatism, it tries to slide above or around particular fields to provide a framework, a metalanguage, for understanding disciplines as specific institutional sets of rhetorical and interpretive practices for knowledge production and dissemination. As a historical practice of cultural rhetoric study, it travels across disciplinary boundaries and tracks the mobility of tropes, arguments, and narratives along intersecting paths of thought. In both theory and practice, rhetorical hermeneutics demonstrates how traveling rhetoric can transform the disciplinary matrices in which it moves and, simultaneously, how that mobile rhetoric is itself transformed in its movement through disciplines by way of interpretive translation and rhetorical exchange. Though all essays here attempt to push forward the agenda of rhetorical hermeneutics, either emphasizing rhetorical pragmatism or illustrating cultural rhetoric study, or doing both at the same time, each originally responded to a different rhetorical opportunity—usually an invitation to enter into a conversation about a certain topic. This opportunity involved joining a collective project, such as a conference panel or special journal issue. In describing the sequence of essays, I’d like to comment, not only on the way each builds on its predecessors, but also on the particular rhetorical contexts of collaboration out of which each emerged.

I “From Segregated Schools to Dimpled Chads” (chapter 1) uses the narrow topic of theory in legal arguments to provide another general introduction to rhetori-

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cal hermeneutics through a restatement of its theoretical claims as rhetorical pragmatism and an illustration of its practical, historical work as cultural rhetoric study. Moving from literature to law, the essay describes how theoretical reflection pushes practical arguments forward in the context of interpreting the U.S. Constitution, focusing on famous court opinions concerned with racial equality in education and recount procedures in a presidential election. The original article developed out of an invitation to participate in an essay collection demonstrating the intellectual work of rhetoric and composition, a disciplinary effort attempting to argue that the field was not interested only in practical pedagogical study, as important as that is, but also in contributing to ongoing theoretical debates across the human sciences. Not a compositionist myself, I was pleased to join the effort as a fellow traveler in rhetorical studies. My participation in such projects is an example of the disciplinary politics discussed in more detail in my conversation with Keith Gilyard (chapter 14). “Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism” (chapter 2) presents a bit of historical perspective on what is often characterized as an exclusively American homegrown philosophy. By emphasizing the initial contributions of the British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller, this essay not only foregrounds the international origins of the movement, but also illustrates pragmatism’s early rhetorical formulations and its association with the humanist tradition. The essay then focuses on rhetorical pragmatism’s ongoing contributions to deliberative democracy through its employment of purposeful mediation as a rhetorical strategy—a strategy used in academic debates and in public spheres beyond the academy. The impetus for this essay further exemplifies the international character of pragmatism: it was written for a special issue of Pragmatism Today, the online journal of the Central European Pragmatist Forum. “Humanist Controversies and Rhetorical Humanism” (chapter 3) turns from rhetorical pragmatism in contemporary politics to rhetorical hermeneutics within the traditions of rhetoric and humanism. More specifically, it looks at rhetorical and interpretive moves within twentieth-century debates over humanism and compares proposals of rhetorical humanist alternatives to postmodern antihumanism. This essay was written for a special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric devoted to the work of Michael Leff, who proposed a “hermeneutical rhetoric” in communication studies to supplement my rhetorical hermeneutics, which originally emerged within literary studies and critical theory. Our common commitment to a form of humanist rhetoric gets presented here as a post-Heideggerian humanism when supported by Ernesto Grassi’s revisionary reading of Italian

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Renaissance humanism, a defense against his teacher Martin Heidegger’s antihumanist critique. If the previous essay distances my rhetorical hermeneutics from later Heidegger’s antihumanism, the very next essay, “Rhetorical Pragmatism and Histories of New Media” (chapter 4), foregrounds the importance of early Heidegger for that same approach. It does this in a rather roundabout way by responding to a series of receptions: the pragmatist Richard Rorty reading the Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus reading the proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard as applied to the Internet. (Dreyfus’s interpretation of Being and Time strongly affected the pragmatist theorizing of both Rorty and Stanley Fish, two thinkers whose work in turn influenced my own rhetorical hermeneutics.) This essay was another contribution to the international reception of pragmatism, a special issue of Amerikastudien on “Pragmatism’s Promise,” and it further illustrates the transdisciplinary character of rhetorical hermeneutics in the way it tracks the translation of an argument about media across academic and popular fields through reception study. The next three essays continue to explain and explore the rhetorical pragmatist dimension of rhetorical hermeneutics by focusing on the problem of comparison across time and space. “Making Comparisons: First Contact, Ethnocentricism, and Cross-Cultural Communication” (chapter 5) takes as its starting point the theoretical assumptions of the comparativist turn in what was once called the New American Studies: How does interpretation take place across radically different communities, and how are successful rhetorical exchanges achieved between those communities, especially in terms of expanding cultural identifications? The central example of this piece is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that tells the tale of first contact between alien species. This essay was originally my contribution to a collective research project on post-national American Studies at the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The argument of the previous essay that received the most attention concerned my rhetorical pragmatist claim about the inevitability of hermeneutic and political ethnocentrism. The next essay, “Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics” (chapter 6), takes up the interpretive part of this argument—we always make inside sense of the outside—and extends it from geography to history, from crossing spatial boundaries to overcoming temporal distance. The example of doing history focuses on the origins of a certain Roman Catholic order founded in the sixteenth century—the Society of Jesus—better known as the Jesuits. This example becomes the basis for making

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some concluding historiographic points from a rhetorical-hermeneutic perspective, especially the argument that there are strong similarities between addressing otherness in the past (while doing history) and addressing others in the present (through cross-cultural communication). This essay was originally my contribution to a collection on rhetorical historiography: How can histories of rhetoric be written in the twenty-first century? If Jesuits can serve as objects of present historical interpretation, they can also appear as subjects doing their own rhetorical-hermeneutic work in the past, as shown in the next essay, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric” (chapter 7). To explain my view of comparative rhetoric, I present Jesuit “rhetorical accommodationism” as an example of how a theorhetoric (speaking to, for, and about the divine) can function as an effective way of interpreting and communicating across cultures. Building on concepts from Bruno Latour, I argue that Jesuit rhetors acted as “angelic instruments” in their missionary activities, conveying information and transforming their hearers as well as themselves in the process. Such activities illustrate again the unavoidable political and hermeneutic ethnocentrism in attempts to work across cultural borders. This rhetorical pragmatist view offers both support and a challenge to contemporary theories of comparative rhetoric, including some presented at the Rhetoric Society of America conference session and in the special Rhetoric Review forum, where versions of this essay were first presented. “Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, Allegory” (chapter 8) develops a comparison between two influential twentieth-century theorists of allegory—HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul de Man. The emphasis here is on their overlapping and contrasting critical theories understood in terms of what Gadamer himself calls the “rhetorical-hermeneutical concept of allegory.” For Gadamer’s hermeneutics and de Man’s deconstruction, allegory functions as a figure for rhetoric itself. Both theorists agree that the historical fate of allegory has mirrored that of rhetoric, a decline in the nineteenth century that gets reversed in the twentieth. But for Gadamer, rhetoric and hermeneutics are inseparable and complementary, while for de Man, their relationship is disruptive and ultimately contradictory. This essay originally appeared in a book attempting to give a collective history of allegory. The next two essays (chapters 9 and 10) use Kenneth Burke to develop a theotropic logology: words about words about God. An earlier version of chapter 9 was presented at a conference, “The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic,” for which participants were asked to

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comment on the manuscript pages not included in the published Allegories of Reading and currently held in the Critical Theory Archive at the University of California, Irvine. Theotropic is de Man’s word for “figuratively god-centered.” “Theotropic Logology” (chapter 9) borrows this term to characterize the published and unpublished exchanges between Burke and two rhetorical deconstructors—de Man and J. Hillis Miller—and then draws some conclusions about their contrasting ways of rhetorically reading. Chapter 10 builds on chapter 9 to provide a framework for a rhetorical pragmatist take on the goals of contemporary higher education. “Jesuit Eloquentia Perfecta and Theotropic Logology” (chapter 10) contributed to a collective assessment of rhetorical approaches to current educational policies and pedagogical practices for a European journal, Studies in the Philosophy of Education. The essay suggests how Burke’s dramatism and logology might contribute to such an assessment and then uses a Burkean theotropic logology to redescribe another, much older rhetoric-centered approach to education, that of the Jesuits and their Christian humanist brand of teaching “perfect eloquence” as a combination of rhetorical arts, ethical reflection, and a commitment to social justice. Over the course of these last three essays and the next, the transdisciplinary plays out as a demonstration of how various rhetorics contribute to and alter disciplinary discussions (in literary criticism, philosophy, theology, and education) and suggests how those same discussions can in turn affect the rhetorics making the contributions. “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding” (chapter 11) uses cultural rhetoric study to give historical specificity to my claims about Jesuit eloquentia perfecta by tracking some rhetorical paths of thought through the work of two late nineteenth-century Jesuit writers—one a popular novelist of school-boy fiction and the other an author of widely adopted college textbooks. In weaving together the stories of these two rhetors, I describe an influential tradition of Jesuit education that emphasizes connections among eloquence, learning, and virtue. This rhetoriccentered tradition is being revived today in several Jesuit colleges and universities; an earlier, much shorter version of this essay was a contribution to a special issue of the journal, Conversations, attempting to push this revival forward. The final four essays (chapters 12 through 15) present additional examples of cultural rhetoric studies and comment on the past and future of rhetorical hermeneutics. “Judging and Hoping” (chapter 12) does a rhetorical reception study of Azar Nafisi’s novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which is itself the story of cross-cultural reception. American reviewers variously judged the hope repre-

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sented by this novel about students reading American novels of “Western secular values” within a political-theological context of a nation opposed to those values. I argue that the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture remain radically local, and attempts to depoliticize reading—to oppose an “ideological stance” to a “nonideological stance”—turn out to be highly problematic. My rhetorical-hermeneutic reception study originally appeared in a book collection promoting reception studies more generally, an attempt that has achieved some success with the founding of the Reception Study Society and its journal, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History. A different kind of reception study appears in “Narrative as Embodied Intensities” (chapter 13), which explores the relation between rhetoric and narrative. Here the rhetorical hermeneutics uses some emploted rhetoric to practice a kind of narrative theory (via Paul Ricoeur and, again, Kenneth Burke) by doing a brief history of embodied experiences of American travelers walking around nineteenth-century Rome. The essay concludes with a return to Jesuit rhetoric and the narrative imagination of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which, as Michel Foucault noted in his last lectures, function as technologies of the self—in this case, shaping subjects as believing actors, with the body becoming (in Burke’s words), “a generator of belief.” Originally presented at the International Society for the Study of Narrative, this essay attempts to demonstrate rhetorically the critical value of considering embodied experience as narrative and narrative as embodied experience. In the only interview gathered in this collection (chapter 14), Keith Gilyard uses the example of violence to the racialized body to challenge my rhetorical pragmatist definition of identity as “interpreted being.” I include the conversation with Gilyard not only because of this challenge, but also because of the way he forces me to defend my chosen terminology within disciplinary politics. Our conversation ranges backward into my earlier work in rhetorical hermeneutics and forward into some possibilities for the future. One of those possibilities is partly actualized in the final essay. “Political Theology in Douglass and Melville” (chapter 15) attempts a reception study of St. Paul as a rhetorical figure in the nineteenth century and then redescribes that reception in terms of the positive and negative forms of political theology developed in the late twentieth century. This concluding essay again illustrates cultural rhetoric study—in this case, tracking the political effectivity of tropes, arguments, and narratives in enactments of Pauline Christianity.

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II As essays in Rhetoric’s Pragmatism demonstrate, rhetorical hermeneutics often takes the form of a reception study focused on reading acts as combinations of interpretation and rhetoric—the entwining of the historically specific establishment of textual meaning with the communally situated use of language to argue for that meaning. Rhetorical hermeneutics targets the critical, historical, and theoretical intersections of language use and interpretive practice by doing rhetorical readings of reading performances (via cultural rhetoric study) and addressing the theoretical issues those acts produce (through rhetorical pragmatism). Rhetorical pragmatism, as the theoretical side of rhetorical hermeneutics, takes thinking, at the least, as a combination of interpretation and rhetoric—the practical use of language in establishing meaning and the theoretical making sense of language use. Cultural rhetoric study, as the practical side of rhetorical hermeneutics, tracks rhetorical paths of thought through time and space, through singular and repeated reading acts, performed by individuals and institutions, across fragmented and unified communities, over continuous and contradictory traditions. The essays in Rhetoric’s Pragmatism give concrete examples of rhetorical hermeneutics as a theoretical practice combining rhetorical pragmatism and cultural rhetoric study in various proportions. In its performance, rhetorical hermeneutics is both a theoretical and practical approach to transdisciplinarity; that is, it is a way of understanding transdisciplinarity and a way of doing it. It proposes a theoretical explanation of how disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and cross-disciplinarity operate in terms of their implied and explicit hermeneutics and rhetoricality, including how disciplines transform each other in their interactions as interpretive strategies and terminological networks that modify and adapt to each other. In its practice, rhetorical hermeneutics employs a method of tracking rhetorical paths of thought across the distinctive hermeneutic ecologies of different disciplines. This tracking involves describing a string of interconnected acts of troping, arguing, and storytelling, which in turn entails analyzing the ebb and flow of figurative, suasive, and narrative forces inside and across the boundaries of specific texts and contexts. Transdisciplinary work highlights the importance of disciplinary identities in the resistance to and enablement of such work. These identities can function to enforce academic siloes in university settings, getting in the way of crossdisciplinary conversations and interdisciplinary collaborations. But disciplinary

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identities can also enable those same transdisciplinary activities by motivating attempts to promote and update one’s home discipline and providing the rhetorical-hermeneutic tools for adapting and using resources from other disciplines to do so. As some have argued about interdisciplinarity, without specific disciplinary identities, there would be no general transdisciplinary work to be done in the first place. But, of course, the issue of identity goes far beyond academic disciplinary contexts. In a vast array of different cultural spheres, questions about who we are involve questions about how we interpret ourselves, how others interpret us, and how we interpret ourselves through how others interpret us. I address these issues from a rhetorical perspective throughout the following essays. For example, in chapter 5, I use rhetorical hermeneutics to analyze the complexity of communal identifications and dis-identifications in cross-cultural communication, while in chapter 14, I discuss the challenges to a rhetorical hermeneutic concept of identity posed by racial violence. In each case, I foreground the way interpretation and rhetoric act together to affect identity formation in specific practical contexts. In this way and others, I hope the collection as a whole demonstrates my claim that rhetoric is as thoroughly pragmatist as pragmatism is deeply rhetorical. Except for slightly expanding the final chapter, I have left the essays in Rhetoric’s Pragmatism fairly close to their original published forms. I have tried to remove unnecessary repetitions, partly by making cross-references among the essays in the volume, and, in a few cases, I have inserted additional notes to update bibliographical sources cited.

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1 From Segregated Schools to Dimpled Chads | Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Suasive Work of Theory in Legal Interpretation

Attorney Klock: What I’m saying, sir, is this: that you cannot be in a situation of using the word “interpret” to explain anything that a court does. The word “interpret” cannot carry that much baggage. Justice Souter: But . . . it seems to me that you, in effect, go to the opposite extreme that you’re excoriating the Florida Supreme Court for, and say they can’t interpret at all. —Oral argument for Bush v. Gore (2000)

In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Huck Finn argues confidently that “the trouble about arguments is, they ain’t nothing but theories after all, and theories don’t prove nothing, they only give you a place to rest on a spell.” William James spins the same tropes differently, claiming that theories are “instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.” Among other things, rhetorical hermeneutics enacts and follows such theoretical movements, treating theories as temporary rest stops and as tools for moving along. In doing so, it traces some of the historical ways that theoretical arguments appear in different cultural sites, noting how they get used and abused in their various rhetorical travels. More broadly, rhetorical hermeneutics is an interweaving of rhetorical pragmatism in contemporary theory debates with cultural rhetoric studies in ongoing, historical practice. Because I am somewhat taken with sloganizing, I have described this project as the use of rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. To illustrate, I will discuss not only argument as theory but theory as argument and theories in arguments—that is, how theory does prove something, and one thing it proves is that both Huck and James are right about theory.

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Rhetorical hermeneutics travels well through many disciplinary domains in the human sciences, but because of the textual traces archived for certain interpretive fields in manuscript, print, microfilm, and digital media, rhetorical hermeneutics is especially at home in disciplines dealing with scriptural, legal, and literary texts. All these archives can be approached though reception study—the interpretive history of how events, texts, figures, and other cultural bits are used at different times and places, including the specific ways they are rhetorically established as meaningful and appropriated in different contexts for different purposes. One well-trodden archival path is the reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been praised as the quintessential expression of democratic equality and true American freedom, and condemned as a producer of juvenile delinquency and perpetrator of racist stereotyping. In one especially ironic reception a few years ago, a certain Virginia school removed Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum, and the book banning made it into the national press, at least partly because of the school’s name, Mark Twain Intermediate. “The book is poison,” declared the assistant principal. “It is antiAmerican; it works against the melting pot theory of our country; it works against the idea that all men are created equal; it works against the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.” The legal event that helped create the cultural politics in which this reception of Huckleberry Finn and the Fourteenth Amendment took place involved an earlier application of that same Constitutional amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1954 segregation cases, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. Here I will practice some rhetorical hermeneutics by doing a partial reception study of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, focusing on just two moments in that interpretive history, Brown v. Board of Education and Bush v. Gore (2000). Both opinions have been criticized for allowing politics to interfere with legal interpretation. This historical “coincidence” will allow me to develop rhetorical hermeneutics’ double thesis about the role of theory in interpretation: first, that a certain kind of theory doesn’t work, doesn’t prove anything—this is a claim about theory as a foundationalist project; and second, that a certain kind of theory does work, does prove something—this is a related claim about theory as rhetorical practice. The Brown opinion famously turned on its construal of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868): “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court had interpreted this clause as allowing “equal but

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separate” public facilities for different races. More than a half century later in the Brown opinion, the court argued against this separate but equal doctrine, declaring that “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” To see how the court rhetorically achieved this reinterpretation, we can look first at the theoretical moments in the Brown opinion, those moments in the argument when the court comments self-reflexively on its own interpretive practices. In the 1954 decision, the court began with the question of whether arguments from intention could resolve the dispute over the constitutionality of racially segregated schools. Each side claimed that the historical evidence for intent supported its case, but the court remained unpersuaded: “This discussion and our own investigation convince us that, although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem with which we are faced. At best they are inconclusive.” But the court was prepared for this turn of hermeneutic events. In its 1953 directions for re-argument, it had requested counsel for both sides to address the question: If the intention of the framers or the adopters of the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be discovered, “is it within judicial power, in construing the Amendment, to abolish segregation in public schools?” In other words, if historical investigation is inconclusive, can the court interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as rejecting the doctrine of “separate but equal”? In the Brown opinion delivered a year later, the court answered its question with an emphatic “yes,” and it justified its interpretive practice in the decision’s most important theoretical moment: Our decision . . . cannot turn on merely a comparison of . . . tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education. In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws. So in this moment of methodological self-reflection, the court announced a crucial decision about what it would use as the relevant interpretive framework for its construal of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court did not interpret the equal protection clause within the historical context of its adoption nor its most

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famous application but rather within the mid-twentieth-century situation of American education. What the court then determined was that separate means unequal and therefore state-imposed segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and must come to an end. How was this theoretical moment received in the aftermath of Brown? Quite predictably there was an immediate explosion of praise and outrage reported in the popular press. Outraged responses included those that accused the Supreme Court of creating law rather than merely interpreting it. Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia claimed that the Justices “had blatantly . . . usurped from the Congress and the people the power to amend the Constitution and from the Congress the authority to make the laws of the land.” Senator James Eastland of Mississippi predicted that the South would “not abide by or obey this legislative decision by a political court.” The General Assembly of South Carolina passed a resolution that declared: “If the Court in the interpretation of the Constitution is to depart from the sanctity of past decisions and to rely on the current political and social philosophy of its members to unsettle the great constitutional principles so clearly established, the rights of individuals are not secure and government under a written Constitution has no stability.” The exact ideological nature of the court’s purported fall into partisan politics was even more specifically characterized by some of its critics. Circuit Judge Tom P. Brady of Mississippi attacked the court for accepting the views of the “left-wing Liberals . . . , Marxian Christians in our churches, and . . . Neo-Socialists, teachers and preachers in our schools.” And Eastland added to his attack the charge that “the country has entered an era of judicial tyranny” and that “the Court has responded to a radical, pro-Communist political movement.” Besides such receptions noted in the popular press, there also began a calmer interpretive history of the Brown opinion within professional legal theory itself. In one of the earliest law journal articles, “Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law,” Herbert Wechsler charged the court with allowing politics to influence its decision. Wechsler defined the issue of enforced segregation in Brown not as a problem of discrimination but as an issue about freedom of association. Thus he asks, “Given a situation when the state must practically choose between denying the association to [the black plaintiffs] who wish it or imposing it on [white citizens] who would avoid it, is there a basis in neutral principles for holding that the Constitution demands the claims for association should prevail?” Wechsler’s answer is no, and therefore he rejects the legal argument of the Brown decision.

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Wechsler’s critique of Brown is made at the service of a broader theoretical project: the proposal of a general hermeneutics that establishes “the standards to be followed” in interpreting the Constitution (11–12). Wechsler’s theory prescribes that judges must decide cases “on the grounds of adequate neutrality and generality, tested not only by the instant application, but by others that the principles imply” (15). If “neutral principles” are ignored, he claims, the court becomes nothing more than “a naked power organ” transforming the Constitution into “ ‘the partisan of a particular set of ethical and economical opinions.’ ” Wechsler’s theory of neutral principles aims to insure that the court avoids this fall from legal adjudication into political ideology. And because the court did not avoid this danger in 1954, Wechsler reluctantly rejects the Brown opinion— an opinion that he claims does not “rest on neutral principles” (17). More than fifty years after the Brown decision and its initial controversy, the case continues to be cited within court opinions, including a Bush v. Gore dissent, and the theoretical issues raised in its reception continue to be discussed in legal and popular culture. One of those issues remains the question of whether theoretical constraints can prevent the collapse of legal interpretation into partisan politics, a question that assumes the viability of the law/politics distinction. A rhetorical hermeneutics here argues that such worries are both inevitable and unnecessary: inevitable given the theoretical assumptions about the Supreme Court, legal adjudication, and party politics in the United States, but unnecessary because politics and interpretation cannot be separated by theory or anything else. Both the issue of interpretive constraints and the worry over collapsing law into politics become problems for theorists especially when they misunderstand theoretical moments, such as those in the Brown decision; that is, when they believe that self-conscious reflections within one’s arguments are something more than rhetorically specific, historically situated uses of theory to extend and justify those arguments. Rhetorical hermeneutics suggests instead that theories within legal arguments should not lead to general hermeneutic theories about all legal constructions, and they should not lead to foundationalist attempts to ward off the purported dangers of interpretive anarchy and political determinism. Rhetorical hermeneutics rejects such foundationalist efforts by replacing a general hermeneutics with rhetorical histories. Rather than proposing still another theory of how to define and constrain individual interpreters and their relations to independent texts, instead of aiming for an abstract theoretical account of interpretive practice that would provide normative rules supposedly guaranteeing the discovery of correct meanings, rhetorical hermeneutics replaces

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a confrontation model of interpreter and text with a conversational model of arguments among interpreters. Theories governing textual confrontations become histories of interpretive conversations. More exactly, general hermeneutic descriptions and prescriptions become rhetorical analyses of specific historical arguments about texts. These historically situated reception studies about historically situated textual arguments cannot escape the configurations of power-knowledge that are constitutive of both the interpretive context of historical description and the interpreted context of the history described. Thus, rhetorical hermeneutics embraces a kind of Foucauldean neopragmatism that, for example, argues for a complex imbrication of legal adjudication and political formation. Put too simply, rhetorical hermeneutics claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric (we make our interpretations through figure and argument) and all rhetoric involves politics (power relations both condition and are affected by our arguments); therefore, interpretation, including legal adjudication, is not completely separable from politics. But to make the interpretation/politics distinction problematic does not mean that just anything goes in legal (or any other kind of ) interpretation, as Wechsler and others fear. Arguments are always situated in specific historical circumstances that include (in the case of law) relevant legal precedents, agreedupon facts, modes of judicial argumentation, and other contextual conditions, all of which make certain arguments appropriate or persuasive and others inappropriate or unconvincing at particular moments. Thus, pointing to words in a statute, describing legislative intent, noting changing historical conditions, or laying out one’s interpretive framework can all count as valid tactics in a court opinion. Making such rhetorical moves does not in itself signify that judges believe in a foundationalist theory of interpretation; it just means they are playing the serious game of legal interpretation. At certain times, during a theoretical moment, judges might temporarily step into another overlapping game called “philosophy” or “theory of jurisprudence” and suggest that their own theory is “universal” or “objective.” But even this move does not invalidate the rhetorical efficacy of their judicial arguments; it only adds another potentially persuasive (for a foundationalist) or unpersuasive (for an anti-foundationalist) aspect to the judge’s interpretive rhetoric. Pointing to general rules of construction or explaining one’s interpretive method—“going meta” in a judicial argument—is simply part of that interpretive argument, a part that I have referred to as the theoretical moment of a legal text.

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When some neopragmatists argue that theory has no consequences, they actually mean that foundationalist theory does not have the consequences of its claims. They argue, and I agree, that if theory is defined as a general account of interpreting that provides guidelines for guaranteeing correct interpretations, theory is impossible and can’t do what it desires. It cannot become a foundationalist hermeneutics outside of and ruling over the untidy domain of interpretive practices in such a way that it absolutely constrains those practices. In this limited sense, theory is inconsequential. However, this neopragmatist argument is not the general rejection of all theory it is sometimes taken to be. Rather, it is a narrowly defined claim about one specific type of theory. There are other sorts of theories with other sorts of consequences. Moreover, what looks like foundationalist theory, when inserted into historically situated legal and critical arguments, does have consequences of a very rhetorical kind. Theoretical moments in these cases function as part of the persuasive attempt to prove or disprove, support or challenge a specific interpretive argument. Only when these theoretical moments get extracted from their historical context of persuasive activity and become the basis of foundationalist theorizing do theorists run into trouble. Only then does Mark Twain’s wry observation apply: that theories don’t prove nothing. Theories in arguments often make for very effective rhetorical practices within legal and other interpretive disciplines. Such rhetorical practices are the discursive form of micropractices making up the social arrangement of powerknowledge within those disciplines at certain historical moments. The rhetorical power of any judicial opinion effectively organizes the argumentative energies functioning within particular socio-historical contexts, disciplinary and extradisciplinary, in which textual meanings are established. The upshot of this Foucauldean neopragmatism, what I’m calling rhetorical hermeneutics, is a reworking of the law/politics distinction. The distinction does not pay its way if we use it as part of a general legal hermeneutics that declares the political out of bounds. The legal is always a form of rhetorical politics, and rhetorical-legal practices are always embedded and implicated both in institutional traditions, like legal precedent, and in larger social formations, like cultural politics. For a rhetorical hermeneutics, an essentialist distinction between law and politics does no useful work. However, the law/politics opposition might prove useful at specific historical moments for particular legal arguments. It may be meaningless to separate law and politics in the rhetoric of the Brown decision, but it

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is exactly this distinction that some conservative arguments cited in attacking the opinion. In a cultural context in which law is assumed to be above politics, the legal/political distinction might well perform quite effective rhetorical work in a legal argument. But when that work becomes the basis for a theory that attempts always and everywhere to separate politics and law, a misguided, ahistorical foundationalism is the unfortunate result. I have to admit, however, that it is often quite difficult to resist the “theoretical urge” to elaborate a foundationalist hermeneutics, especially when faced with theoretical moments in arguments with which you strongly disagree. Take, for example, the Joint Resolution of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, passed in February 1956, condemning the Supreme Court for the Brown decision. The resolution argued that the court disregarded legal precedent and “the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment” and that this action “constitutes a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous attempt to change the true intent and meaning of the Constitution.” At one point, the assembly declared: “This action of the Court ignored the principle that the meaning of the Constitution and of its Amendments does not change. It is a written instrument. That which the Fourteenth Amendment meant when adopted it means now.” We can regard this theoretical moment of the resolution in two very different ways: as a budding foundationalist theory or as a supporting rhetorical strategy. As a piece of embryonic foundationalism, removed from its rhetorical context, it looks like the beginning of an intentionalist theory very similar to that of E. D. Hirsch and its “permanent meaning” versus “changing significance” distinction. But as a rhetorical strategy, the resolution’s theoretical moment occurs as part of an anti-Brown argument. I may be tempted to launch into a theoretical challenge to the assembly’s theory of meaning, but I would be better advised to stick to the case rather than the theory if I want to address the argument. Or, if I do attempt to theorize, I should do so in an anti-foundationalist rhetorical mode and not engage in an essentialist debate over intentionalism or formalism. One lesson of rhetorical hermeneutics, then, might easily be stated: rhetoric should always be the focus, whether discussing abstract hermeneutic theory or analyzing theoretical moments within concrete arguments. Let me use a final example to tease out what such lessons might help us to understand about specific cases; this one is another reception of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is as surprising as it is troubling. Unfortunately, rhetorical hermeneutics can only describe the surprise; it can’t, by itself, remedy

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the trouble. In its effects, Bush v. Gore determined the final outcome of the 2000 presidential election contested between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. Perhaps the most surprising part of the majority’s argument was its appeal to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The issue before the court was whether to reverse the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling that ordered a manual recount of the 4 November 2000 election ballots in each of the state’s voting precincts. The per curiam opinion focused on arguments about reading dimpled and hanging chads: “the question is . . . how to interpret the marks or holes or scratches on an inanimate object, a piece of cardboard or paper which, it is said, might not have registered as a vote during the machine count.” The court worried over how such interpretations would take place uniformly across different precincts. The justices agreed on the legislative standard to be applied: “Florida’s basic command for the count of legally cast votes is to consider the ‘intent of the voter.’ ” But how was this consideration to be carried out? “The problem inheres in the absence of specific standards to ensure its equal application.” This “equal application” would, in the court’s view, guarantee equal protection of every individual voter’s rights: “equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity to each voter.” These theoretical moments in Bush v. Gore are used rhetorically to justify the court’s finding that since no standards for equal application were in place, the Florida Supreme Court’s judgment to continue the recount should be reversed and the case “remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent” with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion. The hermeneutic rule regarding voter intent and the legal principle of equal protection organize the theoretical moment of Bush v. Gore, and the rule and principle are cited as the basis for the specific ruling about standards of interpretation. The court held that “the formulation of uniform rules to determine intent” was “practicable” and “necessary,” but “the want of those rules here has led to unequal evaluation of ballots in various respects.” The court cites as evidence information from the Florida opinion: “Should a county canvassing board count or not count a ‘dimpled chad’ where the voter is able to successfully dislodge the chad in every other context on that ballot? Here, the county canvassing boards disagree.” Such evidence leads the court to conclude that a lack of interpretive standards results in an arbitrary relativism: “As seems to have been acknowledged at oral argument, the standards for accepting or rejecting contested ballots might vary not only from county to county but indeed within a single county from one recount team to another.” Thus, for the court majority, a lack of

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uniform interpretive standards ultimately entails unequal treatment of individual votes and a violation of the equal protection of voters. Much has already been said and written about this unusual reception of the Fourteenth Amendment: that it is a creative or unprecedented or cynical application of the equal protection clause. I will add only one point to conclude this brief demonstration of rhetorical hermeneutics. Did politics influence the court’s decision in Bush v. Gore? There seems to be as little doubt in this case as in Brown. Is there a way of separating out the politics from the legal interpretation? Not according to rhetorical hermeneutics. Does this ironically leave us in a position analogous to that for the Floridians interpreting chads as hypothesized by the court majority? No absolutely clear distinctions, no uniform standards, and thus interpretive anarchy? Well, yes and no. Theoretical distinctions between politics and interpretation cannot be made universally, and no general set of standards governing all interpretations can ever be found. Still, interpretive rules as heuristic guidelines often come in handy, and their recognition can in fact become necessary for achieving argumentative success in certain situations. And, of course, there is politics and there is politics. Though there might be no general way for distinguishing in principle where appropriate interpretation ends and objectionable politics begins, there are contextualized ways of judging when bad rhetoric is replacing good, which is to say (among other things), when unpersuasive arguments are replacing persuasive arguments. Of course, any such judgment is itself a function of later interpretive arguments within other contexts of power-knowledge relations. That is, any attempt to argue that another argument is unconvincing, that it is simply political self-interest crudely asserted, rather than persuasively argued, any such rhetorical attempt is itself open to further challenge within another context. Theory as argument, theory in arguments, must withstand the same rhetorical scrutiny. When it does, then indeed it proves something. As an attempt at theory, one thing rhetorical hermeneutics tries to prove is this: it’s interpretation all the way down; rhetoric all around; and, yes, ideology here, there, and everywhere.

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2 Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism | Democratic Deliberation and Purposeful Mediation

For more than a century, Euro-American pragmatism has developed as a philosophical movement that takes seriously the human significance of language. Indeed, one might characterize much pragmatist thought as specifically being preoccupied with rhetoric—the use of language in a context to have effects. Inside the academy, this rhetorical pragmatism often registers as a languagecentered form of humanistic anti-foundationalism that refuses absolute distinctions between subject and object, meaning and significance, fact and value, knowledge and opinion, aesthetics and politics. In various nonacademic public spheres, one version of this pragmatism supports a progressive pluralism and an inclusive deliberative democracy. To explore these complimentary pragmatist traditions further, I’d like to focus on one of their prominent features: a rhetoric of purposeful mediation. Among recent rhetorical pragmatists, we might include such academic and public intellectuals as Giles Gunn, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Jeffrey Stout. These are neopragmatists who give special attention to rhetoric or (more narrowly in Rorty’s case) persuasion in the public sphere and connect this rhetorical attention explicitly to their articulation of pragmatism as a philosophical or critical theory. Such rhetorical pragmatism can be viewed as a version of postmodern sophistry: these neopragmatists are like some Older Greek Sophists partly because they share the pre-Platonic belief in a primordial unity of rhetoric and philosophy. Viewed from within the historical argument made by Edward Schiappa and others, Sophists and pragmatists do not radically separate language use from the search for truth, rhetoric from philosophy. It was Plato, the argument goes, who established this separation in the Gorgias when he coined the new term rhêtorikê and negatively distinguished it from philosophia. Rhetorical pragmatists reject this version of Platonism and embrace instead an anti-Platonist sophistic rhetoric.

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But these contemporary neopragmatists do not emphasize their sophistic legacy as extensively as an earlier rhetorical pragmatist, the once-forgotten British philosopher, F. C. S. Schiller. I want to return here to an argument I made in my book Reception Histories, in which I claimed that Schiller’s reading of Protagoras was essential to his early version of pragmatism that he called humanism. During the turn to the twentieth century, the discourse of absolute idealism dominated the rhetorical context of philosophical debate in England. It was explicitly against this epistemological and metaphysical hegemony that F. C. S. Schiller directed much of his polemical energies, especially in his two early books Humanism in 1903 and Studies in Humanism four years later. Both of these books were praised by the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey, the former calling Schiller pragmatism’s “most vivacious and pugnacious champion.” One of the distinguishing features of Schiller’s humanistic pragmatism was his use of Protagorean sophistry as an explanatory argument for his own theory. In fact, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Schiller’s reception of Protagoras constituted his philosophical position. That reception was an exemplary instance of a theoretical argument reading the past to mark out a place in the intellectual present and to set an agenda for the immediate future. Schiller’s pragmatism re-interpreted sophistry to establish his anti-idealist argument within the cultural conversation of the early twentieth century. His 1903 book rejects the Platonist’s charge that the human-measure dictum leads to skepticism and relativism. Instead, Schiller argues, Protagoras’s claim that “man is the measure of all things,” when “fairly interpreted, . . . is the truest and most important thing that any thinker ever has propounded. It is only in travesties such as it suited Plato’s dialectic purpose to circulate that it can be said to tend to skepticism; in reality it urges Science to discover how Man may measure, and by what devices make concordant his measures with those of his fellow-men.” One goal of sophistic rhetoric is to investigate and theorize how this rhetorical process takes place, to establish what rhetorical “devices make concordant” one citizen’s measures with those of his or her fellow citizens. In his next book, Studies in Humanism, Schiller more clearly and more extensively demonstrates how his humanism is both sophistic and pragmatist. He remarks on the political context of classical Greece, noting that “the great humanistic movement of the fifth century b.c., of which [the Sophists] were the leaders, is now [early twentieth century] beginning to be appreciated at its true value. . . . The rise of democracies rendered a higher education and a power of

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public speaking a sine qua non of political influence—and, what acted probably as a still stronger incentive—of the safety of the life and property, particularly of the wealthier classes.” The political, economic context of sophistic education resulted in “a great development of rhetoric and dialectic,” and the Sophists definitely exploited this situation, growing wealthy in catering to their wellto-do clientele. Schiller remarks in passing on the contradictory (democratic and undemocratic) origins of sophistic rhetoric and thus prefigures later debates over the problematic ideological affiliations of neosophistry and the dangerous political consequences of rhetoric more generally. Like many rhetorical pragmatists after him, Schiller identifies rhetoric with democracy—only in such a political structure, he argues, could sophistic rhetoric develop—but he also acknowledges that rhetoric could serve undemocratic interests when rhetorical education was restricted to the socio-economic elites. There is a lot more to say about Schiller’s reading of Protagoras, especially in his 1908 pamphlet, Plato or Protagoras?, but instead I want to move on to some implications of the sophistic legacy for rhetorical pragmatism in relation to contemporary debates over the future of democratic deliberation. To make this move I will fast-forward exactly one hundred years. “In case you haven’t heard, Barack Obama is a pragmatist.” So begins Christopher Hayes’s December 2008 Nation article called, fittingly enough, “The Pragmatist.” After noting how the term has often been used to describe the newly elected president and how that president himself has used the word “pragmatism” in recent public statements, Hayes asks: what exactly does it mean to call President Obama a pragmatist? In answering this question, Hayes helpfully points to “Obama’s famous rhetorical dexterity, which he’s marshaled to tremendous effect—giving progressives as well as centrists reasons to believe he shares their values and outlook. In a postelection essay on Obama, George Packer noted these two strains of his campaign rhetoric, and dubbed them the ‘progressive Obama’ and the ‘post-partisan Obama.’ ” According to Hayes, “pragmatic” here means something like “post-ideological.” Saying Obama is a pragmatist means simply that he is not a dogmatic ideologue; he is someone interested in practically getting things done and not someone blindly following an abstract ideological principle. But these are merely popular uses of the terms pragmatic and pragmatist. What, if anything, do they have to do with the more precise usage in relation to the specific tradition of American pragmatist philosophy? Hayes himself raises this question when he notes: “Pragmatism in common usage may mean simply a practical approach to problems and affairs. But it’s

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also the name of the uniquely American school of philosophy whose doctrine is that truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. What unites the two senses of the word is a shared skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions—one that is welcome and bracing after eight years of [the] failed, faith-based presidency [of President George W. Bush].” Hayes then tries to connect Obama intellectually to American pragmatist philosophy by way of the president’s political admiration for Abraham Lincoln. He implies that Obama’s admiration for Lincoln connects him to American pragmatism partly because the war Lincoln oversaw was a significant influence on the earliest philosophical pragmatists: “Having witnessed, and in some cases experienced firsthand, the horror of violence and irreconcilable ideological conflict during the Civil War, William James, Charles Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes were moved to reject the metaphysical certainty in eternal truths that had so motivated the [dogmatically ideological] abolitionists, emphasizing instead epistemic humility, contingency and the acquisition of knowledge through practice—trial and error.” I will return later to the placing of President Obama in the pragmatist tradition, but for now I want to re-deploy a text Hayes cites in explaining that tradition, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. We can use a passage from Menand’s prize-winning book to transform Hayes’s specific claim for a connection between pragmatism and Obama into a broader argument about American pragmatism and U.S. rhetoric in general. Menand writes that after the Civil War, the pragmatists “changed the way Americans thought—and continue to think—about education, democracy, liberty, justice, and tolerance. And as a consequence, they changed the way Americans live—the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves. We are still living, to a great extent, in a country these thinkers helped to make.” Among Menand’s claims here most relevant to my topic are the ones asserting that pragmatism significantly affected the way Americans express themselves (their rhetoric) and the way they interpret themselves (their identities), what we might call an American rhetorical hermeneutics. I would like to follow up on just one strand of this rhetorical hermeneutics and speculate about EuroAmerican pragmatism’s effects on U.S. rhetoric in various academic and nonacademic contexts. This speculation involves making a case for pragmatism as a possible source for or at least influence on an American rhetoric of purposeful mediation.

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An obvious place to begin is William James’s 1907 book Pragmatism, whose very subtitle “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking” implies a mediating purpose for James’s popular lectures—a mediation between the old and the new. James famously defined pragmatism as a method of thinking and a theory of truth. The method looked to results, consequences of beliefs, ideas, actions; and truth was defined controversially as what works. “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” That last phrase provides an opening for teasing out the contours of a specifically rhetorical pragmatism: the true is the rhetorical compliment we give (the figurative label we posit) for whatever proves itself (argumentatively justifies itself through reasons) to be good in the way of belief. Put differently, to identify a specifically rhetorical pragmatism is to work out the way that pragmatism as a philosophical movement is a rhetorical way of thinking with a rhetorical theory of truth. As James explains his pragmatist approach more fully, he makes its strategy of purposeful mediation explicit. James calls pragmatism “a mediator and a reconciler” (43), a “mediator between toughmindedness and tender-mindedness” (129), and a “mediator between empiricism and religion” (7). He describes pragmatism “as a mediating system” (7) and offers pragmatist philosophy as “just the mediating way of thinking” his audience requires (26). We find this same mediating way of thinking and its embodiment in a rhetoric of mediation throughout the American pragmatist tradition. Pragmatism is an intellectual solution to a cultural problem, which means it is a pragmatic response to a question in a specific time and place. A typical problem or question for pragmatism arises from the public recognition of a widespread cultural conflict; and the typical pragmatist response is not to choose sides but to mediate. This mediating rhetorical strategy can be seen in James’s Pragmatism in 1907 and almost a hundred years later in Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. Interestingly, the conflicts addressed by both thinkers involve religion. In James’s case it is a conflict between Darwinian science and Christian religion; for Stout it is a dispute over the role of religion in a democratic polis. James addresses his problem by mediating between what he calls tough-minded and tender-minded mental make-ups; Stout’s rhetoric mediates between liberal democratic secularists and what he calls the new antiliberal traditionalists. In Democracy and Tradition, Stout proposes to resolve the dispute over the contemporary role of religion in the public sphere by arguing that pragmatism as (what he provocatively calls) “democratic traditionalism” makes room for

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religious voices in political deliberation. Like James, though less explicitly than Schiller, he makes use of rhetorical concepts and traditions all along the way. For Stout, “culture is an enduring collection of social practices, embedded in institutions of a characteristic kind, reflected in specific habits and intuitions, and capable of giving rise to recognizable forms of human character” (28). One particular aspect of culture is central to Stout’s mediating rhetorical strategy. That aspect is tradition: “a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct”; for example a democratic tradition “inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues” (3). Underlying these notions of culture and tradition is a theory of practices and a value given to particular rhetorical practices within certain traditions, such as democracy. Stout’s primary aim is to “make plain” how “a tradition of democratic reasoning, dispositions, and attitudes that the people have in common” serves as the “adhesive element in our sociality” (4). Stout thus claims that his “conception of the civic nation is pragmatic in the sense that it focuses on activities [practices] held in common as constitutive of the political community” (4–5). But the practical activities of a democracy are not just procedural forms: “They are activities in which normative commitments are embedded as well as discussed. The commitments are substantive. They guide the discussion, but they are also constantly in dispute, subject to revision, and not fully determinate” (5). Stout gives as examples texts that embody such democratic normative values as the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Nineteenth Amendment, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman.” Stout advocates the rhetorical practices of public deliberation and notes the other social practices in which rhetorical activities are situated and which serve as topics of deliberation, such as voting and the electoral process. Stout specifically takes up the question: What “is the role of free public reason in a political culture that includes conflicting religious conceptions of the good” (2)? To answer this question, he rhetorically focuses on “the discursive core of democratic culture” (195), noting that “by highlighting the significance of public deliberation, democratic political arrangements bring to light their symbiotic relationship to a surrounding culture in which the shared discursive practices of the people are of primary importance” (4). Stout’s rhetoric of purposeful mediation develops a pragmatist account of U.S. democratic culture, rhetorically analyzing both past-mediated conflicts and present conflicts in need of mediation. In so doing, Stout notes the mediating strategies of others in the

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pragmatist tradition. For example, he notes how in an earlier time “Dewey sought a spiritual path between the extremes of militant atheism and arrogant traditionalism” (32). Armed with rhetorical pragmatist assumptions, Stout characterizes the current impasse within American democratic deliberation as a conflict between secular liberal political philosophers and religious-oriented, antiliberal democratic new traditionalists. Because of the discord resulting from religious diversity,“secular liberals,” he writes,“have strongly urged people to restrain themselves from bringing their religious commitments with them into the political sphere.” In contrast, “many religious people have grown frustrated at the unwillingness of the liberal elite to hear them out on their own terms, and have recently had much to say against the hypocrisies and biases of secularism” (63). Stout’s mediating rhetoric, like James’s before him, argues for (what I am calling) a rhetorical pragmatism, one that “can transcend the current standoff between secular liberals and the new traditionalists—and do so by borrowing crucial insights from both sides” (13). Thus, he argues against “the Manichean rhetoric of cultural warfare” (10), and for the pragmatic rhetoric of conflict mediation—not complete resolution but rather respectful recognition of both basic disagreement and shared consensual values. Such pragmatist mediation is a practical accomplishment sometimes aided by theoretical articulation. As practical accomplishment, overcoming conflict takes place in a democracy through public deliberation and development of character, that is, collectively through democratic consensus and individually through democratic virtue. As a rhetorical accomplishment within public deliberation, pragmatic mediation of conflict requires the development of consensual overlap, not prior overarching agreement about the content of abstract concepts and principles. It requires verbally holding others responsible to give reasons for their opinions but not restricting beforehand the kind of reasons (secular or religious) that can be used in the public sphere. For all citizens participating in democratic deliberation, Stout recommends a specific kind of “conversation”: “an exchange of views in which the respective parties express their premises in as much detail as they see fit and in whatever idiom they wish, try to make sense of each other’s perspectives, and expose their own commitments to the possibility of criticism” (10–11). This practical, rhetorical accomplishment can be assisted by theoretical articulation, self-reflective commentary on both the substance and process of the ongoing accomplishment. Stout sees such metacommentary to be the special

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task of public philosophers, to whom Stout recommends adopting a pragmatist point of view. This pragmatist viewpoint sees the “function of moral principles with respect to the ethical life of a people” to be “essentially expressive, a matter of making explicit in the form of a claim a kind of commitment that would otherwise remain implicit and obscure.” The role of “public philosophy,” then, should be a rhetorically mediating “exercise in expressive rationality” (12). That is, public philosophers are intellectuals who express the reasons implicitly motivating citizens in their public deliberations. But we might just as easily characterize the public intellectual who performs this expressive theoretical function as a rhetorician. In fact, isn’t this public theoretical articulation an area where again the philosophy/rhetoric distinction (certainly the opposition) tends to collapse, and thus couldn’t we say that the pragmatist public intellectual is not just rhetorical in his or her mediating practice but also sophistic in theoretical orientation? Following Schiller’s interpretation of Protagoras, doesn’t a rhetorical pragmatist today assume the human-measure maxim (even when the appeal is to the divine) and try to discover and establish what rhetorical “devices make concordant” one citizen’s measures with those of fellow citizens? Stout as a rhetorical pragmatist attempts to fulfill his role as public philosopher through the theoretical articulations of his book Democracy and Tradition. In so doing, he presents a sophistic rhetorical pragmatist framework for public deliberation in a democracy, advocating a rhetorical strategy of purposeful mediation. Let me conclude by returning to the academic and popular claim that President Obama is a pragmatist—in my view, a rhetorical pragmatist. The most comprehensive study published on Obama’s pragmatist roots is James T. Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition. A noted intellectual historian, Kloppenberg charts the marked influence of philosophical pragmatism on Obama’s intellectual development from the readings and discussions in his Harvard Law School courses to his immersion in Deweyan progressive political thinking during his days as a Chicago community organizer and as a law professor at the University of Chicago. Kloppenberg comments often on Obama’s mediating style, his “commitments to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy—to building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building” (83). Kloppenberg calls Obama “a principled partisan of democracy and pragmatism in the tradition of James and Dewey. He believes in the founders’ ideals of equality and liberty. But he believes that achieving those goals requires working to forge agreement about forms of democratic experimentation, and

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he believes that those experiments must be followed by the critical assessment of results” (221–22). Besides connecting Obama with the classical early pragmatists, Kloppenberg also mentions the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Cornel West and others call a Christian pragmatist. In 2007, candidate Obama referred to Niebuhr as one of his “favorite philosophers.” Asked what he got out of Niebuhr, Obama responded that he took away “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.” Here we see the same mediating rhetoric—mediating between pessimism and optimism, between idealism and realism—that we find elsewhere throughout the American pragmatist tradition, including in Niebuhr’s own book The Irony of American History, which, for example, praises the mediating strain of American thought “most perfectly expressed by James Madison,” who “combined Christian realism in the interpretation of human motives and desires with Jefferson’s passion for liberty.” Perhaps the most striking example of Obama’s own pragmatist rhetoric of mediation involves his thoughtful response to the passionate rhetoric of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his vociferous critics. In Dreams from My Father, Obama had described his admiration for Reverend Wright, who, he noted, was a reader of Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and black liberation theologians. Then, famously and still controversially, Obama demonstrated his skill at mediating rhetoric in an 18 March 2008 speech, “A More Perfect Union,” in which he (at least for the moment) refused to repudiate Wright, despite his disagreement with his views. Throughout the speech, Obama tried to reconcile without dissolving many differences, many oppositions, not the least of which was that between black anger and white intolerance. Here is just one piece of Obama’s mediating, unifying rhetoric about “America’s improbable experiment in democracy”: “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

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Given the argument I am making that Obama can be viewed within a rhetorical pragmatist tradition, it is somewhat ironic that three years into his presidency the close fit between his rhetorical skill and his mediating pragmatism was questioned by some of his former supporters. In “The Pragmatic President” Fareed Zakaria writes that liberals are disappointed with President Obama “because of his persistent tendency to compromise.” Their criticism “stems from a liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry.” Prior to his election and soon after, his supporters marveled at the rhetorical force of his mediating progressive pragmatism, but later some of those same people criticized Obama for giving up on the power of his rhetoric in the process of making pragmatic compromises. In contrast, Zakaria defends the president’s record of accomplishments in today’s highly polarized politics: “Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist who understands that in a country divided over core issues, you cannot make the best the enemy of the good.” Thus, we might say, a pragmatist’s mediating rhetoric is sometimes the only way to get something done in difficult situations of extreme ideological partisanship. Still, it is also worth noting the limits of mediating rhetoric within deliberative democracy, limits fully acknowledged by Obama in this passage from The Audacity of Hope: “Democratic deliberation might have been sufficient to expand the franchise to white men without property and eventually women; reason, argument, and American pragmatism might have eased the economic growing pains of a great nation and helped lessen religious and class tensions that would plague other nations. But deliberation alone could not provide the slave his freedom or cleanse America of its original sin. In the end, it was the sword that would sever his chains.” In light of such historical examples, Obama the rhetorical pragmatist notes the limitations of rhetorical pragmatism and its rhetoric of purposeful mediation. He admits: The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. . . . I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today—the antiabortion activ-

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ist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute. (97) Ultimately, Obama turns back to the political figure with whom he has so often identified. He writes, “I’m left then with Lincoln, who like no man before or since understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation” (97). Not forgetting such sobering reminders, rhetorical pragmatists will surely continue their strategic advocacy of purposeful mediation, further developing the long pragmatist tradition of a “mediating way of thinking” within specialized intellectual debates as well as the popular politics of our deliberative democracies.

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3 Humanist Controversies and Rhetorical Humanism

Humanism has always been about human being and becoming. Historically, it has related human being and becoming to various domains of thinking and acting, such as epistemology, ethics, politics, art, theology, and, of course, rhetoric. As many rhetorical humanists have noted, Protagoras famously said, “Humans are the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not.” Plato countered with his Athenian who declares that “it is God who is the measure of all things, not humanity as some say” (Laws 716c). This first “humanist controversy” has been repeated again and again throughout the history of Western culture. In late nineteenth-century America, for example, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot is said to have vetoed William James’s recommendation that Protagoras’s human-as-measure fragment be placed above the door to the newly constructed philosophy building, Emerson Hall. Instead, Eliot insisted on the biblical question to God, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalms 8:4). At the beginning of the twentieth century, James’s most polemical ally, F. C. S. Schiller, advocated a version of pragmatism he called “humanism” and developed its claims through a positive anti-Platonist reading of Protagorean sophistry, emphasizing the human-asmeasure dictum and its complementary valuing of worldly rhetorical practice over philosophical searches for supernatural absolute truth. Schiller’s proposal of a pragmatic humanism soon set off the first of many twentieth-century controversies in which versions of humanism, in its philosophical and literary varieties, were repeatedly proposed, criticized, and defended. In the United States in the twenties and early thirties, there was the New Humanist controversy in literary studies with its arguments over classicism and romanticism, morality and aesthetics, universal values and modern relativism. In France and Germany in the late forties there was the debate over Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism” and Martin Heidegger’s rejoinder in his “Letter on Humanism,” to which I return below. In the sixties,

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again in France, Louis Althusser published his “Marxism and Humanism,” which became part of still another humanist controversy not only within the French Communist Party, but more widely within European philosophy. At the end of the last century—both during the American culture wars and in specialized academic debates over postmodernism—various humanisms, antihumanisms, and posthumanisms significantly defined positions within contemporary thinking. In what follows, I discuss two examples of these humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within disciplinary fields: first, philosophy and then, communication studies. I start with Heidegger’s antihumanist provocation, and examine Ernesto Grassi’s response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next I take up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compare Grassi’s defense of rhetorical humanism within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff ’s reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger’s as well as postmodernism’s philosophical antihumanism. In 1947, Heidegger published his response to Sartre’s argument that existentialism was humanistic. In a lecture the previous year, Sartre had claimed that existentialism, which he partly derived from his reading of the early Heidegger, could be considered a form of humanism. Existentialism, he maintained, is a humanism because both assert that “there is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity,” and in existential humanism, “we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realization, that man can realize himself as truly human.” Heidegger rejected Sartre’s claim that any existentialism derived from his work could be humanistic in a positive sense. For Heidegger, every humanism is metaphysical and mistakenly assumes the what and how of human beings instead of thinking the truth of Being. Humanism does this when it ignores or distorts the ontological difference between beings and Being. This neglect of the ontological difference can be seen in typical humanist definitions of humankind, which always differentiate humans from other beings, a move that gets in the way of asking the question of Being.

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For example, all traditional humanisms presuppose “the most universal ‘essence’ of man to be obvious,” and this assumption led Roman humanism, “the first humanism,” to a “metaphysical interpretation” of the Greek definition of man, “zōon logon echon,” which misleadingly translated it into Latin as “animal rationale.” Heidegger asks, “Are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts, and God?” To think the truth of Being, we must recognize the ontological difference and move beyond the humanist metaphysical effort to “locate man within being as one being among others.” Ernesto Grassi studied with Heidegger for several years, beginning in 1928, and helped publish his teacher’s “Letter on Humanism” in 1947. But then he spent the next four decades defending Italian humanism against what he took to be Heidegger’s misinterpretation. This rhetorical move, providing a counterinterpretation of the humanist tradition, gets repeated in various humanist controversies throughout the century. Indeed, we might call this argumentative tactic a part of the rhetorical hermeneutics of any new humanism: defending humanistic traditions by reinterpreting them in light of contemporary attacks. In his version of the rhetorical move, Grassi argues that Heidegger simply and mistakenly accepted traditional readings of Italian humanism and dismissed it as a literary-cultural movement with no philosophical value. According to Grassi, Heidegger misinterpreted Italian humanism as a rather insignificant example of onto-theological metaphysics. Metaphysics as onto-theology can only think Being in relation to beings as a whole and in relation to the supreme or highest being. It forgets the ontological difference and collapses ontology and theology into each other. Furthermore, according to Grassi, “for ontotheological metaphysics, only the logical, rational word is valid and objective. Any other word, for example the metaphorical word that transfers the significance of one rationally defined term to another (eagle = power), can have a poetic, literary or even rhetorical sense, apt to strike sentiments and to convince, but it does not have a philosophical function.” For Grassi, such onto-theological metaphysics in no way characterizes what he calls “rhetorical humanism.” He argues that “unlike traditional metaphysics,” Italian rhetorical humanism “does not begin with an ontology (that is with a philosophical activity that attempts to define beings rationally) but with the problem of the word. This historical word, not abstract, not rational, clarifies reality.” Grassi highlights Heidegger’s thesis in his “Letter on Humanism” that the “thinking expressed in Being and Time is against humanism.” Calling this claim

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categorical and polemical, Grassi explains that for Heidegger “the humanist conception does not grasp man’s essence,” for it does not think profoundly enough man’s humanitas. The Italian philosopher then asks: “What is the conception of humanism to which Heidegger refers and against which he rails? Is this conception historically valid?” Grassi ends up answering this question in the negative. Through readings of the later Heidegger, he shows exactly what constitutes Heideggerian antihumanism and how Heidegger’s critique does not apply to Italian humanism, which prior to and alongside its Neoplatonist turn was as antimetaphysical in its rhetoric and poetics as any Heideggerian might wish. He develops this counterinterpretation in such books as Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism and Renaissance Humanism: Studies in Philosophy and Poetics. In Renaissance Humanism, dedicated to Heidegger, Grassi presents his alternative rhetorical humanism through a strategic reading of specific Italian and other humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At first echoing Heidegger, he summarizes the dominant model of Western thought, against which, Grassi argues, a non-Platonic Italian humanism reacted. This traditional “ontotheological metaphysics” gives precedence to the philosophical problem of existence over the rhetorical question of the word: “Following Plato’s interpretation of Socratic thought, the principal problem became the question of the rational definition of being, that is, the ‘causal understanding,’ the explanation of its essence, its οὐσία. This led to a definition (χωρισμός), a determination of being independent of ‘time’ and ‘space.’ And the definition of manifold being through rational, causal thought led to the definition of the ‘first,’ primal being—God,” thus resulting in the onto-theological tradition of metaphysics that Heidegger and poststructuralism after him vigorously reject. Born in Plato’s interpretation of Socrates, the metaphysical tradition persisted in the European Renaissance through the Platonic humanism of Marsilio Ficino and others. This Platonic humanism, Grassi contends, is the metaphysical humanism that Heidegger mistakenly took as Italian humanism tout court. However, Grassi argues, there was a more significant, non-Platonic strand of humanism ingeniously articulated by a range of Renaissance thinkers—from Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni through Leon Battista Alberti and Erasmus—that eventually culminated in Vico. This non-Platonic, rhetorical humanism “‘reversed’ the whole of the speculative tradition. ‘Usus’ and ‘experimentia’ replace the a priori idea; the question of the existential claim replaces the problem of causal, rational thought; the investigation of the word as the correspondence of the existential

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claim takes the place of the rational definition of being; the assertion of the preeminence of metaphoric language over rational language is maintained.” One of the more complicated figures in Grassi’s humanist canon is Lorenzo Valla, whose critique of Plato Grassi ends up turning back on Valla himself. Valla is Grassi’s prime example of the humanist merging philosophy with rhetoric: “The interpretations of being . . . are possible only from the sphere of the answer responding to the address [of the concrete situation], and this address becomes known through enunciating the signification of the words ‘here’ and ‘now,’ i.e., through rhetoric” (80–81). For Valla, “the individual case is of central importance; the individual case is not—as maintained by the Platonists—the accidental, the futile, and unimportant, but quite the contrary: it is the expression of the situation, of the concrete in the compass of which man always finds himself and in which he answers the demands put to him. It is therefore important to recognize the ever new and varying historical disclosure of Being through the experience of the demands of the word” (81). This is rhetoric as philosophy. “Rhetorical thinking and speaking” discover “the meaning of beings in the ‘context’ of the historical situation.” With this reading of Valla’s rhetorical humanism in place, Grassi goes on to complicate his interpretation by noting that Valla builds on the ruins of traditional metaphysics and presents “suddenly and without transition” a new rationale for Christian thought (82). Valla does this by replacing “the cardinal virtues of classical metaphysics with the three theological virtues” as articulated by St. Paul: If being receives its meaning as the response to the [existential] appeal, then all existential behavior is based on the faith in the unfathomable address. This response to the address occurs in rhetorical, rather than rational, language. Language which realizes itself within the framework of a nonderivative primal instance is at the same time and always the expression of an act of faith, and of a hope without which faith itself would be meaningless. Hope implies per se a letting-be—in the sphere of the individual situation—of an ever newly self-manifesting being. Such recognition therefore demands the affirmation of openness and love. (83) Faith, hope, and love. Grassi then goes on to resecularize Valla’s attempt to reinterpret classical metaphysics through Christian theology. Indeed, Grassi

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uses the same argument against Valla that Valla used against Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. Quoting Valla’s claim that “it is just as ludicrous to talk of a life of the gods whom we do not know as if we were guessing the life of animals which we do not know,” Grassi argues that “the critique of ‘contemplatio’ as the essence of the life of the gods, which Valla puts into the mouths of the opponents of Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy, turns de facto also against his own ‘new’ Christian philosophy.” Specifically, “after having maintained the preeminence of rhetorical speech, which uses metaphors, over rational speech, which uses concepts, Valla holds that he is justified in proposing a metaphoric description of paradise.” But, argues Grassi, such an analogy is “inadmissible for [Valla’s] purpose” of “maintaining a ‘res religiosa’ on the basis of man’s experiences in history as he responds to demands made upon him.” Why is Valla’s move inadmissible? Because “a metaphor is possible only if there is a similarity: but between a historical life, with its elements of faith, hope and love, and a suprahistorical reality there can be no ‘similitudo.’ In celestial suprahistorical reality the existence of time cannot be assumed, nor can any becoming, or constantly renewed striving, or disclosing; neither has hope, nor faith, nor an anti-dogmatic attitude (caritas = openness) any meaning.” I am less concerned here with the persuasiveness of Grassi’s secularized critique of Valla than I am with the rhetorical hermeneutics of Grassi’s placement of Valla within his revisionist reading of a non-Platonic Italian humanism. Grassi ends up with a rhetorical humanism that rejects onto-theological metaphysics and thus, at the very least, compels a reevaluation of Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian reductive readings of Italian humanism. Michael Leff ’s later advocacy of rhetorical humanism is a good example of such a reevaluation. Though situated primarily within the academic disciplinary debates over rhetoric within communication studies, Leff ’s defense of rhetorical humanism (or what he calls “humanistic rhetoric”) provides an interdisciplinary exemplar of a rhetorical hermeneutics that transcends its disciplinary context. In Leff ’s example, we see the kind of skillful combination of rhetoric and interpretation found in Grassi’s defense of humanism, and Leff concocts this admixture against a postmodern antihumanism indebted to the same Heidegger against whom Grassi worked. However, Leff makes two additions to the argumentative repertoire of a prohumanist apologetics: he self-reflexively situates his claims in a disciplinary context and ends up providing some specific names

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to apply to his strategic maneuvers—Ciceronian humanism as hermeneutical rhetoric. In “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric,” Leff attends to a “specific development in the history of rhetoric that begins in classical Greece with Protagoras and Isocrates, appears in Rome under the sponsorship of Cicero and Quintilian, rises to prominence again in the Renaissance ‘humanists,’ and still commands attention and respect from some contemporary rhetoricians.” Leff places Cicero at the center of this humanistic tradition, and though acknowledging variations in “Ciceronian humanism” throughout its history, he identifies a cluster of common features, which include “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric, but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” In this and other articles, Leff focuses on views about agency and tradition within Ciceronian humanist rhetoric, views that have been critiqued in certain strands of critical postmodernism or poststructuralism. One of Leff ’s friendly adversaries is Dilip Gaonkar, especially in his influential “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science.” Here Gaonkar challenges the contemporary use of rhetorical models borrowed from classical rhetoric. He argues that this borrowing has led to an unfortunate misapplication of classical production-based models within today’s interpretive-centered disciplinary projects. Leff characterizes Gaonkar’s central thesis as a postmodern critique of the “ideology of human agency,” associated with a classical rhetoric that “radically separates the older, humanistic paradigm from the contemporary, interpretive turn in rhetorical studies.” In response, Leff, like Grassi before him, challenges the challenger’s interpretation of the humanist rhetorical tradition and puts forth a counter-reading that attempts to blunt the main thrust of the critique. Leff argues that Gaonkar and other postmodernist critics reductively characterize humanistic rhetoric as assuming a concept of agency as absolutely originary and of tradition as only negatively constraining. In contrast, Leff rerereads the theory and practice of humanistic rhetoric as much more complicated historically and politically: “The humanistic approach entails a productively ambiguous notion of agency that positions the orator both as an individual who leads an audience and as a community member shaped and constrained by the demands of the audience.” Thus understood, Leff claims, the orator is precisely

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not a simple originary source, but rather a performative node of articulation, and an enabling (not just restraining) tradition functions as “a mediating force between individual and collective identities” as it “emerges as the primary resource for rhetorical invention.” Leff develops his defense of humanistic rhetoric through the close reading of various texts from the classical and modernist rhetorical canons, including Thucydides, Isocrates, Lincoln, and Kenneth Burke. Cicero, of course, is Leff ’s most prominent and relevant illustration, for the Roman rhetorician provides both the theory and the practice of agency as historically articulating and tradition as performatively enabling. But Leff uses a reading of Lincoln to add the argumentative moves I have mentioned: a situating of his humanist defense within its disciplinary context and a self-reflexive naming of his strategy of using interpretation for rhetorical invention. In “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” Leff resists collapsing his approach into my version of rhetorical hermeneutics because, he sensibly argues, to do so would erase the disciplinary contexts out of which our complementary approaches arose—literary studies within English for my rhetorical hermeneutics, and rhetorical criticism within communication studies for his hermeneutical rhetoric. Our approaches certainly agree that “all interpretative work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretative work.” Such considerations, Leff goes on, “might tempt us . . . to regard rhetorical hermeneutics and hermeneutical rhetoric as two ways of saying the same thing.” I certainly am so tempted, but Leff resists the identification, arguing that “rhetorical criticism (in speech communication) and literary hermeneutics (in literary disciplines) have had significantly different histories, and scholars in the two domains typically engage in significantly different practices.” And “even if these distinctions are arbitrary and counterproductive,” which Leff doesn’t think they always are, “they remain a practical fact that cannot be ignored.” Instead, Leff argues for “a hermeneutic (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s sense of the term) that recognizes the ‘otherness’ of disciplinary interests while it opens space for fusing these differences into new perspectives.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with Leff here about the status of disciplinary boundaries, it is hard to deny that the different disciplinary identities that he highlights continue to be part of the current rhetorical scene where any defense of rhetorical humanism takes place. To foreground that differentiation can be an effective strategy for convincing a specific audience to accept the usefulness of your particular defense.

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In any case, Leff makes his disciplinary point as a prelude to illustrating how his hermeneutical rhetoric works in practice by rereading Lincoln’s speeches, showing how Lincoln uses a controversial interpretation of the Declaration of Independence to achieve his rhetorical purpose of promoting antislavery politics. Lincoln calls the Declaration an “immortal emblem of Humanity,” asserting the equality of all God’s creatures against the petty partisanship of exclusionary politics. I suggest that this illustration is another instance in which Leff demonstrates the power of his brand of rhetorical humanism. That is, Lincoln’s mixture of interpretive strategy and rhetorical argument—of interpretive performance as rhetorical invention—supports Leff ’s presentation of agency and tradition as mutually constitutive components in humanistic rhetoric. Leff explicitly connects hermeneutical rhetoric to rhetorical humanism in his reading of Isocrates’s Areopagiticus, which he uses to exemplify the performative power of agency and tradition within humanistic rhetoric. “When read from this perspective, the Areopagiticus becomes an exercise in the rhetorical and hermeneutic uses of history. The Athenian tradition frames and justifies the argument but the tradition is fabricated (or at least tailored) as it is invoked, and the text works to fashion a reciprocal interaction between the past and the present.” In this way, Leff puts his close reading of Isocrates, a prominent representative of his humanistic rhetorical tradition, to the service of his defense of that tradition against reductive postmodern readings of humanist agency. Leff not only finds hermeneutical rhetoric in the texts he interprets—specific speeches using interpretation as a resource for rhetorical invention—but also suggests that interpretive reception and rhetorical production cannot be as easily separated within the humanistic tradition more generally as some critics of it assume. Leff uses the classical notion of imitatio to make his point. Imitatio has sometimes been “badly misunderstood because of the aversion to ‘imitation’ that we have inherited from the Romantic movement. Imitatio was not the mere repetition or mechanistic reproduction of something found in an existing text. It was instead a complex process that allowed historical texts to serve as resources for invention.” Thus, Leff concludes, “within the larger program of rhetorical [humanist] education, imitatio allowed interpretation to play a vital role in the formation of rhetorical judgment.” By arguing effectively that interpretive practice and rhetorical invention “virtually coalesce” within the classical humanist tradition, Leff adds to his defense of that tradition against those who view it as based on an outmoded production model no longer useful to rhetorical studies after the hermeneutic turn.

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Within their different humanist controversies, Grassi and Leff share a set of rhetorical hermeneutic strategies for reinterpreting and championing the tradition of rhetorical humanism. Against Heidegger’s antihumanism, Grassi offers a nonmetaphysical reading of humanism that focuses on its forceful valuing of the word, while against a certain reductive postmodernist critique, Leff presents more complex notions of agency and tradition within a developing humanistic rhetoric. These rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age, but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the foreseeable future.

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4 Rhetorical Pragmatism and Histories of New Media | Rorty on Dreyfus on Kierkegaard on the Internet

On the Internet, people “are demoralized in the shortest possible time on the largest possible scale, at the cheapest possible price.” This judgment was actually rendered by Søren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century about another new media, the penny press. But a recent interpreter of Kierkegaard, Hubert Dreyfus, asks that we consider these views expressed about the earlier mass media as immediately relevant to the dangers we face in the present. At the University of Copenhagen in August 1998, Dreyfus read a paper entitled “Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age.” A longtime friend and professional interlocutor, Richard Rorty, wrote a brief response to that paper. I will examine these two texts—Dreyfus’s now published essay and Rorty’s unpublished comments—in order to better understand one contemporary version of the pragmatist tradition and its relation to contrasting opinions about the rhetorical effects of new media. Rorty had known Dreyfus since the late 1950s, when he was at Wellesley College and Dreyfus was at Harvard University. Rorty later claimed that he owed his acquaintance with European philosophy almost entirely to Dreyfus, and through many years, their ongoing discussion and participation in colloquia helped bridge the wide gap between European and Anglophone philosophies. Rorty fondly remembered one of their joint ventures: “Starting in 1980, Dreyfus [. . .] staged a series of summer institutes [at UC Berkeley], sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. These brought Husserlians together with Searleans, Heideggerians together with Davidsonians, Foucauldians together with bourgeois liberals. Some of the most fruitful teaching I have ever done, and some of the most instructive intellectual encounters I have ever had, were at these institutes.” Teaching evaluations in the Richard Rorty Papers support his memories, at least from the students’ point of view: With other instructors (Dreyfus, John Searle) receiving 3.7 and below on a scale with 4.0 as

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the highest score, the person summarizing the student evaluations felt it necessary to explain Rorty’s average of 4.03: Rorty received more A+’s than A–’s and was routinely praised for his ability to make very difficult material clear. It is this ability—to make difficult thinking clear, to translate one piece of language into another usefully, profitably, pragmatically—that embodied Rorty’s greatest rhetorical strength. Redescription was a trope that Rorty used again and again, a philosophical strategy that played an important role in his rhetorical pragmatism as he applied it in his commentary on a wide range of cultural and philosophical topics, including the topic of new media as attacked by his friend Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus is, of course, the author of such influential books as What Computers Can’t Do (1972), a Heideggerian critique of artificial intelligence; Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Phenomenology (1982), with Paul Rabinow, a book for which Rorty provided a press reader’s report; Being-in-the-World (1991), a commentary on Division I of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which also includes some comments on Division II and Kierkegaard; and, most relevant to this essay, On the Internet (2001), published appropriately enough in the Routledge series called “Thinking in Action,” which includes a revised version of Dreyfus’s “Kierkegaard on the Internet,” the paper to which Rorty responded. In the following comments, I first present Dreyfus’s Kierkegaardian criticisms of the Internet as new media and then consider Rorty’s response to Dreyfus on Kierkegaard on the Internet. I conclude with some additional remarks on Rorty’s interpretation of Kierkegaard and its connection to Rorty’s take on William James’s “The Will to Believe.” A preliminary disclaimer: Rorty would not have called himself a rhetorical pragmatist. Indeed, he often avoided the term rhetoric in reference both to rhetoric as a field of study and to rhetoric as a useful concept. I once asked Rorty why someone with his interests in language, in conversation, in persuasive redescription, seemed so obviously to avoid using the term rhetoric. He answered simply that he didn’t want to reinstate a distinction between logic and rhetoric that Dewey, one of his masters, had so effectively and quite appropriately dismantled. We can find the same questioning of that distinction in Rorty’s teaching notes archived in the Rorty Papers. His 1995 “Notes on Plato” contrast a Platonic notion that there is an ultimate “nature to goodness rather than just conventions about what counts as good conduct here or there” to “Dreyfus-like reasons” for thinking that we learn how to use words by “picking up conventions rather than recalling essences.” Rorty then makes a list of the “binary oppositions

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of Western, Greek, metaphysics” that Heidegger and Derrida “will be trying to undermine.” Rorty includes the usual suspects (usual, that is, from a pragmatist and poststructuralist point of view): At the top of these questionable binaries is Knowledge/Opinion; later comes The True World/The Apparent World, Necessary/Contingent, Form/Matter, Soul/Body, Up/Down, and, near the bottom, the suspect opposition Logic/Rhetoric. So it is with some hesitation that I refer to Rorty as a rhetorical pragmatist. My pseudo-justification is that if we try to think our way around the logic/ rhetoric distinction and define rhetoric simply as the use of language in a context to have effects—effects that include persuasion and figuration—then Rorty’s version of neopragmatism is rhetorical in that it clearly emphasizes the importance of language in our understanding of human being and defines language as a tool rather than a medium of representation or expression. For Rorty, language is an instrument for achieving our purposes in the world, an effective means for social interaction, rather than a medium that properly represents the intrinsic structure of nonhuman reality or that properly expresses the essential nature of the human species. Thus, just as one of his admirers, Cornel West, describes his own theory as prophetic pragmatism with its particular emphasis on liberation, justice, and political theology, we might call Rorty’s theory a kind of rhetorical pragmatism with its emphasis on redescription and democratic conversation.

I In his paper, “Kierkegaard on the Internet,” Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard’s The Present Age to draw an analogy between an earlier period and our own. Kierkegaard characterizes the mid-nineteenth century as a time of disinterested curiosity that levels all values upon which action is based, and he blames the public produced by the new media for this leveling process. “Even if my life had no other significance,” he writes in his journal, “I am satisfied with having discovered the absolutely demoralizing existence of the daily press.” Dreyfus remarks that it is no accident that Kierkegaard writing in 1846 chose the public and the press to attack. Summarizing Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Dreyfus gives a brief media history of the Enlightenment creation of a public sphere “as a space in which the rational, disinterested reflection that should guide government and human life could be institutionalized and refined” and notes how an expanding daily press extended the public debate to more and

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more ordinary citizens until by the middle of the nineteenth century “the reign of public opinion appeared as the reign of the many and mediocre.” But Kierkegaard’s chief concern was not the media’s encouragement of mediocrity, nor the “merging of the individual with the group,” nor the mass conformity of “the crowd.” Dreyfus claims that Kierkegaard’s originality was in seeing the public sphere itself “as a new and dangerous cultural phenomenon in which the leveling produced by the press brings out something that was deeply wrong with the Enlightenment idea of detached reflection from the start.” Dreyfus clarifies how for Kierkegaard the new media produced this leveling in several different ways. In redescribing Kierkegaard’s media critique using his own version of an early Heideggerian vocabulary, Dreyfus explains: “the new massive distribution of desituated information was making every sort of information immediately available to anyone, thereby producing a desituated, detached spectator. The new power of the Press to disseminate information to everyone in a nation led its readers to transcend their local, personal involvement and [. . .] encouraged everyone to develop an opinion about everything.” Habermas views this development as “a triumph of democratization,” but Kierkegaard “saw that the Public Sphere was destined to become a realm of idle talk in which spectators merely pass the word along.” From this Heideggerian-inflected Kierkegaardian perspective, the media-produced public sphere appears to promote “ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out of which specific issues grow and in terms of which these issues must be resolved through some sort of committed action. What seems a virtue to detached Enlightenment reason, therefore, looks like a disastrous drawback to Kierkegaard.” The public sphere becomes “a world in which everyone has an opinion on, and comments on, all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility.” Worst of all, according to Dreyfus’s Kierkegaard, in this media-produced public sphere, “anyone can hold an opinion on anything without having to act on it,” and this situation results in “the possibility of endless reflection” with “no possibility of decision and action,” no possibility of the kind of unconditional commitment that makes life meaningful. Thus, Dreyfus quotes the passage from Kierkegaard’s journal with which I began: “Here men are demoralized in the shortest possible time on the largest possible scale, at the cheapest possible price.” And then Dreyfus makes explicit the analogy between Kierkegaard’s media world and today’s, writing of Habermas’s idealized public sphere:

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The desituated and anonymous press and the lack of passion or commitment in our reflective age combine to produce the Public, the agent of the nihilistic leveling characteristic of his time and ours. [. . .] Kierkegaard would surely have seen in the Internet, with its web sites full of anonymous information from all over the world and its interest groups which anyone in the world can join and where one can discuss any topic endlessly without consequences, the hi-tech synthesis of the worst features of the newspaper and the coffee house. Dreyfus then goes on to expand on this pessimistic Kierkegaardian vision of new media by explaining how Kierkegaard’s three-stage model of development (aesthetic, ethical, and religious) can be used to specify further the dangers of the Internet. But now I want to move on to Rorty’s response to Dreyfus, so let me just give Dreyfus’s conclusion: “So it looks like Kierkegaard may be right. The press and the Internet are the ultimate enemy of unconditional commitment, but only the unconditional commitment of what Kierkegaard calls the religious sphere of existence can save us from the nihilistic leveling launched by the Enlightenment, promoted by the press and the public sphere, and perfected in the World Wide Web.” Rorty begins his response to Dreyfus in typical rhetorical pragmatist fashion by citing some books that have had effects on their readers who have then used them for various purposes. He says: Bert Dreyfus and I admire many of the same authors, in particular Heidegger and Kierkegaard. But we differ about the use to which they can be put. Most of us Heidegger-freaks read him the way Christians pray, Zen Buddhists meditate, Janeites reread Persuasion, or Shakespearians rehearse the sonnets. We treat Heidegger as an author who helps us toward something like spiritual or imaginative perfection. It does not occur to us that he might be used for public purposes. Writers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, we believe, were not at their best when commenting on current events or public policy. In contrast, Dreyfus “reads these philosophers differently,” having “once, famously, organized a conference on ‘Applied Heidegger’ ” and now, in the present paper, using Kierkegaard to offer “advice on the problems of our own day.”

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Behind the contrast Rorty draws here is his well-known distinction, argued most fully a decade earlier in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, a distinction between authors “in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates” versus authors “in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates.” Rorty mentions Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger among the former as useful exemplars, “as illustrations of what private perfection—a self-created, autonomous, human life—can be like”; and he lists Marx, Dewey, and Habermas as “fellow citizens” who “are engaged in a shared, social effort—the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel.” Rorty argues further that it is usually a mistake to try to mix these two very different human activities. Theoretically or philosophically, it is impossible, he writes, to come up with a comprehensive outlook that lets “us hold selfcreation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.” And practically or socio-politically, it is better not to mix the vocabularies of the two different kinds of tasks, as the “vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.” But it is not just on liberal principle that Rorty objects to a private Kierkegaardian vocabulary being put to purposes of public critique. More to his immediate point, Rorty doubts that Kierkegaard’s analysis of the public and new media is usefully applicable to either his time or ours. Rorty says he is “particularly dubious” about using the text Dreyfus relies on in his paper, Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, which Rorty characterizes as “Kierkegaard at his crankiest” and “a big come-down from books like [Kierkegaard’s] Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” Rorty provides a very different history of the new media and politics in Kierkegaard’s time: “You would never guess from reading [Kierkegaard’s] The Present Age that it was written in a period when representative government was really beginning to get a grip on Europe, when movements for the expansion of the franchise were frequent and often successful, and when increased literacy was both a cause and an effect of the success of the penny press. It is hard to imagine the development of mass democracy without the sort of popular press which grew up in the [nineteenth] century.” Rorty grants that Kierkegaard, along with other “great political and literary figures,” was “savaged by the press, but adds that Kierkegaard’s The Present Age seems to him “not much more than an ill-tempered reaction to being baited by one’s inferiors.”

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Turning to views of the Internet, Rorty declares that “the triviality of the chat rooms and the mindless proliferation of websites are a small price to pay for the political opportunities which the net offers. We in the rich old democracies, who are accustomed to intellectual freedom, may not appreciate what the net can do for people in places like Peru and Kazakhstan.” He goes on to recommend that funds spent on UNESCO “and on shipping people like [him] to international conferences” should “be spent on fiber optic cables providing internet connections between every educational institution in the world, starting with the universities and proceeding down to the primary schools.” This would lead to more public transparency, easier whistle-blowing of hidden governmental abominations, and more accessible education for poor children. Indeed, according to Rorty, “a lot of wonderful things would happen. The internet could be for the development of an international political class what the penny press was for the widening of this class in nineteenth century Europe.” Getting to the specifics of Dreyfus’s paper, Rorty admits that the views of the Internet Dreyfus puts into Kierkegaard’s mouth are true enough “but fairly inconsequential.” Admitting that Dreyfus “does point out all the disadvantages of the net,” Rorty argues in typical pragmatist fashion that the advantages, the beneficial consequences, of the Internet clearly outweigh the disadvantages “just as they did in the case of the scurrilous, muck-raking, redneck, penny press.” He gives as a representative example the fact that “the net is a perfect medium for slander and innuendo,” but he notes that such statements are “like saying that money is a perfect medium for fraud and theft. So it is, but a money economy is still clearly better than a barter economy. Any medium of exchange of information will be put to slanderous purposes, but we are still better off with cheaper and more fluid media than without them.” Addressing Dreyfus’s use of Kierkegaard’s three-stage model of selfdevelopment (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious), Rorty makes his usual point that such development relates more to private life than public politics and adds that it is probably only applicable anyway to “intellectuals who read large numbers of books.” Rorty does not see a general problem with the new media’s leveling process leading to endless reflection and the impossibility of passionate commitment to action: “I am not sure that paralyzing self-scrutiny is a big problem for more than a few intellectuals. I find it hard to imagine that the incidence of this problem will be increased by the internet.”

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Wrapping up his remarks, Rorty quotes a statement from Dreyfus’s paper that does not appear in any of its published versions. Dreyfus says that “it should be the job of information technology to look for structures that solicit and support unconditional commitments and implement them.” Rorty thinks such statements smack of the Orwellian world of loving Big Brother. He would just as soon have information technologists stay out of the unconditional commitment business, no matter how attractive Kierkegaard and Nietzsche might make such commitments sound. Rorty concludes, “I would prefer it if the information technologists just put everything they could think of on the net— rigorously hierarchical organized data bases, hypertexts, the complete works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, programs that teach you symbolic logic and Danish and test your progress, and so on. They could just let us surfers take it from there.” In response to Dreyfus’s and Rorty’s contrasting evaluations of the Internet, I suggest a different history of the present, one that borrows a bit from each of theirs. What seems most striking today is that so many media users are either unthinkingly complacent in their passionate commitments or complacently unthinking in their detached, everyday busyness. Examples of the former are religious and secular dogmatic fundamentalists, unthinkingly complacent in their passionate commitments. Examples of the latter are most of the rest of us in our busy professional and personal, public and private lives. The Internet does encourage both ways of being unthinking and complacent. I have in mind, on the one hand, the partisan, self-validating websites and blog discussions of fundamentalists on the right and left, religious and secular; and then, on the other hand, everyone’s time-consuming activities of checking emails, web surfing, and information overloading. But it is also the case that the Internet provides its own unique opportunities for challenging unthinking complacency. After all, I retrieved Dreyfus’s essay on Kierkegaard first from his website, and Rorty’s digital archive online was my source for his critique of Dreyfus. Arguably, both texts are opportunities for thinking through our complacencies in reference to new media. These opportunities include the models they provide for thinking rhetorically about media history. Dreyfus and Rorty demonstrate how arguments proposing different accounts of new media in the past help in thinking about media in the present and, indeed, might even motivate different self-reflective uses of that media in the future.

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II As an epilogue to these comments, I’d like to note briefly some related points about Rorty and Kierkegaard that emerge from the texts now available in the Richard Rorty Papers. I’ve indicated how Rorty, while agreeing with some of Dreyfus’s descriptions of the Internet, ultimately disagrees with Dreyfus’s Kierkegaardian condemnation of that media. But, we might ask, does Rorty fully agree with Dreyfus’s positive evaluation of Kierkegaard’s philosophy independent of its application in assessing new media, and how does Rorty’s interpretation of Kierkegaard relate more generally to his rhetorical pragmatism? In answering these questions, we receive some help from Rorty’s published work. Though there is little sustained discussion of Kierkegaard in Rorty’s books and articles, the Danish philosopher is often mentioned in passing to illustrate this or that Rortian generalization about the history of philosophy. For example, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty lists Kierkegaard among his edifying as opposed to systematic philosophers (369), and more than once Rorty cites his “favorite remark of Kierkegaard’s about Hegel.” He puts it this way in “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre”: “The verdict of the literary culture on this [Hegelian] metaphysics was nicely formulated by Kierkegaard when he said that if Hegel had written at the end of his books that ‘this was all just a thought experiment’ he would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, but that, as it was, he was merely a buffoon.” Rorty comments that Kierkegaard’s “epithet is too harsh, but the spirit of the remark seems right.” Such passing references to Kierkegaard in Rorty’s publications do not help much with my questions about how Rorty agrees with Dreyfus’s evaluation of Kierkegaard or how Rorty’s interpretation relates to his neopragmatism. But if we look at unpublished texts in the Rorty Papers, I think the answers become clearer. According to syllabi and lecture notes, Rorty included Kierkegaard in his courses as early as 1960, during his last year teaching at Wellesley. Later in his career and more helpful are Rorty’s notes for lectures on Kierkegaard in a fall 1987 Philosophy 518 course at the University of Virginia. In his first Kierkegaard lecture, Rorty remarks that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were “illustrative of the way in which philosophical system-building died with Hegel and was replaced by artistic [. . .] innovation” (as well as by the political innovations of philosophers like Mill and Marx). Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were two “private eccentrics” who “are comparable in being [. . .] anti-Hegelian and trying to find

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ways of saying that passion ranks above thought, reflection on the situation of the individual over world history.” Though Kierkegaard “adored” Christianity and Nietzsche “loathed” it, “both agreed that Hegel had not understood [Christianity] properly.” Rorty turns to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Kierkegaard argued that “all decisiveness, all essential decisiveness, is rooted in subjectivity. A contemplative spirit, and this is what the objective subject is, feels nowhere any infinite need of a decision, and sees no decision anywhere. This is the falsum that is inherent in all objectivity; and this is the significance of mediation as the mode of transition in the continuous process, where nothing is fixed and where nothing is infinitely decided.” Rorty quotes from a long footnote to this last sentence as his first example of Kierkegaardian “digs at Hegel”: “The great secret of the [Hegelian] System [. . .] is pretty much the same as the sophism of Protagoras, that everything is relative; except that here, everything is relative in the continuing world-process. But this cannot help any living individual.” Kierkegaard goes on to cite an anecdote from Plutarch’s Moralia about a philosopher described to a visitor as “a wise man [. . .] occupied in the search for virtue,” to which the visitor responds: “But when does he then propose to use it?” Next, Rorty quotes Kierkegaard’s statement that “The philosopher contemplates Christianity [only] for the sake of interpenetrating it with his speculative thought,” which Rorty glosses as Kierkegaard saying that “Hegel takes Christianity as a datum, not as an option [. . .]; for Hegel, the question of ‘how am I to live, what should I do?’ is put aside in favor of ‘Where is history going?’ ” Thus, Rorty sees Kierkegaard as opposing objective, systematic thought, which merely arranges abstract possibilities to subjective, passionate thought, which embodies actual commitments and enables decisions to act. Rorty relates this Kierkegaardian philosophy to his own pragmatism when, in summary, he cites William James (in “The Will to Believe”) and claims that “when we face a ‘live, momentous and forced option’ [. . .] the way in which abstract possibilities hang together is not [of much] help.” Later in a published, full-blown treatment of James’s essay, Rorty expands on his Kierkegaardian point that private ‘subjective’ commitment requires no public ‘objective’ justification. He writes, “It is a consequence of James’s utilitarian view of the nature of obligation that the obligation to justify one’s beliefs arises only when one’s habits of action interfere with the fulfillment of others’ needs. Insofar as one is engaged in a private project, that obligation lapses.” James resisted the view that “to be rational” means submitting all one’s beliefs “to the judgment of one’s

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peers.” Instead, James argues in “The Will to Believe” that “there are live, momentous, and forced options which cannot be decided by evidence—cannot, as James put it, ‘be decided on intellectual grounds.’ ” Rorty does criticize James here for assuming a too rigid distinction between intellect and passion, claiming that it is exactly this “sort of dualism which James needs to blur” as a pragmatist who maintains that “the only point of having beliefs in the first place is to gratify desires.” But Rorty tries to “reinterpret James’s intellect/passion distinction so as to make it coincide with a distinction between what needs justification to other human beings and what does not.” Rorty gives Kierkegaard’s faith in the Incarnation as a paradigmantic case of unjustifiable belief, noting that Kierkegaard sees no need to explain to others “how Christ can be both mortal and immortal.” In such ways, Rorty aligns James with Kierkegaard in viewing both as being in the business of privatizing religion. However, privatizing religion does not mean that religious beliefs have no effect on public actions. According to Kierkegaard, just the opposite is the case. Such beliefs provide the ultimate commitments upon which decisions to act are made. As Rorty notes, for Kierkegaard these passionately held commitments, rather than abstract systems, constitute the grounds for deciding among live, momentous, and forced options. And here we see a direct connection with Kierkegaard’s decisionist views as applied in criticizing the new media of his time. Indeed, Rorty’s lectures quote some of the same Kierkegaardian words that Dreyfus applies in his critique of the Internet: “Demoralized by too assiduous an absorption in [abstract Hegelian] world-historical considerations, people no longer have any will for anything.” So, Rorty does seem to agree with Dreyfus’s interpretation of Kierkegaard, at least with those aspects of Kierkegaardian thought most relevant to the demoralizing media effects of leveling and inaction. But Rorty disagrees that Kierkegaard, so interpreted, actually applies to current media in a way that justifies a condemnation of the Internet. That is, for Rorty as a rhetorical pragmatist, it is not the case that with the new media, people “are demoralized in the shortest possible time on the largest possible scale at the cheapest possible price.”

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5 Making Comparisons | First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and Cross-Cultural Communication

Despite all his efforts, Kirk’s scorn broke through. “And you consider yourself Plato’s disciple!” The comment amused Parmen. “We’ve managed to live in peace and harmony for centuries, my dear Captain.” Spock’s voice was icy. “Whose harmony? Yours? Plato wanted beauty, truth and, above all, justice.” —“Plato’s Stepchildren,” Star Trek That’s just rhetorical nonsense. —Ephraim Cochran, speaking of his legendary status as inventor of warp drive, Star Trek: First Contact

Over the last two decades, American Studies has gone radically comparativist. In John Rowe’s words, it combines two models, one that “stresses the ‘comparative American cultures’ within the multiculture of the United States and another that allows us to situate domestic ‘multiculturalism’ within international, transnational, and potentially post-national contexts.” That is, the two dimensions of this Comparative American Studies are internal and external to the cultural practices located within the geo-political boundaries of the United States. As an interpretive project, the internally comparativist displaces traditional American exceptionalism and replaces misleading tropes of national homogeneity with an analytic framework comparing not only separate ethnic U.S. cultures, but also different versions of cultural hybridity. The externally comparativist project includes examinations of “views from abroad,” comparing domestic American Studies with its foreign “translations” throughout the world, focusing on both the interpretive content and the political function of American Studies as a research field and pedagogical subject outside the United States. Finally, any

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post-nationalist American Studies emerging out of this doubly comparativist model will redefine the nation state as a factor in cultural production and reception; it will relocate this explanatory category in comparative relation to the intersection of other categories, such as race, class, generation, religion, ethnicity, and gender within a new cultural rhetoric study. In this essay I examine the theoretical problem of comparison that is so central to this still evolving American Studies and address the topic of making comparisons within and across different cultures. I am especially interested in questions of transcultural comparison related to attempts at cross-cultural communication. I begin with the problematic neopragmatism of Richard Rorty, especially suspect in its renewed American exceptionalism, yet quite useful, I claim, in describing comparisons within cultural politics. His theoretical talk of how to interpret and evaluate alien practices leads me to some specific rhetorical analyses of intercultural contacts. The issue of making comparisons between cultures raises the question of the status of such comparisons and the political position of the twenty-first-century comparativist. My examples throughout are chosen more to clarify a theoretical problem than to illustrate a critical or historical practice. That is, I offer here an argument for theorizing cultural comparison, rather than a model for doing Comparative American Studies.

I In “Cosmopolitanism Without Emancipation,” Rorty writes as a confident (some would say self-satisfied) Euro-American liberal pragmatist: “We look forward, in a vague way, to a time when the Cashinahua, the Chinese, and (if such there be) the planets which form the Galactic Empire will all be part of the same cosmopolitan social democratic community. . . . The Chinese, the Cashinahua, and the Galactics will doubtless have suggestions about what further reforms are needed [in our institutions], but we shall not be inclined to adopt these suggestions until we have managed to fit them in with our distinctively Western social democratic aspirations, through some sort of judicious giveand-take.” There are two aspects to Rorty’s particular brand of ethnocentrism—political and theoretical—and though they are logically separable, they intersect in significant ways. A useful theoretical take on the inevitably ethnocentric nature of comparison cannot be easily distanced from a certain questionable political attitude toward that inevitability. Indeed, as I will later show,

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Rorty’s political attitude was partially constitutive of the comparisons he made. But first we must distinguish more clearly between Rorty’s political and hermeneutic ethnocentrisms. On the one hand, Rorty reinstated a certain American exceptionalism by expanding his earlier claim that Western political institutions are the best we humans have been able to come up with in the history of the world. Later, he combined this political ethnocentrism with a rather blatant and nonironic nationalist championing of U.S. patriotism. That is, Rorty began with a Deweyan story about how continued reform of our social democratic institutions offers the best hope for humanity’s future, but he then transformed this heartening story into a scolding rebuke of the academic left for being too negative in demanding further reforms of these same institutions. In the face of a widening gap between rich and poor, attacks on affirmative action, promotion of antiimmigrant legislation, evacuation of public support for higher education and the arts, and continued criticism of “tenured radicals,” progressive U.S. intellectuals might be excused for not immediately agreeing with Rorty’s new American exceptionalism or for worrying that it gives unintended support to those cultural forces in our nation that do not see or would rather not address the deep political injustices and social inequities enabling the progress Rorty celebrated. In fairness to Rorty, I should note that he was not one of those who failed to acknowledge these national and global problems. However, what I’m calling his political ethnocentrism can easily be seen as contributing to the problems rather than to their solutions. The pragmatic question is which cultural politics would be most strategically useful right now in achieving reforms within U.S. society: intensive critique and constant pressure for improvement or Rorty’s optimistic political ethnocentrism that can be easily appropriated to resist change? In contrast to his problematic political ethnocentrism, I find more valuable Rorty’s neopragmatist arguments for the inevitability of what might be called hermeneutic ethnocentrism. This form of ethnocentrism lies behind Rorty’s claim that we will evaluate any suggestions made by the Cashinahua, the Chinese, and the Galactics from within our own web of beliefs, practices, and desires. Intercultural comparisons of value develop as intracultural negotiations among members of our own community. I can test the viability of this hermeneutic ethnocentrism by comparing these claims to cases involving those beings Rorty here declares as “other.” Some preliminary considerations will ease our way. Who is the “we” in Rorty’s formulations? At least one answer to this often asked question is that

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“we” (in counterdistinction to “them”) refers to those who at particular times and places self-identify as such. For example, the Cashinahua of Eastern Peru sometimes identify themselves with the Brazilian Cashinahua as a “we” across national boundaries, despite the isolation of their individual villages, and regardless of their very different histories. It is the “we” of the Cashinahua that speaks when a villager uses the words huni kuin (“real man, Cashinahua”) as opposed to huni betsa (“other man, outsider”). But the use of such identifiers— e.g., the “we” assumed in kinship groupings—varies in relation to social context, cultural domain, and historical circumstance. Similarly, the “we” in Rorty’s ethnocentrisms must always be understood as socio-historically specific and politically contingent. Especially in the multiculture that is the United States, this “we” can never simply be taken for granted but must be specified in each claim made about the politically or hermeneutically ethnocentric act under discussion. To specify a “we” contextually on a case-by-case basis is to acknowledge its potential heterogeneity and historical fragility. Any “we” is potentially a temporary construction, the result of immediate, negotiated, or even imposed identifications. But the same is true of the “they” each “we” posits. Others may be read as belonging to homogeneous groups, even as “they” disidentify and refuse the unity imposed on them. Such impositions, accepted or resisted, are internal and external to the identificatory practices rhetorically establishing “us” and “them.” These historical inclusions and exclusions defining a community suggest another point often raised against Rorty: Where is his recognition of uneven power relations among participants in his inter- and intra-cultural conversations? It now seems rather uncontroversial to acknowledge that any identification preceding or during an interpretive act necessarily involves power relations among interpreting agents and between interpreters and the subjects interpreted. Comparative American Studies has been especially adept at foregrounding these relations in its various multicultural, intersectional, and global analyses.

II In the “Captain’s Holiday” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the captain of the USS Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, demonstrates how comparative studies are alive and well in the twenty-fourth century. On Stardate 43745.2, Picard takes along various books for “light reading” during his vacation on the

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pleasure planet Risa; these include James Joyce’s Ulysses and Ving Kuda’s Ethics, Sophistry, and the Alternative Universe. Picard’s comparativist interest in reading texts written in languages different from his own first one (French) and his possible intention to compare literature and philosophy are symptoms of his larger comparativist perspective: comparing the differences among alien cultures. As the Captain’s voice-over opening each episode explains: “Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” And what is it that one does with these new worlds, new forms of life, new civilizations, if not at the first compare them? This is a kind of Galactic Comparative Studies, a grander version of the kind of the Comparative Cultural Planetology practiced briefly by Immanuel Kant in his early treatise, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.” Kant claimed that “thinking natures . . . become more excellent and perfect in proportion to the distance of their habitats from the sun” on the “planets from Mercury to Saturn, or perhaps even beyond.” Comparative American Studies is a more delimited version of this planetary and galactic comparativism, a local terran variety that has a long and distinguished ancestry. The title of Picard’s second book of “light reading” reminds us of one ancient group within this comparativist lineage. During the late fifth century b.c.e., there prospered in Athens some well-paid aliens, travelers among the Greek city-states, practitioners of sophistry. The most famous of these was Protagoras, a self-proclaimed Sophist, whose teachings derived from the comparisons he made of the differences among the alternative communities he had visited. His treatise On Truth (or Refutations) might appropriately be called his version of Ethics, Sophistry, and an Alternative Universe. The first sentence of this treatise, all that has survived, translates into English as: “Humans are the measure of all things, things that are that they are, things that are not that they are not.” Now, this human-as-measure maxim was a theoretical statement generalizing from Protagoras’s observations that different communities he visited had different customs, laws, indeed, different ethical systems and views of truth. That is, his sophistic view was that the values of truth, goodness, justice, and so forth, are completely relative to particular communities. There are no absolutes. Protagoras was a contemporary of Socrates, whose student Plato passionately opposed the relativism of the Sophists. Plato’s anti-relativist position is summarized perhaps most clearly in a passage from his last work, Laws (716c): “In our view

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it is God who is pre-eminently the ‘measure of all things’, much more so than any ‘human’, as some say.” The question relevant here to any comparative cultural studies can be stated as follows: Is the comparative measure of all things (like truth and justice) found in some transcendental domain outside every human community and historical contingency; or, as the Sophist Protagoras would have it, is humanity, particular historical communities, or even individuals, the measure of all things? Are cross-cultural comparisons (of truth, goodness, justice, beauty) transcendentally absolute or socio-historically relative? One might say that the opposed answers to this question separate two long traditions of Western thought, which have been characterized in various ways: good philosophy that defends absolute truth versus bad rhetoric that relativistically argues for many truths. That is, Western intellectual history has continually restaged this conflict between relativism and absolutism, mere opinion and true knowledge, sophistry and platonism, anti-foundationalist rhetoric and foundationalist philosophy. The economic and political stakes of this intellectual conflict become vividly manifest at different times and places, such as in the United States during the socalled Culture Wars of the 1990s. Moreover, in order to understand better our own hermeneutic ethnocentrism, we must realize how our ongoing theoretical disputes are themselves part of the more general set of Western beliefs limiting and enabling our understanding of non-Western philosophical traditions. Take the third group posited as other in the Rorty passage quoted above: the Chinese. In The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China, Hu Shih brings his Western education to bear on the early history of Chinese philosophy, referring to the sixth century b.c.e. as the “age of the Sophists.” He uses the word Sophists “merely for lack of a better term” and because this group of early Chinese thinkers “resembles .  .  . closely those Greek Sophists with whom we have been made familiar through the Platonic Dialogues.” Teng Shih, for example, “taught the doctrine of the relativity of right and wrong, and employed inexhaustible arguments.” Hu Shih describes the “founder” of Taoism, Lao-Tze, as “the greatest of all the Sophists . . . the Protagoras of Ancient China.” This Western analogizing of Eastern thought again illustrates the way comparisons are hermeneutically ethnocentric, but it also suggests the complicated relation between the “us” and “them” of cross-cultural interpretation, as Chinese-born Hu Shih’s “we” appears to refer to those Western-educated readers of Plato who were trained, as he was at Cornell and Columbia, in the European philosophical tradition. Indeed, it is not too

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much of a stretch to say that, despite differences in national identification and generational affiliation, Hu Shih and Richard Rorty speak, in the instances I have quoted, the same “we” of Western philosophy, even down to the fact of both being trained professionally in U.S. philosophy departments under the direct or indirect influence of John Dewey. Any comparison of differing truth claims, ethical values, philosophical traditions—that is, any comparison of cultural productions from different communities—inevitably faces the questions of who is right/who is wrong or what is better/what is worse. To answer these questions of comparative value necessarily involves measuring the couple to be evaluated against something else, called a standard or criterion. Comparing two demands a third, a measure against which or according to which the two are compared. On this, the necessity of having a standard against which two things are measured, on this requirement, both Protagoras and Plato were agreed. They simply, and significantly, disagreed over the status of the measure: for the Protagorean Sophist, the measure is relative to community; for the Platonic Philosopher, it is absolute. For the relativist, the value of any person, action, or text is measured by communal standards; for the absolutist, the standard of value transcends any historical community. Some postmodernists would challenge the need (or currently the possibility) of any preexistent measure guiding comparative judgment. Jean-François Lyotard argues, for example, that judgments must now take place without prior criteria, with judges developing standards as their judgments proceed on a case-by-case basis. Furthermore, judges can at times simply fail to rule justly, not only because rules are violated within the relevant language game, but also because of the incommensurability of the parties’ phrases. When radically different phrases or language games or cultures come into conflict, judgments cannot always be made on the model of litigation, in which the competing claims of two parties can be fairly compared and adjudicated. Instead, sometimes a differend is produced: “A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.” Lyotard’s claim for the differend—the incommensurability of phrases—has been extended by some into a claim for the radical incommensurability of cultures. In this extension of the differend notion, some cultures simply cannot be comparatively evaluated, and certain cultures cannot in principle ever communicate with each other because of their incommensurable beliefs and practices. At first Rorty might seem to agree with this conclusion,

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given his stand on hermeneutic ethnocentrism, but this is not the case, as I will try to show in my final example of cross-cultural comparison.

III A Comparative American Studies could usefully adopt a certain cultural rhetoric study as an interpretive tool. Cultural rhetoric study traces the movement of figural, suasory, and narrative energies across different sites of (what this essay might call) the cultural space-time continuum. But I’m most interested here in those rhetorical exchanges that meet resistances across boundaries, borders that are difficult to traverse, especially those hermeneutic barriers between radically different cultures. I will approach the special problems of cross-cultural communication by once again citing that twenty-fourth-century comparativist, Captain Jean-Luc Picard. In the “Samaritan Snare” episode, Stardate 42779.1, Picard is traveling by shuttle craft with young Ensign Wesley Crusher, who is on his way to take entrance exams for Starfleet Academy. Picard asks: “Did you read that book I gave you?” Wesley: “Some of it.” Picard: “That’s reassuring.” Wesley: “I just don’t have much time.” Picard: “There’s no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.” Wesley: “But William James won’t be on my Star Fleet exams.” Picard: “The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics of piloting a starship. . . . It takes more. Open your mind to the past—art, history, philosophy—and all this may mean something.” William James is an excellent reading recommendation for any comparativist to have made. James’s Pragmatism argues that when we read, measure, make sense of new things, alien worlds, our interpretations always involve in a very deep way the making of comparisons: comparisons of what we know with what we don’t know. As James puts it, “New truth is always a go-between, a smootherover of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.” Establishing any new truth depends

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on a required traffic between old opinion and new experiences: facts, desires, contradictions, reflections, and so forth. Any new idea adopted as the true one “preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.” An entirely new explanation, one “violating all our preconceptions,” not comparable to anything we already know, would, according to James, “never pass for a true account of a novelty.” All this is to say that the measure of all things new and old is indeed the human, and human measuring is from first to last comparative: it was in Plato’s time, it is today, and it will be when our human ancestors boldly go where no one has gone before. Rorty, then, was clearly following James in his own hermeneutic ethnocentrism, which might be rephrased as a claim that at any point in the space-time continuum, our own web of vocabularies, beliefs, and desires—the communal and individual subject/agents that we are—comprise the delimiting and enabling conditions of our comparative activities. We can never stand completely outside all cultural positions objectively comparing our ethnos with another alien one, but neither are we free to actualize any position whatsoever or convincingly make any comparisons we want through some imagined freedom of absolute relativism. We are “we” because of being positioned within a culture in a particular set of practices that empowers and constrains acts of interpretive and evaluative comparison. Recognition of this positionality is what I’m calling Rorty’s hermeneutic ethnocentrism, which he saw as “an inescapable condition” that is “roughly synonymous with ‘human finitude’.” Again, this recognition does not short-circuit comparative acts both inside and outside our culture, but rather it simply acknowledges that we all are comparativists from within our particular ethnos—a geographically and historically situated network of beliefs and desires, the contour of our particular version of “human finitude.” This network can and does change as various cultural comparisons are made within intra- and intercultural contacts. The specific shape of our hermeneutic ethnocentrism can be transformed; it always has a history and a future. Part of that shape includes sets of beliefs about and practices involving those understood as alien, not one of “us.” As Rorty pointed out, many Western intellectuals now view with regret their communities’ past political imperialism and with suspicion any current and future contacts that might result in cultural domination. This belief in prohibiting the forceful imposition of one culture’s beliefs on another currently forms a significant defining characteristic of today’s liberal

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democratic ethnos in the West. It is part of what Rorty admired about this ethnos; and thus it constitutes an aspect of his political ethnocentrism. As Rorty recognized, there is something quite circular about his version of this ethnocentrism. He criticized cruder forms of politically ethnocentric activity that force our beliefs on other cultures, and he valued this anti-imperialist stance where he found it within our own Western culture, admitting that this critical stance constituted part of his story about why the Western democracies offer the best future for humanity. In other words, Rorty’s political ethnocentrism consists partly of a belief that his culture’s political ethnocentrism compares favorably to that of other cultures, but he realized that this comparative judgment is a function of his culture’s hermeneutic ethnocentrism, its set of comparative practices that include the valuing of persuasion over force, verbal contest over physical conflict, rhetoric over war. Some might see this circularity as invidious, but Rorty saw it as necessary and unavoidable and thus simply to be accepted. I happen to think that Rorty is theoretically correct—such ethnocentricity is, in some form, unavoidable—but that his attitude toward such inevitability is potentially dangerous, as I noted above. Progressive reform requires a more critical attitude toward the political progress Rorty’s story of the West assumes. But there is another point to make here: Rorty’s story assumes a difference between his culture and others that is difficult to support. Is the liberal West unique in valuing persuasion over force? Not according to many accounts of alien cultures. The Cashinahua, for instance, value influencing others primarily through example and indirect persuasion within their communities as much as Rorty’s Western liberals and are even more adverse to aggressive behavior in general whether verbal or physical. Still, Rorty was right to argue that part of our own culture’s history involves development of a greater and greater sensitivity to forms of political and cultural imperialism (at least in certain segments of our community), even if that sensitivity—as a version of valuing persuasion over force—is not unique to the liberal West. Our ethnocentrism now includes a strong condemnation of certain cruder brands of political ethnocentrism. In the twenty-fourth century of the Star Trek universe, this ethnocentric wariness has evolved into the Prime Directive, Star Fleet General Order 1 prohibiting interference in the normal evolution of alien cultures less technologically developed than the United Federation of Planets. Of course, what counts as “normal” or “less developed” is itself an interpretation based on a comparison made by the Federation within

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its own unavoidable hermeneutic ethnocentrism. Thus can be seen another way in which political and hermeneutic ethnocentrisms are inextricably related. The Prime Directive does not outlaw communication with life forms and civilizations considered equally or more developed than the Federation. Indeed, first contact to establish such communication is a major aim of Federation star ships exploring the galaxy. In what follows, I want to consider briefly an episode of first contact to make some final points about cross-cultural comparison and communication. Stardate 45047.2: Captain Picard explains that “the Enterprise is on route to the uninhabited El-Adrel System. Its location is near the territory occupied by an enigmatic race known as the Children of Tarma.” The Tarmarians, it seems, have been sending a subspace signal toward the Federation, and Star Fleet has determined that this is an attempt at communication. The Enterprise has been sent to make first contact. Well, not exactly first contact. According to Commander Data, the resident android historian and third in command of the Enterprise, “Federation vessels have encountered Tarmarian ships seven times over the last one hundred years. . . . However, formal relations were not established because communication was not possible.” Why? “The Children of Tarma were called incomprehensible by Captain Sylvestrie of the Shikamaroo. Other accounts were comparable.” But Captain Picard is optimistic. He asks, “Are they truly incomprehensible? In my experience communication is a matter of patience, imagination. I would like to believe that these are qualities we have in sufficient measure.” The Enterprise then makes contact with a Tarmarian ship, and over the telescreen, we see and hear the Tarmarian captain. He says to Picard: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.” The Enterprise crew members respond with blank stares. The Tarmarian begins again: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha.” Data observes: “The Tarmarian seems to be stating the proper names of individuals and locations.” Picard asks bewildered: “Yes, but what does it all mean?” Data: “I’m at a loss, Captain.” Picard speaks back to the Tarmarian captain, offering a “mutual non-aggression pact between our two peoples, possibly leading to a trade agreement and cultural interchange.” Now, the Tarmarians don’t understand. “Shaka, when the walls fell,” sighs the Tarmarian captain. After being involuntarily transported to a nearby planet with the Tarmarian captain, Picard struggles to interpret the actions and sounds of the alien. Finally, after many failed attempts at communication and a few more Tarmarian

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exclamations of “Shaka, when the walls fell,” Picard’s patience pays off as he uses his imagination to produce a rhetorical theory to make sense of the Tarmarian’s actions and sounds. Picard: “That’s how you communicate. By citing examples. By metaphors.” Simultaneously, Data and Councillor Troi have come up with a fuller and more rhetorically exact account after viewing and reinterpreting a video replay of their unsuccessful first contact. Data summarizes: “The Tarmarian ego structure does not seem to allow what we normally think of as selfidentity. Their ability to abstract is highly unusual. They seem to communicate through narrative imagery, a reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts.” Councillor Troi adds: “It’s as if I were to say to you “Juliet on her balcony.” Dr. Crusher: “An image of romance.” Troi: “Exactly. Imagery is everything to the Tarmarians. It embodies their emotional states, their very thought processes. It’s how they communicate and how they think.” The crew’s theory about the Tarmarians’ language coincides with that of Picard’s interpretation on the surface, where he uses that theory to accomplish what the crew cannot. Isolated with the Tarmarian captain on the planet, he is able “to learn the narrative from which the Tarmarians draw their imagery.” Having said his last “Shaka when the walls fell,” the Tarmarian acknowledges Picard’s interpretive breakthrough: “Sokath, his eyes uncovered”—just before he gets mauled by the killing Beast of the planet and eventually dies. Now, what exactly happened in this cross-cultural communication? Though I have probably not given enough details to establish my case, I suggest that Rorty’s ethnocentric account works quite well here. In this view, there is no absolute incomprehensibility between alien cultures, no impassable boundary permanently separating one culture from another’s (at least partial) understanding. No community can be so different from another that cross-cultural communication is in principle forever doomed to fail. With every community that we recognize as a community, our form of life always overlaps significantly, for it is only against such a background of commonality that we can perceive radical difference. As Rorty puts it, adopting Donald Davidson’s notion of radical interpretation, “this overlap in effect reduces the intercultural case to an intracultural one—it means that we learn to handle the weirder bits of native behavior (linguistic and other) in the same way that we learn about the weird behavior of atypical members of our own culture.” This is exactly the way the Enterprise crew figures out the rhetorical acts of the Tarmarians. Indeed, Picard’s call for patience and imagination in intercultural communication is analogous to Davidson’s comment rejecting the utility of formal theories of language in such

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contacts: “we cannot expect . . . that we can formalize the considerations that lead us to adjust our theory to fit the flow of new information. . . . There is no saying [beforehand] what someone must know who knows the language; for intuition, luck, and skill must play as essential a role here as in devising a new theory in any field; and taste and sympathy a larger role.” Patience, imagination, intuition, luck, taste, and skill are all used by the Enterprise crew and especially Picard to make sense of the Tarmarian speech acts. But, interestingly, part of the skill they employ is that of a cultural rhetorician, using a rhetorical vocabulary and theory from within their own culture to make sense of a foreign language and to enable them to translate it (at least partially) into their own idiom. Successful communication takes place by the development of a theory and its refinement in very much the way Davidson would have it, but in this case with an explicitly rhetorical twist. My analysis here does not question that cross-cultural communication can be difficult—quite the contrary. But it does challenge certain notions about the incommensurability of cultures and the claim that cross-cultural communication can ever be impossible in principle. Differends are indeed possible, even probable, between radically different communities; but the existence of differends in phrases is not the same thing as the incommensurability of cultures necessarily and permanently preventing communicative success. However, I must admit that Lyotard’s differend analysis using the Cashinahua does imply a different account of the contact case I have just described, an account that questions both Picard’s confident understanding of his communicative success and my own Davidsonian explanation of that success. What if the Tarmarians were actually more like the Cashinahua than the Enterprise crew? What if Starfleet was wrong in interpreting the Tarmarians as attempting to communicate in the way that the Enterprise was always trying to do (in order to establish diplomatic relations, make economic and cultural treaties, etc.)? Lyotard suggests that the purpose of the Cashinahua’s storytelling is just for the sake of telling a story. Any Cashinahua “having heard a story is bound to retell it, because, to refuse to retell it would mean that he does not want to share, which is something that has a very derogatory name in Cashinahua and is a great abomination to them. In other words, someone speaks to me; he places me under an obligation. . . . The obligation to retell.” Perhaps the Tarmarians were not trying to communicate to achieve some later goal but were communicating, telling their stories, simply to fulfill their obligations to share, to tell their stories.

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Furthermore, and perhaps Rorty would have agreed with Lyotard on this point, the very “we” of the ethnocentric act (of trying to communicate to make a treaty, of telling a story for its own sake, or of interpreting and evaluating either attempt) is the “we” constituted and supported by the narrative told. The “Cashinahua narrator derives his authority from telling stories in his name. But his name is authorized by his stories, and especially by those which recount the genesis of names.” The “we” told and telling is the same “we” interpreting and evaluating the Other. Indeed, according to Lyotard, “Narrative is authority itself. It authorizes an unbreakable we, outside of which there can only be they” (321). But we also can and do tell stories about the others outside, and the roles given them, and the narrated events exemplify the hermeneutic ethnocentrism involved in first and subsequent contacts between different cultures. Again, the Cashinahua are typical—as they must be if the argument is to hold—when they interpret their first contact with Brazilian traders in terms of their own Inka mythology. The hermeneutic ethnocentrism of first contact narratives also applies to the narratives told about our own ancestors and descendants, including the stories that articulate our political hopes and fears. Here we return one final time to the relationship between hermeneutic and political ethnocentrisms in Rorty’s thought. A liberal narrative of the West’s progress (including Rorty’s desire to include more and more people within the “we”) was one of Rorty’s strong beliefs, and the narrative’s positive evaluation (compared to other stories and desires) constitutes Rorty’s political ethnocentrism. But this valued story also functions as a strand in the web of beliefs, practices, and desires in and through which Rorty comparatively judged those who were not yet part of his everexpanding “we”; that is, Rorty’s own political ethnocentrism—and that of his community—is part and parcel of his hermeneutic ethnocentrism. This fusion of the two occurs in theory and practice. Theoretically speaking, ethnocentrism is unavoidable in cross-cultural comparisons. Practically, the particular shape any comparison takes in a specific case depends on the particulars of that case, including whether the cultural practices involved are those of Euro-American liberals, Peruvian Cashinahua, Taoist Chinese, or Tarmarian Galactics.

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6 Enactment History, Jesuit Practices, and Rhetorical Hermeneutics

History exists only from out of a present. —Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life [P]ast events cannot be separated from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems. —John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Hermeneutics is always about otherness. Hermeneutics theorizes how otherness is “overcome” through interpretation, the making of sense, the establishment of meaning. A specifically rhetorical hermeneutics claims that interpretation takes place through tropes, arguments, and narratives that persuade others to accept a way of sense-making about the past, present, or future. If text is defined as any object of interpretation, then rhetorical hermeneutics theorizes the interpretation of various texts, including past events, present utterances, or future actions. Within such a perspective, interpreting the otherness of past practices is analogous to interpreting otherness in present communication, both understood in relation to some future action. In other words, we establish meaning for the otherness of the past in ways similar to understanding others in the present, by relating all to our own future enactments. In this essay, I elaborate on the historiographical claims of the first paragraph in three stages. The first section uses a past disagreement over interpreting a text about a fictional future to defend a theoretical account of interpreting otherness in the actual present. The second section takes this account as a theoretical frame for doing histories of rhetoric and then presents a sample rhetorical history. And the third section comments on this rhetorical history by making some additional historiographical remarks from the perspective of rhetorical hermeneutics.

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Appropriating Otherness in the Present “Shaka when the walls fell.” This Tamarian speech act occurs repeatedly throughout the “Darmok” episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. In some of its iterations, the foreign utterance is an assertion that means something like “we have failed to communicate.” The interlocutors are Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Star Ship Enterprise from United Federation of Planets and Captain Dathon from the Tamarian homeworld outside the Federation in Stardate year 45047.2 (2368 c.e.). The plot of the episode turns on the captains’ repeated attempts to communicate, to make first contact, across the linguistic and broader cultural barriers that separate the two peoples they represent. The Tamarians artificially stage an encounter between the two captains by teleporting them down from their ships to an isolated planet inhabited by a strange beast that threatens both. Through Dathon’s patient tutoring, Picard comes to realize that his fellow captain is not an enemy but actually a potential friend, whose incomprehensible language consists of metaphors taken from Tamarian historical mythology. Once he figures this out, Picard encourages Dathon to tell the relevant story that forms the background for the speech acts the Tamarian is currently performing. Picard is finally able to interpret their current battle against a common enemy as analogically related to the Tamarian story of “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” Dathon and Picard then perform similar narrative practices, exchanging stories from their respective cultures. In this way, Picard and Dathon seem to have overcome the otherness of the other and successfully communicated. “Shaka when the walls fell” is replaced by “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!” This television episode about a fictional future thematizes the fact that ultimately there are no incommensurable cultures: communication is eventually possible, whatever the obstacles, when two interlocutors recognize themselves as interlocutors and don’t give up trying to understand each other. But another lesson of the episode is that otherness is always ethnocentrically interpreted in an act of hermeneutic appropriation from within the interpreter’s home culture. In Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations, Diane Davis argues against some of these points, or, more exactly, she initiates a dialogue trying to persuade me and others that my rhetorical account is significantly incomplete. She suggests that I partially misread the “Darmok” episode and mistakenly advocate only a rhetorical hermeneutics to the exclusion of a nonhermeneutical rhetoric. Calling on Levinas and Lyotard, Davis claims that rhe-

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torical hermeneutics is a “rhetoric of the said,” and only a “rhetoric of the saying” can expose a nonappropriative relation to otherness. Davis’s critique pushes me to articulate a rhetorical hermeneutics of otherness. Such a theory relates not only to understanding the other within and across cultures—communication in the present—but also to understanding the otherness and sameness of earlier cultures—doing histories of the past, including histories of rhetoric. Thus, I hope to show how interpreting past practices can be theorized by starting with this present disagreement over interpreting a fictional future focused on the past. In their volume Counterpublics and the State, Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer note that “counterpublics derive their ‘counter’ status in significant respects from varying degrees of exclusion from prominent channels of political discourse and a corresponding lack of political power. The power frequently denied counterpublics consists not only in the capacity to induce or compel actions from others, but power in the Arendtian (1958) sense of that which arises when citizens act jointly.” Like others before them, Asen and Brouwer reference John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927) in defining the “public.” Dewey argues that publics form because individuals recognize that their common interests are affected by consequences of human action. Dewey notes that when persons A and B have a conversation, such a transaction “acquires a public capacity” when its consequences “extend beyond the two directly concerned” and “affect the welfare of others.” In a sense, the Star Trek captains Picard and Dathon are trying to initiate the formation of a public when they try to communicate and establish a relationship of cooperation. Such communication between alien cultures is not qualitatively different from communication between dominant publics and their counterpublics within the same culture. In both cases, members of different communities interpret the rhetorical actions of those outside their group from within their own (sub)cultures, within their own native networks of beliefs, practices, and desires, which enable and constrain rhetorical agency, identification and disidentification, as well as successful and unsuccessful communication. Otherness is only recognized as such against a background of commonality. We always make inside sense of the outside. In her critique of my interpretive theory, Davis wants to supplement this rhetorical hermeneutic model of first contact with a rhetoric of saying that focuses on a “nonhermeneutical dimension of rhetoric not reducible to meaning making, to offering up signs and symbols for comprehension.” This dimension “counts on a certain reception, but not on the appropriation of meaning. Preceding

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and exceeding hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meanings but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other (autrui); it deals not in the said (le dit) but in the saying (le dire).” Davis does not dispute that appropriative interpretation must take place; she just argues that it is dependent upon another, nonappropriative relation to otherness. Davis’s proposed complement to rhetorical hermeneutics strikes me as incisive and helpful. However, significant questions remain: Before a relation of any kind can be established (whether appropriative or nonappropriative), how do we recognize the other as other without first interpreting “it” as such? Otherness is always, at a minimum, the result of an interpretation that posits something as different, strange, alien in relation to our usual past experiences, present assumptions, or future expectations. Furthermore, when Davis writes, “The saying names the site of my encounter with and exposure to the other as other,” I find myself nodding assent; but when she adds, “which by definition leaves my hermeneutic aspirations in the dust,” I can’t help asking: But for how long? I agree that a site of encounter must precede interpreting within a communicative act, but a nonhermeneutic rhetorical relation cannot be maintained if we are to respond effectively. For even if it were possible to sustain, such a prolonged nonappropriative response would ultimately be empty of any positive ethics or politics. What kind of responsible ethics or effectual politics could possibly be developed from the absolute openness of a nonappropriative, nonhermeneutic encounter? Perhaps my difficulties with these questions explain why I even disagree with Davis’s claim that there are hints of nonhermeneutical responses in the “Darmok” episode itself. She points to Picard’s response to Dathon’s gift of fire on the planet as an indication of the “other’s call” making it through Picard’s incessant attempts at interpretive appropriation, his “hyper-hermeneutic disposition.” She writes that Picard’s “discernable stumble is marked by an instant of silence, a suspension in the interrogation, a shift in countenance, and then: a hoarse ‘thank you.’ This barely audible expression of gratitude for the present (the fire) is also the gift of a response, a return call, which both affirms and repeats the sharing that ‘we’ are, prior to any hermeneutic understanding.” But is it really prior? Picard has appropriately and appropriatively interpreted the fire as a gift, not as an attack nor as a subterfuge, and the expression of gratitude is not just a “hoarse ‘thank you,’ ” as Davis claims, but actually includes a repeated assertion of gratitude, “thank you,” significantly acknowledging an interpretation of the other as an other but only within a context of commonly shared purposes.

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Further on, Davis evaluates the outcome of this first contact and notes that at the conclusion of the episode, the two ships simply go their separate ways: “This encounter, then, has led neither to economic gain nor to practical understanding. And yet, there is peace. There is peace without understanding, or better: there is peace despite profound non-understanding.” Davis halfconvinces me here. Her take on this incident reminds me of a line from another sci-fi series: the Matrix trilogy. In Matrix Reloaded, we hear the assertion: “Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation.” Interestingly, this statement is made by a member of the Zion Council, who is played by an African American actor, whose day job is professor of philosophy at Princeton University. Cornel West is, among others things, the leading exponent of prophetic pragmatism, a radically historical outlook that looks forward to transformative political praxis. Anyway, when Davis writes of the “Darmok” encounter, “There is peace without understanding,” I nod and think of the Matrix line that cooperation does not require comprehension. But then I realize that cooperation does not require complete comprehension, but it does require some; and, contra Davis, I think that in achieving peace, there definitely was some “practical understanding” accomplished in the first contact between the two crews in the “Darmok” episode. From my rhetorical-hermeneutic perspective, the episode confirms, rather than contradicts, the claim that we always make inside sense of the outside. Even when we try to remain open to otherness, we are always in the process of interpretive appropriation. And this is as true of making sense of past utterances, actions, and events (doing history) as it is of the present. Furthermore, the inside sense accomplished in the present is always related purposefully to a future action-in the “Darmok” case, a possible future of productive exchange and mutual cooperation. But it might be useful now to put aside temporarily the hermeneutic/nonhermeneutic distinction and the opposition between appropriation and nonappropriation. We might instead turn to a thinker both Davis and I depend upon: Martin Heidegger. But Davis quotes the later Heidegger in her critique of rhetorical hermeneutics, while I cite the early: Heidegger of the 1920–21 lecture course in Freiburg on the phenomenology of religion, especially his reading of St. Paul’s letters in order to explicate the basic meaning of early Christian lived experience. In his interpretation of Paul’s proclamation of the Word, Heidegger uses “factical life experience” to designate both “the experiencing activity” and “that which is experienced through this activity,” thus giving the phrase an active

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and a passive sense. The factical, according to Heidegger, differs from the natural or causal or thing-like; it gains its sense not from the epistemological but the historical. The meaning of this historical life experience is accessible only through enactment or actualization (Vollzug); epistemologically oriented “object-historical” method must give way to “enactment-historical” explication (61–63). Heidegger develops the concept of enactment both critically and metacritically throughout his Pauline interpretation. Critically, he elaborates Paul’s distinction between the called and the perishing as a contrast between those who enact Christian religiosity as temporality and those who miss the enactment. Those who are called grow in faith (2 Thessalonians 1:3), but the “pistis [faith] is not a taking-to-be true, or else the hyperauxanei [growing] would have no meaning; the pistenein is a complex of enactment that is capable of increase” (76). Paul’s Christian facticity must be understood as enactment. Indeed, Heidegger claims, “Paul makes of enactment a theme” (86). Metacritically, Heidegger uses this same concept of enactment to correct past interpretive reductions of Paul’s proclamation to its ideational content, its statements of dogma. “It is noticeable how little Paul alleges [vorgibt] theoretically or dogmatically; even in the letter to the Romans.” Heidegger argues that “the dogma as detached content of doctrine in an objective, epistemological emphasis could never have been guiding for Christian religiosity. On the contrary, the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience” (79). Thus, in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, when Paul simply advises, “Stand firm and master the tradition that you have experienced,” Heidegger comments that “questions of content may not be understood detachedly,” separated from the enactment of Christian religiosity (82). The necessity of such enactment is as true for the historian of Paul’s letters as it is for his contemporary audience. Heidegger emphasizes the point when he remarks that “object-historical understanding is determination according to the aspect of the relation .  .  . so that the observer does not come into question”; whereas, in contrast, enactment-history as “phenomenological understanding is determined by the enactment of the observer” (57). In these ways, both critically and metacritically, Heidegger emphasizes the importance of enactment: Heidegger’s interpretive enactment explicates Paul’s enactment of his proclamation concerning the Thessalonians’ enactment of Christian factical life experience. This notion of enactment can be employed to characterize how a public forms itself and how it relates to others past and present. Picard does not appropriatively interpret or nonappropriatively encounter but rather historically enacts Tamarian otherness. Such enactment then becomes the basis of forming

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a contemporaneous public. In this alternative description, the contrast between appropriation and nonappropriation tends toward irrelevance. One additional point before moving on to discuss more explicitly writing histories of rhetoric: Davis’s rhetoric of the saying can be seen as both consequentially insignificant and significantly consequential at the same time. It is insignificant insofar as no direct consequences follow from the nonhermeneutical conditions of possibility for the hermeneutical. True, we must have contact before we interpret, but no specific rhetoric, ethics, or politics follows from initial contact as such. But in another sense, if I translate this nonhermeneutic rhetorical stance into an attitude of nonappropriative openness to the other, then it is extremely consequential. For it makes a great deal of difference if my attitude toward the other in conversation entails trying to recognize his, her, or its differences rather than similarities to myself, avoiding the simplistic reproduction of sameness, initially not trying to transform the saying into a said. But I will eventually do so, and then I have interpreted—or, more exactly, I have extended my interpretive recognition already begun. Whether I theoretically characterize the hermeneutic process as an enactment or an appropriation, I still claim that both otherness and openness are what we interpret them to be and that no absolute otherness or openness is possible. The familiar and the other, similarity and difference, make up a person’s hermeneutic being-in-the-world, in which he or she can never be free from enabling presuppositions, assumptions, prejudices, desires, interests, and so on. Thus, I am back to a rhetorical hermeneutics, claiming that we can only make inside sense of the outside, which is what I have been doing again and again throughout this section.

Doing Histories of the Past Now let’s turn directly to how rhetorical hermeneutics deals with doing histories. Writing about otherness in the past involves some of the same theoretical considerations as interpreting otherness in the present. In this section, my extended historical example is the otherness characterizing past rhetorical practices and theories, specifically those of a religious order founded in the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus. What does it mean to do a history of early Jesuit rhetoric? I will answer this question by doing a rhetorical history and then return in my conclusion to the theoretical issues about such doing.

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My history begins with a Greek word in a Latin text by the French Jesuit Nicolas Caussin—the seventeenth-century confessor to King Louis XIII and opponent of Cardinal Richelieu. In his 1619 Of Sacred and Profane Eloquence, Caussin retells the story of Paul’s trial before Antonius Felix, the Roman procurator of Judea, as recorded in Chapter 24 of Acts of the Apostles. After three missionary journeys, Paul had been arrested in Jerusalem and sent before Felix in Caesarea, where he was attacked by the prosecuting advocate, the rhetorician Tertullus. Paul skillfully defends himself, and Caussin describes the result: “In this incident appears how weak and meager is human eloquence, compared with the divine; here the θεορήτωρ [theorhetor] Paul demolished the machinations of that rhetorician with a crushing blow of the spirit.” For Caussin, a theorhetor is someone who speaks to others for or about God, the ultimate Other. Caussin’s celebration of Paul’s theorhetoric follows the Jesuit tradition of emphasizing the power of eloquence in educational theory and cultural practice. During the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Caussin’s compatriots in the Society of Jesus developed and advocated their own brand of theorhetoric. Through interpreting and following the rhetorical examples of Jesus Christ, his disciples, and especially the missionary Paul, Jesuits updated these models in response to the exigencies of the Renaissance and Reformation. Jesuit theorhetoric concerned itself with how the relations among oral, scribal, and print media could be managed in rhetorical practice and theory, especially when turned toward theological topics and when addressed to foreign audiences. A historical practice attending to rhetoric’s relation to interpretation can capture something of this complex rhetorical ecology. We can define rhetoric here as the use of language in a context to have effects—both linguistic effects on an audience through argumentative persuasion and language’s effects on itself through figuration. Assuming that we establish the meaning of anything (past, present, or future) through rhetoric’s suasive and tropological effects, a rhetorical hermeneutics does histories of rhetoric by concentrating on past performances of interpretation and rhetoric within cultural politics. More specifically, the term rhetorical hermeneutics can refer to both a historical way of talking (a method) and a historical text talked about (a subject matter). For example, as a method, it uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. The previous section illustrated how rhetoric could be used to practice hermeneutic theory by giving a brief account of a recent interpretive disagreement. The present section uses (theo)rhetoric to practice a bit of media theory by doing some Reformation and Counter-Reformation history. But rhetorical hermeneutics can

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also refer to the subject matter being discussed. For instance, Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana presents its own rhetorical hermeneutics. The first three books provide a theory of Biblical interpretation that forms the basis for the concluding book on Christian preaching. I have, of course, not chosen Augustine’s text at random. It was the most important Christian rhetoric throughout the Western Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, doing significant cultural work in serving as a model for Christianizing classical rhetoric and, with other Augustinian texts, reconfiguring the relations among emotions, reason, and religious faith. A rhetorical-hermeneutic approach to the theorhetoric of Augustine, Luther, and the Jesuits tracks the rhetorical paths of theological thought through these authors’ texts and their receptions. That is, rhetorical hermeneutics focuses on the use of theorhetoric (particular tropes, arguments, and narratives) and the theorizing of that use; or, again, it interprets the rhetoric of theological thinking and theological thinking about rhetoric. In what follows, I bring this rhetoricalhermeneutic perspective to a history of Jesuit rhetoric, describing how Christian theology (embodied in theorhetoric) served as one condition of possibility for the print revolution in the early modern period of Europe. This theorhetoric of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation functioned as a kind of media theory to promote and justify the use of a new communication technology, and this technological innovation then affected the development of a distinctive Jesuit rhetoric. My history moves from Luther’s theorhetoric around 1520 to that of the Society of Jesus founded in 1540. The media revolution of the early modern period has been variously characterized by cultural and intellectual historians. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein argues that the transformation was not from an oral to a written culture but rather from one kind of written literate culture (scribal) to another (print). Manfred Schneider suggests a more conflicted revolution pitting a Protestant hot print media of concentrated individual Bible reading against a more diffuse Catholic cold multimedia of Church ritual and priestly interpretive mediation of scripture through preaching. Both accounts help us understand the rhetorical and hermeneutic effects of printing when compared to earlier oral and scribal media technologies. With the adoption and spread of the printing press, typographical fixity encouraged textual preservation and standardization. These new possibilities combined with enthusiasm for classical philology to promote a more intense concern with textual purification and authorship among a learned elite. Also, the printing press enabled wider

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textual dissemination over space and time. On the one hand, this wider dissemination of standardized texts reinforced uniformity or secured publicity for the same textually transmitted controversial opinions and news events. On the other hand, more rapid production and circulation made more books and pamphlets available to individual readers; these printed texts could be compared, synthesized, and diversified into new ways of thinking or used to reinforce and revivify old ways of thinking—rhetorical effects that were far more divisive than unifying. The media effect most often noted, of course, is the popular availability of vernacular translations of the Bible. As many historians have argued, a Protestant theology “stressed Bible-reading as necessary for salvation” and this doctrine generated “unusual pressures toward literacy”; while a Catholic theology of mediation and authority resulted in a “refusal after [the Council of ] Trent to authorize alternatives to the Latin Vulgate” and “worked in the opposite direction” against widespread literacy, defending the Church as authoritative mediator between God and his lay children. Paulus Bachmann, a German Cistercian abbot, stated the Catholic argument in 1527: “The written word of God, as the Lutherans call the Gospel, cannot always be productively presented to the simple folk according to its bare words or literal meaning but rather requires interpretation and the addition of commentary.” Such a position not only expressed Catholic Church doctrine, but also supported priestly privilege and ecclesiastical authority. A very different political theology of print appeared in the writings of Martin Luther, who famously referred to the relatively new medium as “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.” Lutheran theorhetoric enthusiastically embraced the disseminating and publicity powers of print. But for Luther, this dissemination and publicity served, most importantly, not the circulation of his theological proclamations and controversial pamphlets, but the promotion of individuals reading the vernacular Bible for themselves. In September 1522 Luther published arguably his most influential piece of theorhetoric, his German translation of the New Testament. Sola scriptura, interpreted as “with scripture alone,” was the theological doctrine at the center of Lutheran thought. Through reading the vernacular Bible, individual believers could have direct, unmediated access to God’s Word. Luther figured this direct access in an explicitly rhetorical way in his scriptural theology. For example, in his commentary on Psalm 121, he describes the Holy Spirit as being rhetorized (rhetoricatur) within the hearer of the Word.

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The theology of Lutheran Reformers supported the expansion of print culture as much as printing supported the success of Reformation theology, promoting the view that the laity and not the clergy alone should have direct access to scripture and debates about interpretive authority. When the Catholics responded to Luther with their own printed pamphlets in the vernacular, they were obviously caught in a paradox: They argued that the debate over reform should not take place in public before the easily misguided laity, yet they made their own cases before that same audience through vernacular pamphlets. But the media paradoxes were not just on the side of the Catholics. Though Luther claimed, “Scripture interprets itself,” he provided a plethora of hermeneutic guides instructing readers on how to read scriptural passages as he read them. Despite vigorously criticizing the established church and its clergy for improperly insisting on a mediated scripture, Luther in his turn mediated God’s message through his Biblical glosses, prefaces, and independent commentaries. I’d now like to turn more directly to the theorhetoric of the Catholic CounterReformation, in particular the tradition of Jesuit rhetoric. Founded by Ignatius Loyola and his companions in 1540, by 1615 the Society of Jesus had established 372 colleges throughout Europe and the rest of the world, and had sent missionaries to India, China, Japan, and the Americas. What constitutes a specific tradition of Jesuit theorhetoric? We find a clue by turning to the Jesuit Formula used to establish the Society through the papal bull of Paul III in 1540. The Jesuit Formula names the multiple practices that the new order recognized as ministries for achieving its stated goals of defending and propagating faith and of fostering the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine. These practices include performing and guiding the Spiritual Exercises; spreading popular education; administering confession and other sacraments; doing works of charity; and preaching, lecturing, and performing other ministries of the Word. A certain Jesuit rhetoric of thinking permeated all of these practices and was accompanied by an explicit Jesuit thinking about rhetoric. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises promotes a specific rhetorical hermeneutics of potent affects and vivid imagining throughout its program of daily contemplative exercises. The faculties directed for use include imagination, memory, intellect, and will, and the sequence of practices have a particular rhetorical arrangement, what Ignatius calls an “order of procedure.” This order includes first the “Preparatory Prayer,” a framing supplication and statement of the general goal of all the exercises, followed by up to three “Preludes, including one called a “composition of place,” a preparatory imagining that dramatically envisions the scene of the

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topic chosen for the exercise, and a second, more specific supplication, asking God for a desired gift (for example, a specific attitude or feeling) to result from the exercise. The preludes are followed by several “Points,” operational practices of meditation or contemplation using memory to recall, intellect to understand, and will to move toward the desired goal of the exercise. Finally, there is the “Colloquy,” an imaginary conversation on the exercise topic, reinforcing the result of the operational practices. This brief description illustrates the Ignatian emphases on vivid imagination and embodied feeling, on concrete images and spiritualized emotions, which make up the core of the Spiritual Exercises as theorhetoric. The centrality of rhetoric more generally within the Jesuit paideia can be seen in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, an outline of the different levels of Jesuit education written collectively over three decades. The goal of the class in rhetoric is eloquentia perfecta: to instruct the students to perfect eloquence. The purpose of the pedagogy should be both practical utility and cultural enrichment, and teaching should be adjusted to the capacities of the students. For a rhetorical textbook, the Ratio recommends that of the Jesuit Cyprian Soarez— his Three Books on the Art of Rhetoric Taken Especially from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. For Soarez and others in the Jesuit rhetorical tradition, ideal rhetoric combines eloquence, wisdom, and virtue. Jesuit eloquentia perfecta thus becomes a particular kind of Christian rhetoric, a specific development of the Ciceronian and Quintilian ideal orator: the good person writing and speaking well for the public good. This Jesuit rhetoric holds that the teaching of eloquence should always be combined with critical thinking, moral discernment, and social responsibility. Soarez’s textbook on profane rhetoric and later Jesuit sacred and general rhetorics, such as Caussin’s in 1619, included a distinctive emphasis on the spiritualized emotions and concrete imagery promoted in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. Most Renaissance sacred rhetorics shared a similar focus on passionate rhetoric and religious persuasion. But for the Jesuits, such an emphasis played an especially significant role in a rhetorical ecology of the ministries they practiced as outlined in their founding formula: their rhetorical ministries of the Word were embedded in other Jesuit practices of administering the sacraments—especially confession, educating students in colleges, and guiding individuals in the Spiritual Exercises. In the theorhetorics of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, we see versions of a rhetorical hermeneutics that in different ways attempt to

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persuade believers and mediate scriptural interpretation through uses of available media. For the Jesuits, this meant developing and promoting a rhetoric of talking for and about God by paying close attention to writing and reading, as well as speaking and listening. Such a theorhetoric embodied both oral and written media, the spoken and printed word in both private and public spaces. Indeed, in Schneider’s McLuhnesque terms, the Jesuits maximized the potential of rhetoric as a cool medium. “Rhetoric is the epitome of cool medial communication. Through the combination of different linguistic, bodily, vocal techniques, it traps the listener and binds him to a cultural code.” If, as Schneider suggests, “rhetoric designates the ability to produce effective speeches, whereas theology names the amplification effect of true speech,” then Jesuit theorhetoric purports to be effective mediation and amplification of the Logos, performed through multiple ministries of the Divine Word, including sermons, lectures, conversations, and confessions as well as confession manuals, pedagogical textbooks, and theological treatises. I began this section with the Jesuit Caussin calling Paul a theorhetor in his treatise on sacred and profane rhetoric. Earlier he describes Paul as one of the practitioners of a “divine eloquence,” which “has made men into subjects, inflaming their deepest feelings by means of a kind of divine fire,” an eloquence that “has tamed kings, and . . . enticed cities, provinces, and finally the entire world to accept the yoke of Christ.” Caussin compares this divine eloquence to another kind he calls “heroic,” which is “a conflation of the human and the divine,” combining learned art and natural ability. It is the Jesuit version of this eloquence that Marc Fumaroli describes so eloquently himself in the following passage: “Jesuit rhetoric . . . was at bottom a theorhetoric, a deciphering and a tuning of the dialogue between human nature and God’s love encompassing the inward and the outward, religion and science, personal salvation and the welfare of the political body.” In contrast, Fumaroli continues, “the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations and the lay Enlightenment made a different choice: they connected human welfare, along with science and philosophy, to the secular state and therefore placed it in the political sphere; they reserved the dialogue with God’s Word for the private sphere.” We don’t have to agree completely with Fumaroli’s stark contrasts here, but they do foreground the role of theorhetoric’s political theology both for interpreting the media culture of the early modern period and for understanding that of our own. Moreover, Fumaroli’s summary comment provides a fitting end to my brief history of early Jesuit rhetoric.

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Rhetorical Hermeneutic Historiography In this conclusion I will resume the theoretical questioning of the first section by discussing the rhetorical history presented in the second. How do the differing theoretical accounts of interpretation as appropriation and enactment relate to my history of Jesuit rhetoric? Viewed as appropriation, my historical interpretation places early Jesuit rhetoric into a framework of rhetorical-hermeneutic practices and metapractices. Jesuit praxis included spiritual exercises as hermeneutic technologies of the self and pedagogical theories as accommodationist accounts of otherness. Viewed as enactment, this rhetorical history actualizes an exegesis of Jesuit life as embodied in rhetorical-hermeneutic experiences, both inner (spiritual exercises and confessional practices) and outer (preaching, teaching, and missionary work). To develop this rhetorical historiography further, we can adapt the methodological distinction from early Heidegger alluded to in first section and tentatively contrast an “object-historical” interpretation with an “enactment-historical” explication. Object-historical method interprets the past in terms of some framework of “objects” (ideas, concepts, theories, practices); the “object-historical attitude” fits the chosen object of study (Paul, Augustine, Jesuits) into “a historical complex” of ordered objects. This object-historical interpretation appropriates the otherness of the past into a present day, object-filled framework for sensemaking. In contrast, the enactment-historical method attempts to actualize the other’s past experience in the dimensions of its own sense-making; that is, the enactment-historical explicates the lived experience (Paul’s proclamation, Augustine’s confession, Jesuits’ rhetoric) as meaningfully actualized in its historical situation. (From a rhetorical-hermeneutic perspective, we might be tempted to say that the object-historical method results in an appropriative interpretation of the past, while the enactment-historical method performs an explication of a past interpretation—a present appropriation of a past appropriation.) In prefacing his phenomenological explication of Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, Heidegger illustrates an objective-historical interpretation by placing the letter writing in the context of Paul’s first missionary trip right after his arrival in Corinth, having earlier been forced to leave Thessalonica by Jewish opposition and after having been minimally successful in his teaching at Athens. But enactment-historical explication of the same letter, according to Heidegger, “write[s] the letter along with Paul,” asking such questions as: “How does Paul, in the situation of a letter-writer, stand to the Thessalonians? How are they experi-

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enced by him? How is his communal world given to him in the situation of writing the letter?” Whatever one thinks of this methodological distinction between objecthistorical and enactment-historical, it is helpful in drawing out two different ways of viewing and extending my history of Jesuit rhetoric in the previous section. By suggesting that early Jesuit rhetoric consists of certain interrelated rhetorical practices and theories, this history describes a particular historical configuration that could serve the purposes of doing either object-historical or enactment-historical interpretations. The object-historical aspects are most apparent in the placement of rhetorical practices in an objectified historical context of rhetorical and nonrhetorical practices of the Renaissance and CounterReformation. The enactment-historical possibilities of the history reside in the lived rhetorical experience of the Jesuits in performing those practices. The early Jesuits lived their rhetorical experiences partly through performing the Spiritual Exercises, during which act they engaged in particular rhetorical practices, including specifically spiritual exercises that, in turn, shaped and embodied their lived experiences. In the preceding paragraphs, we moved from hermeneutic models to interpretive methods. I transformed two different theoretical accounts of what historical interpretation is (appropriation versus enactment) into two practical strategies for how to do rhetorical histories (object-historical vs. enactmenthistorical). Rhetorical hermeneutics embodies this contrast between historiography as explanatory hermeneutic theory (a description of doing history) and historiography as practical interpretive guide (a prescription for doing histories). Thus, rhetorical hermeneutics as historiography becomes still another way of using rhetoric to practice theory by doing history.

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7 Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric

Comparative rhetoric can be defined as an angelic instrument working across cultures. This definition builds on Bruno Latour’s distinction between information networks and translation processions. We might call this a rhetorical distinction between institutionalized procedures for transferring messages versus unpredictable processes of transforming hearers. The former—transferring messages—Latour calls instruments, and the latter—transforming hearers—he calls angels. Bridging this opposition, comparative rhetoric not only translates information across cultures, but also produces effects both on targeted audiences and in the rhetors themselves. As a practice, comparative rhetoric mediates differences and explores similarities; as a theory or metapractice, it accounts for how such mediation and exploration take place. Comparative rhetoric as an angelic instrument “examines communicative practices across time and space by attending to historicity, specificity, selfreflexivity, processual predisposition, and imagination.” I’d like to focus on one historical example of this comparative rhetoric, an example derived from the ministries of the Word as theorized and practiced by the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. This Roman Catholic order has a long tradition of rhetoric, eloquentia perfecta, developed from its spiritual exercises, preached from its pulpits, taught in its schools, and performed in far-flung missionary efforts over four centuries. The Jesuits’ uniform plan for education, the 1599 Ratio Studiorum, prescribes that training toward perfect eloquence include written and oral rhetoric (poetry and oratory), combined with an erudition based not only on church doctrine, but also on the study of the “history and customs of nations” (historia et moribus gentium). That is, a certain cross-cultural attunement forms an explicit part of Jesuit rhetorical education. If we define theorhetoric as talking to, for, and about God, I am suggesting that Jesuit rhetoric from the beginning was a comparative theorhetoric, an angelic instrument, partly designed to work across cultures, most specifically in its missionary teaching and preaching.

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The Jesuits developed a particular communicative strategy, part of what they called their “way of proceeding,” to accomplish various ministries of the Word. John O’Malley calls this strategy “rhetorical accomodationism”: studying the audience and adjusting one’s rhetoric to the audience’s abilities and interests. Jesuits performed this rhetorical accommodationism not only in their churches with congregations, but also in private spaces directing retreatants in spiritual exercises, in confessionals with persons confessing, in classrooms with individual students cooperating and competing with other students, and, most importantly here, in their cross-cultural missionary work with native peoples. In this last rhetorical context, the Jesuits developed their own response to Paul’s missionary advice in his First Letter to the Corinthians: proclaim the gospel truly and boldly but be all things to all people to convert at least some. But unlike Paul, Jesuits did not reject classical rhetoric—Greek eloquent wisdom—in their rhetorical theory. Rather, Jesuits trained their own by immersing them in a rhetorica generalis derived from Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, often emphasizing the classical definition of rhetoric as vir bonus dicendi peritus—the good person speaking well. In so doing, Jesuits built into their teaching of rhetoric a specific ethics and politics, a kind of virtue ethics, and a comparative theorhetoric of cross-cultural accommodationism. Especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits translated European Christianity for native peoples in foreign missions and translated foreign cultural beliefs and practices back to Europe. In intention and effect, Jesuit comparative rhetors acted as brokers between European Christianity and the missionary populations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Unfortunately for the Jesuits, their accommodationist mode of missionary work came under virulent attack from within and outside the Roman Catholic Church. A number of their fellow Catholics condemned Jesuit accommodationism as corrupting the essence of Christianity in an attempt to gain converts in non-European lands. This criticism was a version of the popular anti-Jesuitism that attacked Jesuit casuistry as justifying any means to achieve a desired end. Later critics of the Jesuit missionaries condemned them for ethnocentrically distorting foreign cultures, and lumped their projects together with other missionary efforts as serving the interests of European cultural and political imperialism. To best understand Jesuit comparative theorhetoric—both its effectiveness and its vulnerabilities—one must attend to the small details of Jesuit practical accommodationism. Their adaptive rhetorical practices included not only their preaching, but also their practices of dress, eating, ceremonial rituals, and language

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learning, in addition to translating native discourses of literature, philosophy, and religion. Jesuit practices of language-using and meaning-making were embedded in other native practices, changing them and being changed by them. This was a rhetorical brokering that altered the Jesuit missionaries as it translated Christianity to affect their audiences in both Europe and non-European lands. That is, again, Jesuit comparative theorhetoric was an angelic instrument of crosscultural translation that transferred a message and transformed its producers and receivers. We can see this complex rhetorical ecology at work in the most widely discussed example of Jesuit accommodationism, their missionary work in the contact zones of China. Here Matteo Ricci and his seventeenth-century companions preached the Good News by adapting their rhetoric to the beliefs and practices of their Chinese hosts. In so doing, they attempted to preserve the essentials of their Christian message as they worked to convert their audiences and simultaneously found themselves transformed in the process. Changes occurred in the attitudes and actions of these Jesuit rhetorical brokers as they interacted in various ways with the Chinese people, from learning Chinese languages to adopting the attire of mandarin elites, from synthesizing Christianity and Confucianism to writing in the genres of the ancient Chinese classics, from participating in intellectual disputations to admiring late Ming literary and political culture. Jesuit missionaries functioned as angelic instruments from around 1600 when Ricci was active to 1732 when Pope Benedict XIV issued the apostolic bull Ex quo singulari ending not only the Jesuit accommodationist practices, but also any further discussion of them in the Roman Catholic Church. As one Jesuit historian summarizes: “At issue was the problem of how Western man was to translate into the Chinese language the concepts of the divinity and other spiritual realities and how he was to judge, on a moral basis, the ceremonies performed by the Chinese in honor of Confucius and their ancestors. The controversy involved the whole field of cross-cultural understanding and missionary accommodation.” Here the rhetorical-hermeneutic strategy of the Jesuits included third-order rhetorical practices directed to Chinese and European elites, which adopted and translated first-order native practices of dress, ritual, and language, so that Jesuit second-order rhetorical practices of preaching and teaching were more persuasive to their Chinese audiences yet still acceptable to European superiors in the Roman Catholic Church. In carrying out this strategy, Jesuits sometimes used the tactic of “redirected intentions”: for example,

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translating the ritual intention of ancestor veneration into the civic rather than religious realm, making the intention socio-political rather than supernatural and thus acceptable to Roman Catholic authorities in Europe. If we examine the historical detail of this Jesuit comparative theorhetoric as practice and theory, we can see it as a form of strong hermeneutic ethnocentrism combined with a weak ethnocentric politics. This is a general description, not a specific criticism. It is my rhetorical pragmatist claim that a certain amount of ethnocentrism cannot be avoided. Jesuits necessarily appropriate the other while attempting to respect otherness, whether the other welcomes them or not. Interpreting another culture is always done within one’s own culture, as is acting responsibly to respect the otherness of the other. This situated state of rhetorical being-in-the-world does not mean that specific Jesuit historical actions (e.g., supporting the Inquisition or holding slaves) cannot be criticized. Quite the contrary. It is just that such criticism always takes place within its own ethnocentric world of values and meanings, which can be contingently changed but never absolutely transcended. Like all human beings, Jesuit missionaries rhetorically and hermeneutically work from within their own context of cultural desires, beliefs, and practices. This Jesuit being-in-the-world as Christian Europeans was reflected upon and reinforced through their collective, individualized technologies of the self— the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Those exercises helped transport Jesuits from interior meditations to external activities, from looking inward to turning outward as “contemplatives in action.” Propelled by motives of self-reform and evangelization, Jesuits traveled across a vast missionary network employing rhetoric as a tool for changing others and themselves. The practical details of this transformational work embody how Jesuit comparative theorhetoric functioned as an angelic instrument on a global scale.

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8 Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, Allegory

Allegory is narrative with a shadow story of corresponding characters, events, or ideas. Allegorical interpretation establishes the meaning of this figurative relation by tracing its correspondences of actions and concepts. Such working definitions will need revision as we consider the critical traditions of hermeneutics and deconstruction. In the second half of the twentieth century, these two ways of thinking offered unique perspectives on allegory as both a mode of writing and a strategy for reading. For the purposes of this essay, we can view hermeneutics generally as theories of interpretation, the establishment of textual meaning, especially those theories associated with the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. More provisionally, we can treat deconstruction as a radical form of poststructuralism and a certain way of interpreting against the grain of a text, developed within and against phenomenology and structuralism, and often identified with the critical readings of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Hermeneutics and deconstruction intersect and diverge on their shared topic of allegory in its relation to rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. We begin with two very different figures that set the rhetorical stage for later developments in hermeneutics and poststructuralism. Early in the century, Martin Heidegger’s ontological rereadings of Western theology and philosophy included suggestive comments on allegory in his 1930–31 lecture course, “The Essence of Truth.” Preparing to interpret Plato’s cave allegory with all its shadows and light, Heidegger notes that allegory is presented through a “sensory image” that “is never intended to stand for itself alone, but indicates that something is to be understood, providing a clue as to what this is.” But “what is to be understood is not a sense, but rather an occurrence.” That occurrence is always a seeing, an understanding something “in the sense of ” something else. “The presentation of an allegory, of a sensory image, is therefore nothing else than a clue for seeing (a provision of a clue through something which is presented sensuously). Such a clue leads us to what simple description, be it ever so accurate

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and rigorous, can never grasp.” We might take these admittedly schematic remarks as indicative of certain emphases to be found in the allegory theories of later hermeneutics and poststructuralism, both movements significantly indebted to Heidegger. For example, we will find in these traditions a focus on interpretation, not only as a process for making sense of allegorical clues, but also as an occurrence to which allegory draws our attention, an occurrence that is either historically determinate through hermeneutic tradition or structurally troubled through self-deconstructing textuality. At mid-century, Northrop Frye’s influential literary theories contributed to a formalist turn toward allegory as a topic in critical thinking. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye compares his project to that of Aristotelian poetics: a “theory of criticism whose principles apply to the whole of literature and account for every valid type of critical procedure.” Frye describes how literature and criticism actually work in formal terms but does not prescribe how they should work. He aims at producing “a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organized” (11). That is, he wishes systematically to describe “the organizing or containing forms” of literary criticism’s “conceptual framework” (16). His widely discussed taxonomy includes theories of modes, symbols, myths, and genres, which undergird complementary critical approaches, respectively, historical, ethical, archetypal, and rhetorical perspectives. Frye’s theory of allegory finds its place under his theory of symbols, though, as we will see, allegorical commentary is, in one sense, the overarching category for all critical approaches, not just a subset of ethical (character-related) criticism. Frye’s modernist theory of allegory attempts to stabilize distinctions at two discursive levels: distinctions between genuine allegories and narratives containing only some allegorical aspects, and between allegorical interpretations that are indisputable (allegory is simply there) and those that are not (allegory is ambiguously present). However, as both hermeneutic and poststructuralist thinkers might point out, these distinctions cannot be so easily stabilized in theory. This very point is illustrated at times in the unfolding of Frye’s own arguments. For example, in a 1965 encyclopedia entry, he writes: “Allegorical interpretation, as a method of criticism, begins with the fact that a[llegory] is a structural element in narrative: it has to be there, and is not added by critical interpretation alone.” Here Frye tries to demarcate clearly the distinction between allegory in the text and allegory supplied by interpretation. Yet in the very next sentence, this distinction becomes blurred: “In fact, all commentary, or the relating of the events of a narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one

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sense allegorical interpretation.” After this admission, Frye tries to recuperate the distinction between true and partial allegories and between legitimate and illegitimate allegorical interpretation by claiming that “[s]trictly defined, allegorical interpretation is the specific form of commentary that deals with fictions which are structurally allegories” and that the “presence” of structural allegory “prescribes the direction in which commentary must go.” In response to such foundationalist claims, a hermeneutical theorist might point out that for a prescription to prescribe effectively, it must first be interpreted as having a determinate content and force. That is, a prescription cannot control subsequent commentary prior to interpretation; rather, a prescription’s effects are the product of contextualized interpretations within an already existent tradition of commentary. Similarly, a deconstructionist might note that prescriptions often go awry and fail in their prescriptive efforts and, further, that “doubling commentary” once performed can never guarantee the proscription of a disruptive or contradictory “critical reading.” Both an argument for the hermeneutic circle and a poststructuralist rejection of permanently stable meaning call into question the reader/text, subject/object split assumed by Frye’s modernist theory of allegorical interpretation. But this is not to say that hermeneutics and deconstruction are opposed to allegorical interpretation as such. Quite the contrary. They are simply suspicious of foundationalist theories attempting to ground interpretive practices, including allegorical interpretive practices (allegoresis). Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, hermeneutics and deconstruction contributed significantly to the rehabilitation of allegory and allegoresis, a revaluation that included distinctively new interpretations of classical, medieval, and romantic theories. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s monumental treatise on philosophical hermeneutics, Wahrheit und Methode (1960; English trans. Truth and Method) advanced this conceptual transformation through a historical critique of German Romanticism and its privileging of symbol over allegory. Gadamer’s account formed part of his influential attempt to champion a mode of artistic truth that went beyond contemporary methodological reductions restricting knowledge to scientific objectivity. Gadamer’s overall goal in Truth and Method is to examine aesthetic and historical consciousness in order to establish the legitimacy of non-methodical, non-scientistic modes of truth and ways of knowing within the human sciences. He achieves this goal partly through a criticism of “aesthetic differentiation,” the cultural process through which German idealism advocated a subjective artistic

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autonomy grounded in the separation of aesthetic consciousness from mechanical rationalism and scientific procedure. “The shift in the ontological definition of the aesthetic toward the concept of aesthetic appearance has its theoretical basis in the fact that the domination of the scientific model of epistemology leads to discrediting all the possibilities of knowing that lie outside this new methodology.” Gadamer mounts his critique in the area of aesthetics through a detailed history of concepts in European poetic theory. He asserts that the Romantic cult of genius and its emphasis on subjective experience formed historical conditions of thought for an aesthetic differentiation that brought with it a claim for the superiority of symbol over allegory. Gadamer argues that aesthetic non-differentiation is a more useful framework for understanding the experience of art than a one-sided focus on aesthetic consciousness: “It should be admitted that, say, an ancient image of the gods that was not displayed in a temple as a work of art in order to give aesthetic, reflective pleasure, and is now on show in a museum, retains, even as it stands before us today, the world of religious experience from which it came; the important consequence is that its world still belongs to ours. What embraces both is the hermeneutic universe” (xxxi). Gadamer notes that “the vindication of allegory, which is pertinent here, began some years ago with Walter Benjamin’s major work, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (xxxi, n. 8). Gadamer extends that vindication in his criticism of the Kantian subjectivization of aesthetics and the subsequent Romantic celebration of symbol over allegory. He makes his case most effectively in the section of Truth and Method called “The Limits of Erlebniskunst [art based on experience] and the Rehabilitation of Allegory.” He begins by noting that as late as the eighteenth century, “poetry and rhetoric [were] side by side in a way that is surprising to modern consciousness.” But the nineteenth century developed a different conception of art based on the “criteria of being experienced and of the inspired genius,” a conception that “eliminates everything merely occasional and banishes rhetoric entirely” (71). Ultimately, “the aesthetic opposition between allegory and symbol” follows from this “devaluation of rhetoric” and the embrace of “the doctrine that genius creates unconsciously” (72). Gadamer traces the conceptual history of symbol and allegory, observing that in their classical use the two terms were initially associated with different fields of activity: “ ‘Allegory’ originally belonged to the sphere of talk, of the logos, and is therefore a rhetorical or hermeneutic figure. Instead of what is actually meant, something else, more tangible, is said, but in such a way that the

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former is understood. ‘Symbol,’ however, is not limited to the sphere of the logos, for a symbol is not related by its meaning to another meaning, but its own sensory existence has ‘meaning.’ As something shown, it enables one to recognize something else.” For example, a religious symbol or secular badge allows community members to recognize each other as members. Though from different spheres, allegory and symbol do have a basic structure in common: “Both words refer to something whose meaning does not consist in its external appearance or sound but in a significance that lies beyond it.” Also, both terms find “their chief application in the religious sphere,” though “the concept of symbol has a metaphysical background that is entirely lacking in the rhetorical use of allegory”: through the symbolic coincidence of “visible appearance and invisible significance,” it becomes “possible to be led beyond the sensible to the divine.” By the end of the eighteenth century, the symbol’s presupposed “metaphysical connection between visible and invisible” semantically fostered a contrast between “the symbolic (conceived as something inherently and essentially significant)” and “the allegorical, which has external and artificial significance.” That is, the symbol was seen as “the coincidence of the sensible and the non-sensible” in contrast to allegory, “the meaningful relation of the sensible to the nonsensible.” Then, in the nineteenth century, “under the influence of the concept of genius and the subjectivization of ‘expression,’ this difference of meanings became a contrast of values.” Gadamer summarizes the results of this conceptual history: “The symbol (which can be interpreted inexhaustibly because it is indeterminate) is opposed to allegory (understood as standing in a more exact relation to meaning and exhausted by it) as art is opposed to non-art” (73–75). The nineteenth-century concept of the symbol becomes a basic justification for aesthetic autonomy as the concept “implies the inner unity of symbol and what is symbolized,” thus establishing the coincidence of finite sensible appearance and suprasensible infinite meaning (77–78). “For this is what is characteristic of the work of art, the creation of genius: that its meaning lies in the phenomenon itself and is not arbitrarily read into it” (77). In contrast to the symbol, allegory “is certainly not the product of genius alone. It rests on firm traditions and always has a fixed, statable meaning” (77–79). Gadamer’s history of concepts demonstrates how the contrast between symbol and allegory is shaped differently at different times, “whereas the prejudice of the aesthetics of Erlebnis [experience] made it appear absolute.” Gadamer’s concern here is not simply with changes in aesthetic taste, but with the very “concept of aesthetic consciousness itself,” which now “becomes dubious, and

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thus also the standpoint of art to which it belongs.” He asks rhetorically (in both senses): “Is the aesthetic approach to a work of art the appropriate one? Or is what we call ‘aesthetic consciousness’ an abstraction?” (81) compared with the actual hermeneutic experience of aesthetic non-differentiation, of refusing the “false dichotomy” of regarding art “either as originally contemporary with all times and outside history or as a way of attaining culture through the experience of history”? (573). He summarizes and concludes that “the revaluation of allegory that we have been describing indicates that there is a dogmatic element in aesthetic consciousness too. And if the difference between mythical and aesthetic consciousness is not absolute, does not the concept of [autonomous] art itself become questionable?” (81). In his influential essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), Paul de Man folds Gadamer’s account into his own poststructuralist deployment of allegory and its history. In de Man’s deconstructive rhetoric of reading, allegory becomes both a topic of historical consideration and, more crucially, a figure of interpretive exploitation. Indeed, probably more than any other theorist of the late twentieth century, de Man extends and complicates (what Gadamer calls) the “rhetorical-hermeneutical” dimensions of the concept of allegory. Like Gadamer, de Man characterizes the fall and rise of allegory over the last two hundred years as parallel with and part of the fortunes of rhetoric more generally: Since the advent, in the course of the nineteenth century, of a subjectivistic critical vocabulary, the traditional forms of rhetoric have fallen into disrepute. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that this was only a temporary eclipse: recent developments in criticism [and here his footnote citations include Walter Benjamin and Northrop Frye] reveal the possibility of a rhetoric that would no longer be normative or descriptive but that would more or less openly raise the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures. De Man encourages this possibility of a new rhetorical theory and criticism through a preliminary “historical clarification” of the Romantic period in European literature, a time when “the rhetorical key-terms undergo significant changes and are at the center of important tensions.” Central to these changes is the explicit opposition of symbol and allegory.

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In his revisionist history, de Man argues for a more complicated account of debates over these two terms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “[E]ven in the case of Goethe, the choice in favor of the symbol is accompanied by all kinds of reservations and qualification. But, as one progresses into the nineteenth century, these qualifications tend to disappear” (189). In the work and influence of Coleridge, de Man finds a similar pattern in which “what appears to be, at first sight, an unqualified assertion of the superiority of the symbol over allegory” is actually accompanied by a striking ambiguity, an ambiguity that is then ignored by most British and American critics that followed. De Man summarizes Coleridge’s view that “the symbol is the product of the organic growth of form; in the world of the symbol, life and form are identical. . . . Its structure is that of synecdoche, for the symbol is always a part of the totality it represents.” This “symbolic imagination” contrasts with “allegorical form,” which “appears purely mechanical, an abstraction whose original meaning is even more devoid of substance than its ‘phantom proxy,’ the allegorical representative; it is an immaterial shape that represents a sheer phantom devoid of shape and substance.” However, de Man points out, later critics fail to notice that there is “a certain degree of ambiguity” in Coleridge’s account (191–92). Rather than stressing the symbol’s “organic or material richness” (192) as one would expect, Coleridge characterizes the symbol as manifesting a “translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal.” In such a characterization, the “material substantiality” of the symbol “dissolves and becomes a mere reflection of a more original unity that does not exist in the material world.” Thus, surprisingly, “the moment of material existence by which [the symbol] was originally defined has now become altogether unimportant; symbol and allegory alike now have a common origin beyond the world of matter.” Coleridge ends up with “a description of figural language as translucence, a description in which the distinction between allegory and symbol has become of secondary importance.” Later British and American critics did not develop this ambiguity in Coleridge’s account but instead focused on “the romantic image as a relationship between mind and nature, between subject and object,” and they took the “ultimate intent of the image” to be, not translucence, but rather “synthesis . . . defined as ‘symbolic’ by the priority conferred on the initial moment of sensory perception” (193). In contrast, de Man reads romantic European literature against the grain of its usual interpretation as privileging organic symbolism over dogmatic allegory. De Man challenges the traditional focus on the romantic image

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as a symbolic synthesis of subject and object and through a critical reading of Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse puts “to the test the nearly unanimous conviction that the origins of romanticism coincide with the beginnings of a predominantly symbolical diction” (200). The result: de Man’s close reading demonstrates that the novel “could not exist without the simultaneous presence of both metaphorical modes [of symbol and allegory], nor could it reach its conclusion without the implied choice in favor of allegory over symbol” (204). Building on this reading, de Man argues that symbolism’s “dialectic between subject and object does not designate the main romantic experience.” Rather, it is in Romanticism’s “allegorizing tendencies” that “an authentic voice becomes audible.” More exactly, “the prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny.” Here is de Man’s most important rethinking of allegory as a mode: “in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category.” By this, he means that for allegory to exist, the allegorical sign refers to another, preceding sign; for it is not external dogma that decrees the relation of allegorical sign to its meaning. “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition (in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term) of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority.” De Man’s readings illustrate this temporal relation in allegory when he describes Rousseau’s literary allusions to the Roman de la rose and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, anterior texts with their own allegorical elements. In sum, “whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.” For de Man, such a conclusion leads to a radical revision of “the customary picture”: “The dialectical relationship between subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs.” Thus, the nineteenth century’s “asserted superiority of the symbol over allegory” turns out in the end to be simply a rhetorical form of “tenacious self-mystification” (204–08). De Man goes on to theorize the allegorical discontinuity of sign and meaning by considering the relation of irony to allegory in some romantic writers. The temporal noncoincidence of the allegorical sign and its antecedent is a structural discontinuity that allegory shares with irony: In both modes, “the sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning and has for its function the the-

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matization of this difference.” Noting that this “important structural aspect may well be a description of figural language in general” (209), de Man focuses on the distinguishing temporal dimension of irony and allegory and then identifies a distinction between allegorical and ironic discontinuity: allegory’s fundamental structure stretches toward narrative duration, whereas irony “appears as an instantaneous process that takes place rapidly, in one single moment” (225). Irony approaches “the pattern of factual experience and recaptures some of the factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self.” In contrast, “allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future.” In other words, “[i]rony is a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows to be illusionary.” Still, de Man temporarily concludes, despite their differences, irony and allegory “are the two faces of the same fundamental experience of time” (226). De Man’s rhetorical interpretation of allegory summarized above formed part of his early effort to write a history of romanticism. But, as he describes in the preface to Allegories of Reading (1979), what “started out as a historical study. . . . ended up as a theory of reading.” Analyzing Rousseau in preparation for a historical consideration of romanticism, de Man found himself “unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation”; and in trying to deal with this problem, he shifted from “historical definition to the problematics of reading.” We might view de Man’s brief introductory account as itself a little allegory, an allegory about the kind of rhetorical reading he thematizes throughout Allegories of Reading. Narratives are allegories of reading when they diachronically represent elements (characters, events, or ideas) as figurations of the reading act (an agent using an instrument or an inside merging with an outside, for example, figuring the act of reading as application or appropriation); or, conversely, when they represent temporal reading acts as allegories for theories of reading (say, hermeneutics or deconstruction). De Man’s own allegories of reading result from “a process of reading in which rhetoric is a disruptive intertwining of trope and persuasion” (ix), a process he explains and illustrates in his famous essay, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” chapter one of Allegories of Reading. Rejecting charges of radical negation or nihilistic destruction, de Man figures deconstruction as an analytical undermining, a systematic critique, through the close textual reading of, for example, inside/ outside metaphors, literary and figurative meanings, or figural praxis and metafigural theory, a rhetorical reading that puts in question those distinctions. In

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later chapters, de Man’s rhetorical interpretations specify the allegories of reading in a range of texts, giving support to the claim that “any narrative is primarily the allegory of its own reading” (76). This claim is almost a tautology: any narrative when specifically read is an allegory of that specific reading in the sense that the narrative text (its literal sign) necessarily points to a second textual narrative (its own allegorical meaning) as a result of any interpretation. (We are reminded here of Frye’s earlier point that all interpretation is allegorical interpretation.) What is distinctive about de Man’s rhetorical interpretations is the allegory of unreadability he again and again uncovers. We might say that allegories of reading embody the product and process of deconstruction: they are its products insofar as texts are interpreted as allegories of reading that selfdeconstruct; they constitute its process in that rhetorical interpretation allegorizes a text’s unreadability. In his interpretation of Proust’s allegory of reading, de Man asserts that “the allegorical representation of Reading” is “the irreducible component of any text”: “All that will be represented in such an allegory will deflect from the act of reading and block access to its understanding. The allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading” (77). Similarly (or is it?), de Man reads Rousseau’s Second Preface to Julie in relation to the main text and notes that the model generated “cannot be closed off by a final reading” as “it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.” Such narratives we call allegories: “Allegorical narratives tell the story of the failure to read. . . . Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading—a sentence in which the genitive ‘of ’ has itself to be ‘read’ as a metaphor” (205). The temptation here is to conclude where we began in our account of de Man, with rhetoric as an allegorical emblem. In his reading of Nietzsche’s history of rhetoric, de Man writes: “Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative but when considered as a system of tropes, it deconstructs its own performance. Rhetoric is a text in that it allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding.” In both Gadamerian hermeneutics and de Manian deconstruction, allegory turns out to stand as a synecdoche for rhetoric itself. In Gadamer, allegory’s historical fate is part and parcel of rhetoric’s throughout the nineteenth century. In his account, the rise of aesthetic differentiation and the privileging of symbol entailed the decline of rhetoric and the devaluing of allegory. A similar historical

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narrative appears in de Man, but, additionally and more importantly for him, allegorical figuration is itself constitutive of rhetoric’s destabilizing structure. Thus, whereas rhetoric and hermeneutics—language-use and interpretation— are inseparable and complementary for Gadamer, this is not the case for de Man, who sees linguistic figures as troubling interpretive reading, and rhetorical and hermeneutic theories to be in a dynamic tension. Gadamer argues for a view of textual interpretation as the fusion of horizons within a tradition, a historically situated dialogue that at least temporarily stabilizes meaning and makes successful communication possible, though not guaranteed. Rhetoric (as contexualized language use) is the medium for these exchanges. In contrast, de Man criticizes the “aesthetic restraint” of the hermeneutic tradition, which tends to “swerve” or “draw back” from the “rhetorical dimension of language” in both its interpretive practice and hermeneutic theory: in practice, it “pays little attention to the semantic play of the signifier,” and in theory, it presents a stabilizing mimetic model of reading, rather than a destabilizing allegorical one. Instead of literary interpretation mimetically imitating aesthetic perception, de Man sees such interpretation, which he calls reading, to be a form of allegoresis that separates aesthetics and hermeneutics from poetics and rhetoric: “Allegory names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves from a phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented direction.” In spite and because of these significant rhetorical differences, hermeneutics and deconstruction continue to advance the contemporary rehabilitation of allegory.

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9 Theotropic Logology

I’ll begin with a footnote attached to J. Hillis Miller’s 1979 essay, “Theology and Logology in Victorian Literature.” The footnote concludes: “ ‘[I]nfluence’ is not a matter of conscious borrowing, but something that, like a disease, in fact like ‘influenza,’ insinuates itself into the air we breathe, or something that is present, whether or not we know it or wish it, in the intimate texture of our material, in the words we must use to speak or write at all. If we are another footnote to Plato, Plato was himself already a footnote to still earlier footnotes, in an endless chain of footnotes to footnotes, with nowhere a primary text as such.” My goal in this essay is simple: to explore some published and unpublished exchanges among Miller, Paul de Man, and Kenneth Burke, all of whom practiced a kind of theotropic logology—the study of words about words related to words about God. Taking my cue from Miller’s footnote, I’ll focus on the disease of referentiality, psychological in particular and ultimately theological, or more exactly, in de Man’s word, theotropic, figuratively god-centered. The footnote with which I began is from the published version of a 1977 paper delivered at Drew University in the second public encounter between Miller and Burke. The first was two years earlier and is described in a footnote added to Miller’s essay, “The Linguistic Moment in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ ”: Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at the Ransom Symposium at Kenyon College in April 1975, argued that I should add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in the title. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins’s wreck. This was a powerful plea to relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjective counterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personal document there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are “lived,” not mere “verbal play” in the negative sense. . . . Nor can there be

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any doubt that in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” Hopkins is speaking of his own wreck in the sense of personal disaster, fragmentation, or blockage. . . . The danger in Burke’s suggestion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction, the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it. . . . Subjectivity, I am arguing, with all its intensities, is more a result than an origin. To set it first, to make an explanatory principle of it, is, as Nietzsche says, a metalepsis, putting late before early, effect before cause. Much later I will turn to Burke’s response to this footnote, but for now I just want to ask: Why is “much at stake” for Miller in his purported disagreement with Burke? What exactly is at stake? I’ll be suggesting that for Miller, and also for de Man, at stake is the nature of reading itself and its relation to figuration and referentiality, rhetoric and metaphysics. To make this point, my only point, I will need to examine de Man’s early reading of Burke and their later exchange of letters. Both Miller and de Man read Burke during their graduate school days at Harvard in the early fifties. In a student paper for Harry Levin’s comparative literature course in January 1954, de Man compared Burke and Gaston Bachelard in terms of their theories of the poetic image, clearly preferring, with qualifications, the theory of Bachelard. In the section on Burke, de Man notes that the “extra-literary motives” of both theorists, “however distinct, had something in common. . . . [B]oth were concerned with introducing a formal dimension into the reasoning that applies to their respective fields of interest: science, in the case of Bachelard, pragmatic social relations in the case of Burke.” De Man calls the 1935 Permanence and Change Burke’s “most sincere and clearest book,” in which “his main preoccupations are with the social concerns characteristic of the thirties: the feeling of impending collapse of capitalism, the inequity of overproduction contrasted with utter poverty, fascism as a desperate rear-guard action of the bourgeoisie in the class-struggle, unemployment, etc.” De Man notes that “nowadays [in the fifties] these problems seem dated, certainly not because they have been solved, but because we have lost illusions about the possibility of solving them by the mere manipulation of political and economic institutions.” De Man then adds: “But the sociological fallacy of the thirties, however naïve it may seem in retrospect, was backed by the best of intentions; one could blame a man for not having shared in it rather than for having done

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so. One’s intellectual stature might well be evaluated by the speed with which one outgrew it.” In de Man’s reading of Permanence and Change, Burke followed Veblen in attacking the “deductive causality” of traditional “sociological reasoning,” and “substituted for it frames of thought which could be called ‘formal.’ ” Burke used such terms as perspective by incongruity and trained incapacity to “introduce the discontinuity of paradox into deductive and continuous schemes,” and he “could not fail to notice the deep analogy between formal thought in general and aesthetic imagination.” In this way, Burke’s “interest in literature, as a formal activity, could be motivated by semi-revolutionary social intentions” (18–19). De Man sees a “certain cogency” even in some of Burke’s more naïve notions in Permanence and Change, such as his “vision of communism as ‘poetic’ or of the poet as the political rebel of the age.” But there is no such sympathy for Burke’s work after 1935: “Since the poetic symbol and social thought have their formalist nature in common, Burke simply equates social and aesthetic behavior and gives us the endless conversion of aesthetic symbols into social facts which makes up the gist of Attitudes toward History, The Philosophy of Literary Form, A Grammar of Motives, and four-fifths of A Rhetoric of Motives” (19). Except in that final fifth of the Rhetoric, de Man insists that all we get in Burke’s later work is a “socialization of the formal” in place of Burke’s earlier “formalization of the social” (20). In Part II of the Grammar, for example, Burke’s “attempt . . . to represent metaphysics itself as some sort of social drama is,” according to de Man, “rather preposterous: the metaphysical purpose is precisely to find the general categories and essences which lie underneath apparent behavior.” Furthermore, “in as far as the poetic imagination lies closer to metaphysical thought than the acts of external life, it can be said to be pre-social” (20–21). De Man saves some of his most biting criticism for Burke’s reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” included in his Grammar. De Man writes that Burke’s approach ignores the aesthetic fact that in Keats’s poem, “a social and banal experience [the felt opposition between a utilitarian and a contemplative world] had been transcended to the level of a metaphysical awareness. To retrace the way back [from the present poem to the prior experience] is both arbitrary and entirely useless” (21). Moreover, de Man asks incredulously, “what assistance is the equation of the fever which runs through the poem with Keats’s physical disease? . . . Even if Keats had told us specifically that this was the case, that his heightened sensitivity was a product of his tuberculosis and that the poems were written under the effect of this fever, what difference would it make? Again,

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the problem is why and how these visions of his sensitivity have taken the shape of images and how these images were put into language.” De Man sums up his critique: “By replacing the relevant term ‘formalization’ by the irrelevant one ‘socialization,’ ‘dialectic’ by ‘drama,’ ‘poetic symbol’ by ‘social situation,’ Kenneth Burke has reduced the world of the poetic to a superficial sociology” (22). Here we have the same critique of Burke’s reductionism, his too easy referentiality, that we saw in Miller, though de Man emphasizes the sociological rather than the psychological. After such disparaging criticism, one might wonder why de Man ever came to find Burke worth writing about. Nevertheless, almost thirty years later, de Man decided to add a chapter on Burke to his planned book Resistance to Theory and in January 1982 wrote directly to Burke: “I have long admired your work and, over the next few months, I’ll be trying to write something about it. If it works out, I’ll send you a copy.” Burke responded in his usual fashion to such fan letters: “You cannot imagine what a lift your letter gave me. I am vastly grateful that you would think of taking the trouble to size up my entanglements with the word.” So how did this evaluative change of heart come about in de Man? We actually get its prefiguring in the final paragraph of the 1954 student paper, where he briefly comments on that final fifth of A Rhetoric of Motives. Here, de Man writes, “in treating the rhetoric of dialectical thought, [Burke] notices that it is hierarchical in essence and that, in the last analysis, order itself appears as the supreme design of poetic imagery. ‘Human effort would be grounded not in the search for “advantage” and in the mere “sublimating” of that search by “rationalizations” and “moralizations.” Rather, it would be grounded in a form, in the persuasiveness of the hierarchic order itself.’ ” Burke also claims that “implicit in our attitude toward things is a principle of classification. And classification in this linguistic or formal sense is all-inclusive, ‘prior’ to classification in the exclusively social sense.” De Man’s penultimate statement in this early 1954 assessment reads: “If this change of thesis marks a new beginning in Burke’s thought, it would mean that his future readers will be able to begin their study with the last chapter of the Rhetoric” (23). Over the decades that followed, de Man’s tentative approval of Burke in this one paragraph from his early paper apparently developed into the full-blown admiration of his final years. It centered on their common commitment to the linguistic activity, the rhetorical element of language, though still understood differently by the two theorists. Some of those differences can be seen in the

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letter Burke sent to de Man in response to receiving a copy of Allegories of Reading. In the famous first chapter to that book, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” de Man remarks that “behind the assurance that valid interpretation is possible .  .  . stands a highly respectable moral imperative that strives to reconcile the internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential, and public effects.” Of course, de Man argues that this assumed connection between internal and external, between literary language and referential effect, is called into question through a close reading of a text’s rhetoric. Indeed, “rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration” (10). He supports his claim by pointing to recent “theoretical and philosophical speculation,” with Kenneth Burke as his exhibit A. Burke, de Man writes, “mentions deflection (which he compares structurally to Freudian displacement), defined as ‘any slight bias or even unintended error,’ as the rhetorical basis of language, and deflection is then conceived as a dialectical subversion of the consistent link between sign and meaning that operates within grammatical patterns; hence Burke’s well-known insistence on the distinction between grammar and rhetoric” (8). In his March 1982 letter thanking de Man for sending a copy of Allegories of Reading, Burke comments that he read this opening chapter “not without difficulty” because he was “used to slicing up the territory differently,” citing his own “Four Master Tropes” essay, in which he “substitutes for metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony the terms perspective, reduction, representation, and dialectic respectively.” But Burke goes on to say that de Man’s analysis of a Proust passage “(the hand-underhand, torride-torrent) was made to order for my [logological] purposes, though I don’t know for sure whether you would go along with my notion (in terms of my recent self-occamizing job whereby I wd. reduce us to ‘bodies that learn language’) that the passage you are discussing also ties in the ‘guilt’ of [Proust’s] chosen profession with his psychogenic asthma.” And here we are back again to the point of de Man’s early 1954 objection and Miller’s later 1976 footnote criticism of a too easy or quick move from the poem to the poet in Burkean logological interpretation. Remember, Miller wrote “Much is at stake” in this disagreement. We might clarify the stakes by noting de Man’s remarks in the second part of Allegories of Reading. De Man argues that it is only by reading the figural dimension of Rousseau’s language and by attending to his theory of rhetoric that we can avoid “a prognosis of inconsistency” for the body of Rousseau’s texts, “lead-

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ing to the separation between the theoretical, literary and the practical, political aspects of Rousseau’s thought.” A rigorous rhetorical interpretation questions the literal reading that equates “extra-textual reference” with “literal correspondence” and that ignores the mediation of language, positing a too clear distinction between Rousseau’s literal political language and his figural literary language. With such a distinction in place, the explicitly “fictional” parts of Rousseau’s political text can be read as symptomatic of a psychological disease: “The literary faculty which, in the Second Discourse, invents the fiction of a natural state of man becomes an ideology growing out of the repression of the political faculty.” Thus, in such a literal reading, the “theoretical interest of a text like the Second Discourse is primarily psychological”; it can be read “for an understanding of [Rousseau’s] psychological self-mystifications” (136–39). It is this referential, psychological interpretation of Rousseau’s political text that de Man’s rhetorical readings call into question. Burke concludes his March 1982 letter promising “more later” and declaring his special interest in reading the sections on Nietzsche and Rousseau. Unfortunately, no further correspondence between Burke and de Man has come to light. However, from the marked-up copy of Allegories in Burke’s personal library, we know that he did read at least some of these later pages on Nietzsche and Rousseau. For example, on the inside back cover, Burke indexes p. 201 and Rousseau’s questioning of the model that assumes “the possibility of referential meaning as the telos of all language.” What might Burke have written about these published sections of Allegories or, if he had read them, about the more theotropically highlighted pages of the earlier “Textual Allegories” manuscript? To approach a tentative answer, let’s turn to Burke’s 1979 essay on “Theology and Logology,” which responded to Miller’s 1976 footnote critique of Burke’s reading strategy—its dangers of psychological reductionism—where much is at stake. Burke’s response to Miller calls attention to the same Keats essay that de Man trashed in his 1954 student paper. Burke acknowledges that in his essay he “had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the disease [Keats] was to die of manifested themselves” in the poem. But Burke points out that he had qualified his point by differentiating his interpretation from crude materialist readings that make poems merely passive effects of bodily causes. “In such accounts, the disease would not be ‘passive,’ but wholly active; and [the symbolic] action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphenomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chill themselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essential matter here, the intense

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linguistic activity.” Then Burke comments that he privately wrote to Miller: “In that last paragraph . . . at least I say I’m not doing exactly what you say I am doing. .  .  . However, I’ll meet you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease and the symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One’s poetizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body’s passions, can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings.” Ending the quotation from his letter to Miller, Burke comments that he “had in mind here such a ‘reflexive’ process (I guess current cant would call it ‘feedback’) as the role of ‘psychogenic’ asthma in Proust’s search for essence by the ‘remembrance of things past.’ ” To this last sentence, Burke attaches a footnote reference to which I will turn in a moment. But first let me remark that Burke does not, as he claims, quite meet Miller halfway. The two critics do agree on the rhetorical fact of a poem’s “intense linguistic activity” but they remain, at least in this exchange, no closer to agreement on how to characterize the nature of that activity. Miller sees it as semantically meaningful, but without direct reference to the poet’s independent and prior subjectivity in its personal preoccupation with bodily disease. Keats’s or Hopkins’s poem is not “about” his disease; to insist on such aboutness, on such reference, is to risk “a psychologizing reduction.” Burke doesn’t quite answer the charge when he continues to focus on the poem as an effect of the poet’s preoccupation with his disease, even if he insists that the poem is an active rather than a passive effect. However, Burke does go on, in the footnote attached to his comment on Proust’s “psychogenic asthma,” to argue that “any such possible relationship between personal tensions and their use as material for intense linguistic activity (to be analyzed and admired in its own terms) might figure thus,” that is, might figure in a “feedback” relationship between “the physiology of disease” and “the symbolic action of poetry.” But, Burke continues, “there are special, purely logological, incentives for such a relationship between poetic activity and psychological passion.” And here Burke references his essay, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis” in The Rhetoric of Religion, where he “discussed the process whereby the effort to characterize conditions now turns into a ‘story’ [allegory?] of ‘origins’ then.” This citation is almost immediately followed in the same footnote by two Burkean paragraphs I will give in their entirety for their theotropiclogological significance: Incidentally, with regard to Keats’s ode (which I take to envision a kind of “art-heaven,” a theological heaven romantically aestheticized), by my inter-

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pretation, the transforming of his disease’s bodily symptoms (fever and chill) into imaginal counterparts within the conditions of the fiction would be a poetic embodiment of the orthodox religious promise that the true believers would regain their “purified” bodies in heaven. That is, the symptoms would have their “transcendent” counterparts in poetic diction as indicated in my analysis. I review these various considerations because the discussion of them offers a good opportunity to at least indicate “humanistic” concern (the admonition to “know ourselves”) that I take to be involved in the logological distinction between the human organism’s realm of nonsymbolic motion and the kind of “self ” it “naturally” acquires through its protracted, informative traffic with the (learned) public modes of symbolic action. In tracking Burke’s rhetorical path of thought in this footnote, we see first that he theologizes his logological reading of Keats’s ode and then extracts from this theotropic logology a metaphysical assertion about nonsymbolic motion versus symbolic action. That is, in his article, Burke moves from Proust’s novel and his psychogenic asthma to a logological connection between disease and poetry, to a theologizing of that connection in Keats’s ode and, finally, to an ontological statement of logology’s underlying dramatistic model of nonsymbolic bodily motion and symbolic poetic action. Do such interpretive moves answer or simply confirm Miller’s and de Man’s criticisms of the referential tendencies of Burke’s reading strategy? I’m not sure. De Man and Miller’s objection to Burke’s logological referencing of the poet’s bodily disease is an example of their broader critique of any reliance on extratextual referencing that deflects from rigorously reading the linguistic activity of a text, and illegitimately attempts to stabilize rhetorical meaning by appeals outside or prior to the text. For them, Burke’s reference to a causal, explanatory signified in the poet’s body is simply another instance of the metaleptic interpretive move to ground a reading in a transcendental signified that can permanently stabilize the indeterminate relation of rhetoric to grammar. That is, Burke’s purported causal shift to the poet’s body ultimately and exactly relies on what de Man calls the “theotropic” in the “Textual Allegories” manuscript. Referentiality, de Man writes, is “constitutively metaphysical, in the Nietzschean sense of the term as taken over by Heidegger and his best French ‘reader,’ Jacques Derrida. It is also constitutively theotropic, since the only conceivable name for a transcendental signification that would no longer be itself a sign, the only

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word that would have a truly proper meaning, is ‘god.’ ” In his reading of Keats, then, Burke defends against the charge of “reductive psychologizing” with a double hermeneutic maneuver that in both stages is theotropic (in de Man’s sense): first, Burke interpretively transforms his logological referencing of Keats’s disease in his ode into a “poetic embodiment” of a traditional theological doctrine (the resurrection of the body after the Last Judgment); and, second, Burke’s interpretive citing of this poetic embodiment becomes an opportunity for him to reference his metaphysical claim regarding the irreducible distinction between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action: humans are bodies that learn language. But if Burke’s logological reading exemplifies such theotropic referentiality, his elaborations and self-occamizings demonstrate both his awareness of the fact and perhaps the wider significance of his larger logological and dramatistic project as he interprets and theorizes symbolic action more generally. Such a project not only acknowledges a theotropic referentiality; it also extends its interpretive attention to the specific symbolic actions that follow directly from the naming of God. As de Man writes, in sentences immediately following the one I just quoted: “The only ‘meaning that one can give the word to be’ (Profession, p. 571) is that of ‘god.’ Yet, at the same time, the referentiality resulting from this paradigmatic denomination must lead to the performance of a finite, practical or, as we say, ‘historical’ act . . . The possibility of practical action is inherently linked to the (fallacious) coinage of the word ‘god.’ ” It was Burke’s theotropic project to go much further in reading these practical activities, these historical, religious actions, including theotropic symbolic acts. And this he partly accomplished by using Heidegger and Augustine in his book The Rhetoric of Religion. But that’s another story, indeed an allegory about allegory, for another time.

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10 Jesuit Eloquentia Perfecta and Theotropic Logology

Rhetorical theory has long played a prominent role in establishing the purposes of education. From the classical Greek paideia, through the medieval trivium of the first European universities, to the neoclassical curriculum of American colleges in the Golden Age of Oratory, rhetorical thinking contributed to debates over educational policy and pedagogical practices. Only in the twentieth century did rhetorical studies fade from the academic scene of responding to questions like those appearing in the inaugural issue of Educational Theory: “How shall we conceive our educational endeavor? At what shall it aim, both generally and specifically? And what kind of educative process promises best to attain these aims?” Today these same questions are being asked with increasing urgency, and new rhetorical approaches are being proposed to address them. In this essay, I take a rhetorical pragmatist perspective on current questions about educational purpose. I begin by considering some challenges to rhetorical approaches to education and placing those challenges in the theoretical context of their posing. I then describe one current rhetorical approach—based on Kenneth Burke’s dramatism and logology—and use it to understand and redescribe another rhetorical approach—Jesuit eloquentia perfecta. Proceeding in this way, I hope to present both a theoretical framework for discussing educational aims and a practical example of how such aims might be achieved.

Rhetorical Education Gert Biesta’s recent work illustrates how altered disciplinary conditions affect the way basic questions about educational policy are now being asked. In criticizing the dominance of scientistic evidence-based approaches, Biesta challenges educators “to reconnect with the question of purpose in education.” They should not be valuing just what can be measured, he argues; they should be

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measuring what they truly value. Biesta himself develops a general framework for discussing the purpose of education, specifying three functions that educational systems perform: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. The educational function of qualification consists of providing students “with the knowledge, skills and understanding and often also with the dispositions and forms of judgement” that enables them to “do something” within their current society, e.g., train for a job or become an informed citizen. Related to this first function, a second is socialization, which “has to do with the many ways in which, through education, we become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political ‘orders.’ ” The third function that Biesta emphasizes is individualization, or what he prefers to call subjectification, “becoming a subject.” Biesta characterizes this function as the opposite of socialization. Subjectification “is precisely not about the insertion of ‘newcomers’ into existing orders, but about ways of being that hint at independence from such orders; ways of being in which the individual is not simply a ‘specimen’ of a more encompassing order.” Biesta is most concerned about the “quality” of subjectification, that is, “the kind of subjectivity—or kinds of subjectivities—that are made possible as a result of particular educational arrangements and configurations.” He clearly agrees with those who believe that “any education worthy of its name should always contribute to processes of subjectification that allow those being educated to become more autonomous and independent in their thinking and acting.” Turning to rhetorical perspectives on education, Biesta challenges educators to go beyond simply explaining how curricula and pedagogies persuade students and instead ask about why they should do so. He acknowledges the value of rhetorical approaches, including Burke’s dramatism, but questions whether such approaches move effectively from socialization and empowerment to subjectification and emancipation. According to Biesta, both the old and new rhetorics when applied to education emphasize “processes that provide individuals with power to operate within a particular [linguistic, social, cultural, or political] ‘order’ ” rather than “a process that challenges the particular orders that grant individuals the power to speak and act, so that new ways of speaking and acting, and ultimately new ways of being become possible.” That is, rhetorical education of empowerment ultimately reinforces the established order (and its injustices) instead of changing that order. The “order” Biesta assumes here is that of a world, a context for ways of being, doing, and speaking. But Biesta should be careful in criticizing rhetoric as simply maintaining a past world order and perhaps be more skeptical about the

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possibility of transcending that world order. Most rhetorical perspectives explicitly recognize that all criticism takes place in a world using the tools of that world’s order. There is no neutral, free space above and beyond all worlds from which to criticize a particular world order, but rather, only various options more or less available within that world for self-criticism. This being the case, the rhetorical choice is never simply between empowerment and emancipation, but between an empowerment that promotes the possibility of emancipation and one that does not. From a rhetorical pragmatist perspective, empowerment is a condition of possibility for emancipation, and socialization is a prerequisite for subjectification. Another, more paradoxical, way to put the claim is to say that rhetorical conformity is the only way beyond socio-political conformism. Students must know how to use rhetoric effectively in their world, must initially conform to its conventions, in order to transform the order of that world. Rhetorical approaches also recognize another troublesome aspect of education: the unpredictability of usage and consequences. Like rhetoric in general, rhetorical education can be seen as risky business precisely because it refuses to guarantee its results. From the time of its legendary origins in ancient Syracuse, rhetorical education has been portrayed in contradictory ways, sometimes as conservative defender of tradition and at other times as progressive advocate of change. After the fall of the Syracusan tyrant in 467 b.c.e., the stories go, Corax invented rhetorical theory to educate the newly free citizens on how to act in their changing circumstances. In one version, Corax was a democrat who rhetorically educated his fellow citizens to enable them to deliberate effectively in the assemblies and argue in the law courts to regain their state-confiscated property; but in another version, Corax was an autocratic member of the old tyrant’s retinue and invented rhetoric only to maintain his power and as much of the status quo as possible. Today, rhetorical education still offers no guarantees concerning its uses and results, symbol-wise and world-wise—or, better, symbol-wise as world-wise. But it also champions phronetic consideration of probabilities. Rhetoric is concerned with interpreting contexts, choosing strategies most likely to work, and acting accordingly. For a rhetorical pragmatist in education, “what works” must be defined to encompass not simply what is procedurally effective in a specific rhetorical context, but also what is consistent with greater educational purposes across multiple contexts. That is, the rhetorical issue is not just what works efficiently in one time and place, but what works long term, in the largest sense, including that of educational purpose. The means and ends of educational persuasion

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must work together. What counts as “effective” teaching or “achieved” learning outcomes is only so when the chosen educational methods are considered the most probable means for achieving results consistent with carefully discerned educational purposes. In other words, the truth about education resides in the contextual imbrication of methods and purposes. If this just sounds like educational common sense, it is a common sense that needs emphasis in any historical period that either overstresses measurable efficiency without purpose or advocates purposeful indoctrination without choice. Here it is useful to recall William James’s definition of truth: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.” The truth of educational practice and policy is dependent on what we believe to be the purpose of education, what we are trying to achieve and how we are trying to achieve it. A rhetorical approach to education embraces this challenge and provides tools for accomplishing it in practice and thinking about it in theory.

Burkean Symbolic Action One such rhetorical approach develops out of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism and logology. His famous definition of humans as “bodies that learn language” is based on an ontological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion, which then grounds his linguistic approach to education. Symbolic action is the domain of the humanities and social sciences or what Burke calls the “verbal” and “socio-political” fields of inquiry; and nonsymbolic motion is the domain of physical and biological sciences or the “natural” fields. But on the metalevel, the verbal or linguistic perspective can be applied to all these disciplinary fields insofar as their practices, theories, and traditions involve symbolic action. More specifically, Burke’s rhetorical emphasis on terminologies through which the world is interpreted suggests both a general curricular structure for organizing academic disciplines and a specific pedagogical method for engaging students and treating subject matter. In his “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education,” Burke made his most concentrated application of the dramatistic perspective to educational theory and practice. Here I emphasize just one aspect of that application, what might be called his rhetorical hermeneutics of terms. Most generally, a rhetorical hermeneutics deals with the intersection of language use and making sense, rhetoric and interpretation. Burke’s terminological version consists of an interpretive

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theory for making sense of rhetorical practice (a dramatistic pentad) and a rhetorical account for interpretations of reality (a theory of terministic screens through which humans make sense of the world). Burke’s dramatistic theory uses the terminology of drama (act, agent, agency, scene, purpose, and their various ratios) to interpret symbolic action, and in his logology (words about words), he rhetorically analyzes the terminological ensembles of various domains of human activity. In his “Linguistic Approach” essay, Burke explores the educational implications of four terminological orders or pyramids. In addition to the verbal, the social, and the natural, Burke includes the supernatural and notes that each terminological realm has its own distinctive words and phrases, and also borrows from the other realms. What he says about a social philosophy he recommends more generally: “we should set out dramatistically to analyze the structure of its statements, considered as symbolic acts.” We should “ask what terministic devices are used here, how they combine, etc.” Thus, “a linguistic point of view .  .  . confronts a practical use of language for rhetorical effect by a theoretical study of such usage.” Logology is a theoretical study of the practical usage of terms in and across different terminological realms. Viewed logologically, dramatism is a perspective on human behavior that privileges the terms of drama (an agent acts in a scene through an agency for a purpose); viewed dramatistically, logology is the study of the use and abuse of terms in symbolic action. One part of Burke’s “Linguistic Approach” essay provides an especially useful orientation for applying his dramatistic logology to other traditions of rhetorical education. In the “School and Religion” section, Burke argues that “the study of religion fits perfectly with the approach to education in terms of symbolic action.” Religious discourse, in particular theology, presents multiple examples of terminological ingenuity, its depth and scope. Indeed, for Burke “the language of religion is the most central subject matter for the study of human relations in terms of symbolic action,” and “the long tradition of religion provides us with a field of study as vital and as sweeping as the over-all history of human culture itself.” But in a world of conflicting religious and secular faiths, how can the linguistic study of religion proceed in our educational institutions? Burke proposes that such study should not be substantively doctrinal, but rather, terminologically formal. “That is, it does not ask: ‘Is such a doctrine literally true or false?’ Rather, it asks, ‘what are the relationships prevailing among the key terms of this doctrine?’ And: ‘Can we adapt the terminology to other terminologies, at least somewhat?’ ” Burke promotes his own dramatistic perspective as a formal

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metaterminology to analyze the symbolic activities of the many religious persuasions on the global scene by comparing, contrasting, and mutually translating their terminological configurations. These different religious terminologies, for example, “have charted with especial urgency and thoroughness the problems of ‘sin’ and ‘redemption’ as these take form against a background of hierarchal order.” How do such terminological charts interrelate? What are their similarities and differences, their terminological borrowings and rejections, their past rhetorical histories, present overlaps and tensions, their future possibilities of common linguistic sharing or even conversion? Burke makes additional claims about “secular religions,” such as the political ideologies of capitalism and communism. “These, too, are terminologies of action, hence essentially ‘dramatistic’ in structure—and whatever their vast disagreements, they can at least meet in terms of their nature as terminologies of action.” Burke admits that his approach won’t resolve specific issues that lead to direct collisions between political enemies. This is an impossible request to make of any educational method. “But one can ask that it provide a positive equivalent for the area of commonalty which even opponents must share, if they are to join the same battle.” Regarding both religious and secular faiths, Burke concludes: “Where the various ‘persuasions’ are brought together, what topic surely transcends them all but the question of persuasion itself?” Six years after his 1955 “Linguistic Approach” essay appeared, Burke published his most extensive logological study of religion. Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion develops what might be called a theotropic logology, words about words about God. Burke’s rhetorical hermeneutics here treats God-talk as languagetalk. He notes that his book is “concerned not directly with religion, but rather with the terminology of religion” and once again affirms his logological thesis “that, since the theological use of language is thorough, the close study of theology and its forms will provide us with good insight into the nature of language itself as a motive.” Thus, he says, “We are to be concerned with the analogy between ‘words’ (lower case) and The Word (Logos, Verbum) as it were in caps.”

Jesuit Rhetoric We can use Burke’s theotropic logology to redescribe a far older rhetorical approach to education. The Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, was established in 1540 as a missionary order that soon became involved in rhetorical

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education. Emerging out of European Renaissance humanism, Jesuit rhetoric aimed to produce a Christian version of the classical ideal orator, a good person writing and speaking well for the common good. The 1599 Ratio Studiorum presented the Jesuit educational framework, including Rules for the Professor of Rhetoric. The rhetoric class had the aim of instructing students to “perfect eloquence.” It combined written and oral rhetoric, focusing on oratory and poetry while promoting both useful skills and cultural enrichment. Students learned the general precepts and stylistic practices of the Greco-Roman classical tradition and joined them with erudition derived from Church doctrine and cultural history. All of this rhetorical education was adjusted to the abilities of individual students, exemplifying the famous Jesuit accommodationism that adapted rhetoric to the audiences of the Society’s various ministries of the Word. Up until at least the early twentieth century, rhetorical education remained central to the Jesuit paideia in schools throughout the world. During the last few years in the United States, several of the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities have attempted to revitalize this rhetorical tradition, especially in relation to core curriculum reform. These attempts at rhetorical education have incorporated the educational purposes presented in documents, such as “The Characteristics of Jesuit Education” and “Ignatian Pedagogy: A Practical Approach.” The aim of Jesuit education is “the fullest possible development of every dimension of the person, linked to the development of a sense of values and a commitment to the service of others which gives priority to the needs of the poor and is willing to sacrifice self-interest for the promotion of justice” (198). This purpose can be redescribed as empowerment within the world order working toward the emancipation of self and others. As Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit Superior General, put it: “The excellence which we seek consists in producing men and women of right principles, personally appropriated; men and women open to the signs of the times, in tune with their cultural milieu and its problems; men and women for others.” This educational purpose underwrites the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm of context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation. The new teaching of Jesuit eloquentia perfecta works within these redescribed educational aims and pedagogical strategies, explicitly combining training in the language arts with critical thinking and moral reflection. Jesuit ways of rhetorically proceeding, both old and new, have developed out of terminology used in the central formation text composed by the Society’s founder, the Spiritual

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Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. This guide to vocational choice is a series of meditative and contemplative practices performed by a retreatant working with a director. Burke’s theotropic logology can serve as a framework for understanding the shared rhetoric of the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian pedagogy, as well as an instrument to be used within the theory and practice of Jesuit eloquentia perfecta. Advocates of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm present it “in light of the Spiritual Exercises” as a “fitting description of the continual interplay of experience, reflection and action in the teaching-learning process” and also as “an ideal portrayal of the dynamic interrelationship of teacher and learner in the latter’s journey of growth in knowledge and freedom.” Moreover, “the active role of the person making the Exercises is the model for the active role of the student” in self-reflection, personal development, imaginative creativity, and public interaction, while “the progression in the Exercises is one source of the practical, disciplined, ‘means to end’ approach that is characteristic of Jesuit education” (213). When we look more closely at the terms of contemporary Jesuit education, we find certain repeated phrases and slogans: cura personalis (care of the individual person), magis (doing more), “finding God in all things,” “service of faith that promotes justice,” and “men and women for others.” But just as important from a Burkean perspective is the playing out of terminological cycles within the Jesuit way of proceeding. For example, Burke’s terminological cycle of order is prominent in the Spiritual Exercises and has implications for rhetorical education. In his logological analysis of Genesis in the Christian Bible, Burke examines the term order by asking what other key terms are “tautologically” implied by it. He immediately notes that there is a “strategic ambiguity” in the application of the term order whereby it can be employed in both the natural and socio-political realms, the domains of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. One can speak of the natural order of things, but also of the human order of sociopolitical institutions that enable the giving of orders. Burke is especially interested in the way word-orders mutually affect each other through rhetorical borrowings and translations, how, for example, “a vision of the natural order can become infused with the genius of the verbal and socio-political orders” (185). He thus describes “from the purely logological point of view” the Genesis account of creation: a daily “kind of enactment done through the medium of God’s ‘Word’ ” in which “the sheerly ‘natural’ order contains a verbal element or principle that, from the purely empirical point of view, could belong only in the socio-political order” (185).

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Burke elaborates the terminological cycle of order in various directions. On the one hand, order simply implies its opposite, disorder, in both the natural and socio-political domains. But, on the other hand, order as a verbal command within the socio-political implies a response of obedience or disobedience. Then “we have the proportion: Order is to Disorder as Obedience is to Disobedience” (186). Burke looks further into “the act of Disobedience” and comes up with “the need for some such term as ‘Pride,’ to name the corresponding attitude that precedes the act. And some such term as ‘Humility’ names the idea of the attitude that leads into the act of Obedience” (187). From here, Burke proceeds to the implicit idea within the distinction between Obedience and Disobedience, what he calls “the idea of some dividing line, some ‘watershed’ that is itself midway between the two slopes.” The term often “used for naming this ambiguous moment is ‘Will,’ or more fully, ‘Free Will,’ which is thought of as a faculty that makes possible the choice between the yea-saying of Humble Obedience or the nay-saying of Prideful Disobedience” (187). Burke goes on to spin out the cycle of terms around order and apply it in an interpretation of the Genesis narrative, but I will stop here and turn to the way the cycle relates to the central text of the Jesuit way of rhetorically proceeding. Ignatius gives the aim of the Spiritual Exercises: “to overcome oneself, and to order one’s life, without reaching a decision through some disordered affection.” The order/disorder opposition serves to frame both the ends and the means of the exercises, as the retreatant is instructed to pray that all his or her “intentions, actions, and operations may be ordered purely to the service and praise” of God (136). In attempting this ordering of life, the retreatant must examine the interior ordering of his or her mental and spiritual states, developing the right attitude toward the world as a means to an end and being sensitive to one’s inner “motions” in performing the meditations and contemplations. The proper Ignatian attitude toward the world is that of “indifference,” not in the sense of being uncaring about the world (quite the contrary), but rather in the sense of being neutral toward its affordances (e.g., opportunities for wealth and honor) that become obstacles to one’s ultimate goal of salvation or selfflourishing in the divine plan (130). In its directions for self-examination, Ignatian terminology illustrates Burke’s point about how one word-order borrows from another, in this case the use of natural “motion” to describe workings of human interiority: What are the inner motions during meditations and contemplations? What do they tell the retreatant about what direction to take? How do they result in spiritual “consolation” or “desolation” (202)? In all of these

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orderings, we see the way the Spiritual Exercises function as technologies of the self, rhetorical techniques that work toward a specific subject formation. Ultimately, the subject formed is one who is empowered to resist certain selfinterested affordances in the world and turn instead toward an emancipatory service to God in serving others. The Ignatian spin on the terminological cycle of order carries over into the Jesuit educational project, including its rhetorical teaching and learning. As the authors of “Ignatian Pedagogy” put it, the Spiritual Exercises are “rigorous exercises of the spirit wholly engaging the body, mind, heart and soul of the human person. Thus they offer not only matters to be pondered, but also realities to be contemplated, scenes to be imagined, feelings to be evaluated, possibilities to be explored, options to be considered, alternatives to be weighed, judgments to be reached and choices of action to be made—all with the expressed aim of helping individuals to seek and find the will of God at work in the radical ordering of their lives.” This ordering takes place in various specific practices that have pedagogical applications, such as the composition of place and the discernment of spirits. Translated into secular terms, these applications include the imaginative placing of oneself into a narrative and taking a lesson from the experience and the phronetic deliberation on the motives of one’s actions, as well as their effects. Within this conception of Jesuit education redescribed in Burkean terms, Jesuit eloquentia perfecta achieves three major aims of education—the pragmatic, the admonitory, and the appreciative—through training in rhetorical skills, moral reflection, and aesthetic appreciation. The rhetorical skills taught continue to build on the Greco-Roman tradition but are now informed by contemporary communication theory and composition research. Moral reflection includes not only using Jesuit discernment strategies for rhetorical invention, but also theoretical discussion that combines traditional Jesuit casuistry with revitalized philosophical analysis in contemporary Virtue Ethics. And whereas the Ratio Studiorum description of rhetorical study emphasized only oratory and poetry, today’s Jesuit rhetorical classroom deals with the appreciation of multiple genres in different media. With his usual imaginative flare, Burke once described the pragmatic, admonitory, and appreciative aims of education as “secular or technical analogues of the trinitarian three: ‘power,’ ‘wisdom,’ and ‘love.’ ” Jesuit rhetorical education encompasses both sides of Burke’s analogy. In addition, Jesuit rhetoric under a Burkean redescription helps meet certain philosophical challenges to the old and new rhetorics applied in education. Citing Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Biesta criti-

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cizes rhetorical metaperspectives for emphasizing perspectivity, arguing that it is simply untenable to distinguish between perspectival frames of reference and the empirical content of our experience. Abandoning this scheme-content distinction, he claims, “raises serious questions for the [rhetorical] idea that it is possible to become ‘symbol-wise’ or that inter/multi/transcultural education should focus on gaining knowledge about each other’s frames of reference. While this does not mean that we cannot learn from each other, this can, in my view, no longer be understood as a process in which we become acquainted with each other’s perspectives on the world. Instead, it has to be seen as a process through which we become acquainted with each other’s worlds.” As educators, we should emphasize becoming “world-wise” rather than rhetorically “symbol-wise.” Jesuit rhetoric can respond to this challenge in two complimentary ways. First, Jesuit rhetorical accommodationism has for centuries promoted educational “dialogue across difference” in its missionary work, not only by learning and describing native languages, but by practicing the language arts through immersion in the rich world of others’ cultural practices (rituals, dress, etc.). Indeed, as mentioned above, early Jesuit rhetorical education included cultural history, studying the “customs of nations,” in its rules for teaching eloquentia perfecta. To be symbol-wise is to be world-wise. Second, a world-wise Jesuit rhetoric can redescribe Burke’s symbol-wise terminological method and avoid using the scheme-content distinction. Burke’s notion of “terministic screen” is usually taken to refer to a lens through which reality is viewed, a linguistic version of a conceptual scheme between viewer and world. In contrast, Jesuit rhetorical practice (and rhetorical pragmatist theory) treat terminologies as tools by way of which an actor acts in a world in dealing with self and others. Actors, languageuse, and worlds are primordially co-constituted. So, again, to be symbol-wise is to be world-wise—and vice versa.

Conclusion By focusing on Jesuit rhetorical education, its theory and practice, I am suggesting that it is not sufficient to talk in general about educational purpose and its accomplishments; it is necessary to talk about a specific example and then perhaps even use it as something like an informative or representative anecdote for educational thinking. Understood from a dramatistic-logological perspective, Jesuit educational theory and practice represent one powerful way to answer the

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questions with which I began: How should we conceive the purpose of education today? What should be its aims, and how might they best be attained? With eloquentia perfecta at its core, Jesuit rhetorical education not only presents its own concrete answers to these questions; it also offers resources of thought to other educational approaches, especially as those resources get terminologically translated within the Burkean framework of theotropic logology.

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11 Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding | Eloquentia Perfecta in U.S. Jesuit Colleges

The Jesuit priest Francis Finn wrote a popular series of Catholic boy books at the end of the nineteenth century. Unlike his fictional namesake Huck, Father Finn is almost forgotten today, but his spirited stories about students at a Jesuit boarding school offer a useful introduction to my topic. In the novel bearing his name, the young hero Tom Playfair is described as having “a boyish eloquence which persuaded where it did not prove.” After hearing a sermon about Christ casting out devils, Tom convinces his compatriots to help him “exercise” (his word for exorcise) a fellow student “who curses and talks vile” (74). Failing in his first attempt, Tom finds other ways to reform the student, and his friend Alec ends up complimenting Tom’s method: “You know how to talk”; and Tom replies, “That’s what I’ve got a tongue for” (110). The models for such eloquence become clear in later books in the Tom Playfair series. In Harry Dee, referring to their teacher, a Jesuit scholastic, “the boys of Rhetoric class . . . say that he’s the most wonderful man they ever met. They say that when he gets started in class he talks like a book, and when he warms up to a subject he becomes really eloquent. His timidity all goes, his eyes flash, and he talks like an orator. He’s a poet, too; and the leader of the class said that Mr. Auber was the nearest thing to a genius that he ever met.” Later these students, who had been giving their rhetoric professor quite a hard time, ask this same teacher to tell them a story. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he began and then was slowly “transformed. His eyes flashed and his hands moved in easy, striking gestures; and in a flow of English, strong, pure, simple, the like of which we had never heard, he poured forth a tale of heroism and adventure that set our eyes blazing, riveted us to our seats, brought the tears to our eyes, and convinced us that we were listening to the most eloquent story-teller we could hope to meet with.” After publishing several of his schoolboy books, Father Finn commented on contemporary juvenile literature: “We, who are Catholics, expect something

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more than outward respectability, or, as in the case of [Horatio] Alger’s stories, rough honesty or courage from our young heroes. We have a right to demand that the supernatural element should pervade the character of the boy or the girl whom we delight to honor, and in proposing such heroes we need not depart from real life.” Finn’s narrative intention, in its theory and execution, illustrates nicely (what might be called) the Jesuits’ rhetorical way of proceeding, a practical concern in their ministries of the Word for the virtuous shaping of character through eloquentia perfecta. To support this claim, I track some rhetorical paths of thought running from Finn’s fiction through his Jesuit formation and college teaching to his association with an influential Jesuit textbook author, Charles Coppens. In weaving together the stories of these two Jesuit writers, I attempt to trace a particular strand of Jesuit rhetorical education that emphasizes the connections among eloquence, learning, and virtue. The Society of Jesus became deeply involved in higher education soon after its establishment in 1540. The centrality of rhetoric within the Jesuit curriculum can be seen in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, a plan for Jesuit education written collaboratively over three decades and structured as a hierarchy of student class levels and faculty professorships in grammar, humanities, rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. Under “Rules for the Professor of Rhetoric,” the goal given for the rhetoric class is eloquentia perfecta: instructing students to attain perfect eloquence. This goal should be accomplished through teaching the arts of oratory and poetry, with oratory being given preference. The class should aim at both practical utility and creative enrichment, meaning that perfect eloquence includes erudition as well as skill in the language arts. Erudition should derive from studying cultural history, scriptural authority, and Church doctrine. Such teaching must be adjusted to the capacities of the students. This pedagogical flexibility is part of a more general rhetorical accommodationism that Jesuits practiced in all their ministries, adjusting their teaching to their audiences’ physical, emotional, and spiritual development, whether in the confessional, the lecture hall, or the foreign mission. The rules of the Ratio are quite specific regarding the preferred rhetorical theory and practice: Precepts should be taught primarily from Aristotle and Cicero, and style should be taken “almost exclusively from Cicero.” For a rhetorical textbook, the Ratio recommends that of the Jesuit Cyprian Soarez, his De Arte Rhetorica, revised by the noted Jesuit orator and rhetoric professor of the Collegio Romano, Peter John Perpinian, and reprinted 207 times in various

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forms from its first publication in 1562 through the late eighteenth century, when the Society was temporarily suppressed. In his opening address to the Christian reader, Soarez justifies imitating classical Greco-Roman examples and notes that his fellow Jesuits embrace this pedagogy as “they start training youth in virtue and learning.” Later returning to this educational principle of combining morals with erudition, Soarez declares his intention to assist beginners with reading “the learned books of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian wherein lie the well-springs of eloquence” and concludes his initial address to readers by asserting his strong desire that they “possess every grace and scholarship and thus be pleasing and acceptable to the source and salvation of our life, Christ Jesus.” In the introduction that follows, Soarez opens with an observation that the Greeks thought reason and speech so similar that they used the same term (logos) for both. He then elaborates: “Reason is a kind of light, so to speak, and illumination of life; speech is the glory and ornament of reason. Reason guides and keeps our own minds under control; speech changes the minds even of others.” The “power and nature” of reason and speech “compel us to acknowledge that [God’s] goodness, wisdom, power, and dominion” deserve admiration and wonder from all. Soarez rhetorically asks, “What can be more wondrous than for thoughts that are so numerous, so lofty, so varied and manifold to be entrusted to speech?” And what of speech’s effects produced through our particular human embodiment? “What can be more wondrous than . . . for speech to pass into the minds of other people through very delicate passages of our ears, designed in such a unique and skillful manner, and to imprint its mark so perfectly and so fixedly on them that it comforts the sorrowful, arouses the languid, reanimates the discouraged, restrains those who have been carried away by empty pleasure, and, at length, moves the hearer to any mood whatever.” Soarez argues that if speech has such “pre-eminence,” then rhetoric must be “supreme,” since it contains the theory for equipping speech. “Indeed, this same human reason that has invented the other arts has also illuminated the . . . art of speaking” (111). This “close union” of speaking with reason is the origin and dignity of eloquence. Soarez adds that those who learn the rules of rhetoric and dialectic should “hasten towards perfection in the other arts” as well (112). This combination of learning with eloquence must also be purified by Christian teaching. “Just as a conscientious farmer makes a vine more fruitful and better to behold by trimming it with his pruning knife when it runs wild and spreads out rather freely in all directions, in the same way eloquence will recover its

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marvelous beauty, if there is a pruning of the vanity of errors into which it has fallen through the fault of men ignorant of God’s laws” (113). In his conclusion, Soarez describes eloquence as “nothing else but wisdom speaking fully” (428– 29), and in an earlier chapter, he follows Cicero in praising the “restraint and wisdom of the perfect orator,” on which “depend not only the speaker’s authority but the welfare of many individuals and especially that of the state as a whole.” Continuing to echo Cicero’s De Oratore, he then declares that eloquence must be joined “with integrity and utter discretion. If we were to teach the ability to speak to people who lack these virtues, we would certainly not be training orators but would be providing mad men with weapons” (119–20). For Soarez, Perpinian, and others later in the Jesuit rhetorical tradition, the ideal rhetor unites eloquence with wisdom and virtue. Jesuit eloquentia perfecta might thus be characterized as a particular form of Christian rhetoric, a pedagogical elaboration of the classical ideal of the good person writing and speaking skillfully for the public good. This strand of Jesuit rhetoric asserts that the teaching of eloquence should always be combined with critical thinking, moral discernment, and civic responsibility. Often quoting Quintilian’s definition of the perfect orator as the good person speaking well, many Jesuit rhetoricians repeated his claim that virtuous character was required for true eloquence. Such affirmations continued in the textbooks adopted in U.S. Jesuit colleges late in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. I turn now to the rhetorical genealogy of these required texts of the 1880s and 1890s. Eloquentia perfecta, as term and concept, remained a part of the Jesuit rhetorical tradition after the official restoration of the Society in 1814. The term still appears in the Ratio Studiorum of 1832, a revised version that was, however, never officially approved by the Society as a whole. In fact, by midcentury in the United States, the explicit rhetorical theory promoted in Jesuit colleges differed little from that in non-Jesuit schools. In both, the classical theory of the Greco-Roman tradition (Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) was often combined with the belletristic eighteenth-century British (more specifically, Scottish) tradition (especially Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres). After the American Civil War, the curriculum in U.S. Jesuit colleges remained a classical course of study centered on Greek and Latin much longer than in most non-Jesuit schools, which were transformed by the elective system and the importation of the modern German research model. However, English rhetoric-textbook adoptions remained similar in Jesuit and non-Jesuit schools into the last quarter of the century.

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The textbook situation changed as Jesuit colleges required at least three new rhetorics written by Jesuits. The first was Ars Dicendi, a Latin textbook by the German Jesuit Joseph Kleutgen, which appeared in the course lists of several Jesuit colleges as required for the Rhetoric Class’s Latin instruction or as a reference work for the class’s English rhetorical precepts. The other two popular Jesuit rhetorics were A Practical Introduction to English Rhetoric and The Art of Oratorical Composition, English texts written by a Belgian-born Jesuit, Charles Coppens, and published in 1880 and 1885, respectively. Fr. Coppens taught at the Jesuit seminary, St. Stanislaus in Florissant, Missouri, and at several American Jesuit colleges, including Detroit, Xavier, and Creighton. At St. Louis University in the late 1870s, as confessor and mentor, Coppens helped save the vocation of a future Jesuit novice, Francis Finn, by interesting himself in the student’s “spiritual welfare” and leading him “to read some very good Catholic books.” In the early 1880s, Coppens served as rector of St. Mary’s College in Kansas when Finn taught there as a Jesuit scholastic. St. Mary’s later became the basis of the fictional setting, St. Maure’s, for Finn’s Tom Playfair series, the early books of which he wrote while teaching at St. Mary’s and Xavier in the 1880s and 1890s. Throughout this same period, Coppens’s rhetoric textbooks were required at many Jesuit colleges across the country, a fact facilitated by the effort of the Missouri Province to standardize the curriculum and textbook adoptions of its Jesuit colleges. In the mid-1880s, one of Finn’s benefactors, Rudolph Meyer, SJ, the Missouri provincial, called for the evaluation and standardization of the curricula in his province, and the resulting report recommended the adoption of Coppens’s textbooks. In a 1920 autobiographical sketch, Coppens commented on the origins of his textbook writing: I was ordained, in 1865, and then employed for ten successive years in teaching, all alone, the juniorate at Florissant. Everything was very elementary in those early years of our province, and we were mostly well satisfied to do the best we could without any personal ambition. But meanwhile I felt my own unfitness for the work confided to me. The good Lord, however, assisted me, and during my professorship of the juniors I accumulated abundant notes on the science of rhetoric, which a few years later I ventured to publish as a text-book on the subject, chiefly because there was then no such work in English for the use of Catholic pupils. A few years later I published a companion volume to it on oratory. Both

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books were well received in Catholic colleges and academies, because they were the first text-books of the kind printed in America. They still have a fair circulation. The earliest textbook referred to here, the first Coppens published, is A Practical Introduction to English Rhetoric: Precepts and Exercises. Adopted widely by Jesuit colleges, A Practical Introduction was required for the Classes of Humanities and Poetry at Xavier College, where Finn taught the Third Academic Class in 1885–86, and also for the same classes at St. Mary’s College during his term there as rhetoric professor in 1894–95. Finn used the textbook for his own courses at Marquette College in 1888–89 when he taught the Poetry Class and again at Xavier in 1897–98, when he returned to teach the Humanities Class and to lecture on “contemporaneous literature” in a postgraduate course. Book 1 of A Practical Introduction moves from “object-lessons” (names, parts, and qualities of objects, actions by or to objects, uses of objects) through chapters on words, sentences, paragraphs, and punctuation. Book 2, “The Ornaments of Composition,” contains chapters on tropes, figures of words, and figures of thought; and book 3, “Style in Literary Composition,” includes material on beauty, sublimity, wit, humor, and taste as well as the varieties and improvement of style. The final three sections focus on genres of prose composition and poetry: book 4 covers imitation, letter-writing, narration, description, essays, dialogues, novels, and history, while book 5 explains versification, and book 6 concludes the volume with the “Nature and Varieties of Poetry.” In the “Narration” chapter of A Practical Introduction, Coppens presents some “general rules for all good narration,” one of which emphasizes choosing the proper subject for the “end intended by the writer.” The options for narrative intentions are defined in Ciceronian rhetorical terms—to please, to move, and to instruct—and Cicero is also the source for one of the examples Coppens provides of “simple narration”: “Dionysius and Damocles” with its “every detail” adding to “the happy effect of the whole.” Other examples to be imitated include narratives with moral lessons, such as “the humble are exalted” and “though a taste of pleasure might quicken the relish of life, an unrestrained indulgence is inevitable destruction.” In the chapter “Novels,” Coppens defines the genre as “a fictitious narrative in prose, embracing a complete series of events, and exhibiting some phase of human life” (209) and lists examples of such phases: societal conditions, period manners, passions, institutional tendencies, and peculiar worldviews.

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His informal taxonomy includes philosophical novels, society novels, and sensational novels. The latter two come in for some criticism. Society novels usually “ridicule the extravagances of prevalent tastes and practices” and are “chiefly taken up with the exhibition of character.” Such novels “may be useful in their way,” Coppens continues, “but unfortunately not many can be recommended for the perusal of those who care to keep their hearts undefiled by the contamination of vice.” Coppens finds that “sensational novels are still more objectionable” because they “stir up the passions by frequent vivid sketches of exaggerated and unreal scenes” and in so doing “they create a morbid craving for exciting stories, and impair that calm of mind which is an essential element of a prudent and considerate character.” Instead of these negative effects of reading, Coppens suggests by contrast the positive benefits of reading philosophical novels, which include religious novels, though he still cautions that “the doctrines inculcated be sound” and emphasizes that “the composition possess literary beauty and proper interest” and that “the moral tone of the characters be favorable to virtue” (209–10). Of the last quality, Coppens notes that there is “no more excellent model” than Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman’s Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs (1854). It was this same novel that began “a new period” in the life of the young boy Francis Finn. Years later, Finn recorded that “the beautiful story of those early Christian martyrs had a profound influence upon my life. Religion began to mean something to me. Since the day of reading ‘Fabiola,’ I have carried the conviction that one of the greatest things in the world is to get the right book into the hands of the right boy or girl.” On this point, the fiction writer Finn and the rhetorician Coppens appear to agree completely, and that agreement further illustrates the consistent preoccupation of the Jesuit tradition with connecting the language arts and Christian virtue. The second textbook Coppens wrote was The Art of Oratorical Composition, Based upon the Precepts and Models of the Old Masters, which became a required text for the Rhetoric Class in Jesuit colleges both in and beyond the Missouri Province. Father Finn used the text when he was professor of rhetoric at Marquette in 1889–90, at St. Mary’s in 1894–95, and still again at Xavier in 1898–99. Continuing the earlier nineteenth-century mixture of classical and belletristic rhetorics, Oratorical Composition added a more recognizably Jesuit character and an American flavor to the combination. Coppens often quotes Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, along with Blair, but also cites the Jesuit Kleutgen’s Ars Dicendi and refers to Jesuit orators as examples. Americans are

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represented by the speeches of Daniel Webster as well as the Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory of John Quincy Adams, Harvard’s first Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory. That Coppens uses Adams’s lectures is somewhat unusual and perhaps even surprising given how the Boylston Professor explicitly rejects Quintilian’s definition of the perfect orator: Adams declares that the Roman’s arguments “in support of his favorite position, are not all worthy of his cause. They do not glow with that open, honest eloquence, which they seem to recommend; but sometimes resemble the quibbling of a pettifogger, and sometimes the fraudulent morality of a Jesuit.” Nevertheless, Coppens clearly found Adams’s neoclassicism helpful in developing his own particular version of Jesuit rhetoric. In his introduction, Coppens distinguishes among the terms rhetoric, oratory, and eloquence. Rhetoric is defined as “the art of inventing, arranging, and expressing thought in a manner adapted to influence or control the minds and wills of others,” whereas oratory is “that branch of rhetoric which expresses thought orally.” To define eloquence, Coppens prefers to use Webster’s Dictionary: Eloquence is “the expression or utterance of strong emotion in a manner adapted to excite correspondent emotions in others.” This emphasis on strong emotion follows in a long Jesuit tradition, beginning at least with the rhetoric of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, and it is characteristic of other religious rhetorical traditions emerging out of the Renaissance. Also typical of the Jesuit rhetorical way, Coppens asserts that eloquence is “not confined to oral discourse,” but “applies also to written language.” He then describes oratory as “a noble art” and, like many Jesuit and non-Jesuit rhetoricians before him, quotes from the first book of Cicero’s De Oratore: “On the influence and the wisdom of a perfect orator depends not only his own dignity, but also, to a very great extent, the safety of multitudes and the welfare of the whole republic.” Coppens discusses “national variations,” claiming that “American eloquence aims at the perfection of the Latin,” which emphasizes “the beauty of eloquence, without, however, ignoring its usefulness.” The introduction concludes with a listing of the book’s divisions, which, Coppens notes, agree with those in Quintilian’s Institutes, “the most thorough and systematic work ever written on this subject” of training orators (14–16). Oratorical Composition includes major sections on the invention, arrangement, and development of thought, as well as “Memory and Elocution” and “The Different Species of Oratory.” Consistent with the Jesuit emphasis I have been tracking, Coppens precedes all of these divisions with a section, “Sources of

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Success in Oratory,” that highlights moral virtue along with natural talent and trained skills. “But far more important than any physical power in the orator,” he writes, “are the moral virtues with which nature and his own efforts, with the help of God’s grace, have adorned his soul.” He then cites Blair: “In order to be a truly eloquent or persuasive speaker, nothing is more necessary than to be a virtuous man. This was a favorable position among the ancient rhetoricians: Non posse oratorem esse nisi virum bonum—’That no one could be an orator except a good man.’ ” Among the virtues “most necessary for an orator,” Coppens lists probity, temperance, public spirit, compassion for the unfortunate, benevolence, modesty, confidence, self-command, and a habit of application and industry (26–31). He then makes the same association between a speaker’s virtues and successful eloquence in the rhetorical genres of deliberative, forensic, and especially sacred oratory. Of course, the close connection maintained between eloquence and virtue throughout the Jesuit rhetorical tradition is to be expected, given the longstanding educational goals of the Society. The founding Constitutions of 1558 declare that “very special care should be taken that those who come to the universities of the Society to obtain knowledge should acquire along with it good and Christian moral habits,” while the Ratio Studiorum of 1599 makes clear that students should be instructed so that “along with letters, they also and above all interiorize the moral behavior worthy of a Christian.” Under “Rules Common to All the Professors of the Lower Classes” (including rhetoric), the Ratio urges that inside and outside the classroom “impressionable young minds” should be prepared “for the devoted service and love of God and the virtues by which we ought to please him.” These pedagogical goals continued to be stressed in course catalogues for U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the nineteenth century. A typical formulation emphasizes the value of a “liberal education” in the tradition of the Ratio, “which has met with success for centuries in the schools of the Society, both in Europe and in America.” It aims “to develop the moral and mental faculties of the students, to make good Christians, good citizens, good scholars—men who shall be an ornament to religion and the upholders of Christian society.” Coppens’s Oratorical Composition underlines the same point: “It is the chief duty of education to make men virtuous; any system of training which does not put virtue in the first place is a false system.” The Jesuit tradition of eloquentia perfecta and its preoccupation with rhetoric and virtue thus fits well within the Society’s general educational program. These Jesuit ways of proceeding, rhetorical and otherwise, emerge from another of the

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Society’s founding documents, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, a book that Coppens calls “one of the most remarkable and useful books in the world.” Ignatius’s text has long been at the center of Jesuit formation, as testified by many members of the Society, including Francis Finn, who comments on his experience during his first novitiate year in 1877: “I can imagine nothing better calculated to make men close followers of Christ and by consequence true heroes of the cross, saintly missionaries, heroic martyrs, than the performance of the thirty days’ exercises as laid down by St. Ignatius.” Similar effects are recorded in the spiritual diary of Finn’s provincial supporter, Rudoph Meyer, who responds to the call of the “Two Standards” meditation during several retreats over many years. The assumed narrative of that exercise pits those under Christ’s banner against the followers of Lucifer, “the mortal enemy of our human nature,” a conflict on which Meyer reflects, applying it to his own life and hearing it applied by his director to the history of the Jesuits. As Finn and Meyer suggest, the Spiritual Exercises are not simply to be read, they are to be performed. That performance includes a retreatant’s working with a director in conjunction with Ignatius’s text, which specifies a series of meditative and contemplative practices ordering the retreatant’s life in preparation for a vocational election. The rhetoric of the exercises appeals to the intellect and emotions of the practitioners as it targets their narrative imaginations. In the contemplative practice called “composition of place,” retreatants are instructed to use their imaginations to envision, sometimes through appeal to all five senses, a biblical narrative into which they will place their embodied selves as participants. Called to remember the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey, retreatants are told to “see in imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Consider its length and breadth, whether it is level or winds through valleys and hills.” At the place of the Nativity, retreatants are supposed to imagine themselves as actors in the narrative scene: “I will make myself a poor, little, and unworthy slave, gazing at [the Holy Family], contemplating them, and serving them in their needs, just as if I were there, with all possible respect and reverence. Then I will reflect upon myself to draw some profit.” This explicit appeal to narrative imagination is thus combined with moral discernment and character formation. Such a rhetorical path of thought connects the exercises with both the intended effects of virtuous book-reading and the pedagogical tradition of eloquentia perfecta that I have been tracking throughout this essay.

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12 Judging and Hoping | Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. . . . And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran vividly stages Iranian receptions of novels by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. This “memoir in books” itself became a popular object of reception as a 2003 bestseller in the United States, a reception demonstrating the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture that is always local. American reviewers and academic critics of Reading Lolita not only testify to the power of these effects but also interpret and evaluate the acts of reading represented in the book they are reviewing. Specifically, they judge the hope offered by a book about college students reading and judging classic novels of “Western secular values” within a political context dominated by a theological autocracy—the Islamic Republic of Iran. In this essay, I focus especially on the section of Reading Lolita that most dramatically represents judging and hoping: the scene in which the author’s Iranian students put The Great Gatsby and “The American Dream” on trial in their classroom at the University of Tehran. I am guided in this reception study by three interrelated questions: What kinds of thinking take place through reading? How does thinking develop rhetorically in reading novels? What rhetorical paths of thought can be traced through the reading of a text and its reception? In the receptions it represents and in its own reception, Reading Lolita in Tehran illustrates the effects of getting people to think about thinking through or because of reading. One of the first academic treatments of the book underlines this aspect of the reception. In “Women and Reading,” Kate Flint writes, “From the start Nafisi felt passionately about the importance of getting her

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students to think about the value of reading fiction.” Flint then quotes a passage from the book in which Nafisi says, I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. In other words, Nafisi wished her students to think in the sense elaborated by Hannah Arendt, another writer about totalitarian regimes. In “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Arendt ponders the question “Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought?” She defines thinking as “the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass,” and she ends up claiming that thinking does condition people against evildoing. This effect of thinking occurs primarily because it is the nature of thought to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought—words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines). . . . The consequence of this peculiarity is that thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics. We might add that thinking precedes, but also follows, from judging, which works through rhetorical phronesis (practical wisdom) in specific times and places. Flint underlines the importance of these geopolitical conditions of phronetic judgment in another of her own judgments about Reading Lolita. After quoting Nafisi quoting Adorno, Flint comments that “Reading Lolita in Tehran is remarkable for the ways it lends new eyes to those of us who take the reading

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privileges of a Western democracy more or less for granted. Reading—presented, to be sure, by someone whose experience has made her a fervent advocate of Western liberalism—becomes simultaneously an escape from oppression, especially gender oppression; an intellectual transgression; and a promise that life might and can be otherwise. Reading provides liberation through the imagination.” As we will see, Flint appears to be an example of Nafisi’s ideal reader, though it is important for my argument that she parenthetically notes Nafisi’s ideological position as a “fervent advocate of Western liberalism.” In late 2003 and early 2004, the reviews of Reading Lolita in Tehran in U.S. newspapers and magazines were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluations of the book’s form and content. Sonja Ostrow, a college junior, wrote in an undergraduate publication, the Yale Review of Books, “Chilling, exciting, stimulating: Reading Lolita in Tehran is all of these, and thus has the power to enlighten and inspire readers on a political, historical, literary, and even personal level.” Ostrow picks out the novel’s representation of reading The Great Gatsby for special attention: “In one particularly telling passage, Nafisi observes, ‘My students were slightly baffled by Gatsby. The story of an idealistic guy, so much in love with this beautiful rich girl who betrays him, could not be satisfying to those for whom sacrifice was defined by words such as masses, revolution and Islam. Passion and betrayal were for them political emotions, and love far removed from the stirrings of Jay Gatsby for Mrs. Tom Buchanan.’ ” Ostrow then suggests how alien she found the Iranian students’ responses: “To a reader who takes the idea of romantic love for granted, who accepted Gatsby’s unrequited love without question, such a response is chilling, intellectually exciting, and stimulating in its strangeness.” Here Ostrow registers a troubling of her own assumptions, and thus we can say that this undergraduate found Nafisi’s book a spur to thinking. But there were other receptions by (I presume) older readers that seem harder to judge. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Heather Hewett praises Reading Lolita as a “stirring testament to the power of Western literature to cultivate democratic change and open-mindness.” Hewett goes on to say, “Drawing from vivid anecdotes (including an unforgettable scene when her university students put The Great Gatsby on trial), [Nafisi] reveals how literature can offer readers a valuable way of understanding the world.” But Hewett introduces her evaluation of the book with the following statement: “Asar Nafisi’s memoir makes a good case for reading the classics of Western literature no matter where you are.” Hewett is right that this is probably Nafisi’s

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intended argument, but such a statement of the case foregrounds that argument’s problems. A very different lesson might in fact be taken from Fitzgerald’s novel, its reception in Nafisi’s memoir, and the reception of that memoir: where you are does matter in reading Western classics, indeed, in reading anything. And so too in thinking about judging and hoping: it is all about where (and how) you are. In the Middle East Journal, an Iranian-American—Cameron Kamran— wrote admiringly about the way that Nafisi “relates great Western classics and their themes to life in the Islamic Republic. . . . [L]iterature for Nafisi is a universal language that bridges cultures and instills a form of democracy by teaching us empathy for the complexities of the human condition. According to Nafisi, the principal sin of the Islamic regime is its unyielding judgment, its inability to feel compassion.” It is this dogmatic, absolutist, ideological form of judgment that is judged wanting in the Gatsby trial scene. Kamran takes the trial somewhat allegorically: “Gatsby, a character who ends up destroying himself by trying to re-imagine his past, is an apt metaphor for the Islamic Regime— a cabal of Ayatollahs that sacrificed the present by enforcing their own dream of a collective past on Iran.” While this figurative meaning is certainly part of the book’s staging of Gatsby’s reception, it is in no way all or perhaps even the most important aspect of that staging. Rather, as Kamran himself notes at the end of his review, the main question is how universal are the Western values of universality, rationality, and humanism. “Nafisi, through her love of Western literature and the values of empathy and choice that it holds universal and sacred, wages a . . . crusade in modern Iran, and one that is critical to its prosperity and indeed the future of greater Muslim society.” Nafisi’s teaching and writing are based on the hope that her judgment of value in Western literature can prevail in her native land. How she judges these values determines, in turn, what will count as hope. It is the judgment of both hope and judgment itself that is put on trial in the Gatsby section of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi arms her readers with something like a rhetorical hermeneutics to view thinking, judging, and hoping in the scene. “All through the week before the trial, [in] whatever I did . . . part of my mind was constantly occupied on shaping my arguments for the trial. This after all was not merely a defense of Gatsby but of a whole way of looking at and appraising literature—and reality, for that matter.” That is, interpreting and arguing—hermeneutics and rhetoric—are inseparable in Nafisi’s run-up to the

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trial of Gatsby: in planning her case for making a certain sense of and positing a particular value for the novel, Nafisi shapes an argument that would simultaneously defend the novel and advocate a way of interpreting and evaluating not only literature, but socio-political reality more generally. As the trial unfolds, the reader hears various interpretive arguments mounted by both sides in the case. First there is the prosecution’s simplistic ideological reading of literature: Gatsby is immoral because its hero is an adulterer and a criminal, and the novel values an American crass materialism that Islam rejects. The Islamist judgment that the book should be censored is ironically mirrored by a Leftist reading that defends the book because at least it represents the failures of the capitalist American Dream. Both ideological judgments evaluate the book on the basis of its perceived political views. In contrast, the designated student defense attorney (and Nafisi, who plays the role of the defendant) judges the book according to what is presented as a non-ideological view of literature: The defense argues that the prosecutor is unable to “read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, crude and simplistic exaltation of right and wrong.” A novel, she continues, “is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then Gatsby has succeeded brilliantly. This is the first time in class that a book has created such controversy.” The lesson the defense attorney takes from the novel is that “[i]t teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also.” This is a judgment about judgment that leads to thinking. But this same thinking turns back on the supposed non-idealogues even as it applies to their opponents. In fact, we might ask: Are the defenders of The Great Gatsby just as dogmatic, absolutist, and ideological about reading and Western values as the Islamists and Leftists are about their religious and political views? To answer this question, we need to distinguish among dogmatic attitude, absolutist belief, and ideological thinking. You can, for example, be dogmatic or flexible in your absolutism, as my final example will show. But we can ask further questions: In seeing the American ideology of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the hope for Iran, has Nafisi failed to see the United States as unthinking in its hope, as acting in another ideology with its own blindnesses when performed in another time and place? Is the rhetorical effect of Nafisi’s teaching Gatsby in Iran different from that of her teaching it in the United States, say, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,

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where she was hired while neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz was dean before he became the Deputy Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush? Has Reading Lolita been used by neoconservatives to make sense of Iran as tyrannical oppressor of women “while the United States is at the height of its war on terror and Iran has been [singled] out by the U.S. president as a member of an ‘axis of evil’ ”? These rhetorical and interpretive questions emerge from thinking geopolitically about the judgments and hopes represented in the trial of The Great Gatsby and throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran and its reception. Such questions become all the more pressing as Nafisi positions herself within contemporary U.S. debates over nuclear proliferation and terrorism: “While Western governments are confused and obsessed with the threat of Iran’s potential weapons of mass destruction, the Islamic regime is dealing with threats of its own and increasing its repressive measures against workers, women, students, gays, minorities and, now, publishers and writers.” In defending publishers and writers, Nafisi condemns literary censorship, arguing for “the importance of books as channels for communication and creation of open spaces and genuine exchanges.” Consistent with her earlier rhetorical stance, Nafisi sees these books as “transcending the limitations of politics, nationality, race, gender, religion or geography” In July 2005, Nafisi contributed to the “This I Believe” series on National Public Radio by reading her essay, “Mysterious Connections that Link Us Together.” She again takes up the topic of reading literature, citing the reception of still another book about judgment and hope, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to make her points. “I believe in empathy,” she begins. “It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens.” She continues with a favorite literary example: “Whenever I think of the word empathy, I think of a small boy named Huckleberry Finn contemplating his friend and runaway slave, Jim.” Nafisi refers to the famous scene in which Huck struggles to decide whether to give Jim up and return him to slavery. His religious training says stealing a slave, someone else’s private property, is a grievous sin deserving of “everlasting fire.” But, in Nafisi’s words, Huck “imagines Jim not as a slave but as a human being and he decides that, ‘alright, then, I’ll go to hell.’ ” She comments: “What Huck rejects is not religion but an attitude of selfrighteousness and inflexibility.”

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Nafisi goes on to relate an example of reception that she sees as confirming her argument: In the early 1980s when I taught at the University of Tehran, I, like many others, was expelled. I was very surprised to discover that my staunchest allies were two students who were very active at the University’s powerful Muslim Students’ Association. These young men and I had engaged in very passionate and heated arguments [described in Reading Lolita]. I had fiercely opposed their ideological stances. But that didn’t stop them from defending me. When I ran into one of them after my expulsion, I thanked him for his support. “We are not as rigid as you imagine us to be, Professor Nafisi,” he responded. “Remember your own lectures on Huck Finn? Let’s just say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell!” What lesson might we take from this reception anecdote, especially the final sentence, “Let’s just say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell”? Nafisi most likely sees the student’s statement as an ironic confirmation of the universality of the values she taught, and she is probably right that, at the very least, her teaching a particular reading of Twain’s novel has encouraged this student to think about his religious beliefs. But what else might we say about religious belief (or any belief for that matter) in relation to this famous episode of Huck Finn’s decision to go to hell rather than betray his friend? The lesson certainly is not that Huck has given up his racist beliefs; their lingering presence is evident in his words and actions later in the novel. Rather, he has at one particular moment allowed one set of feelings and beliefs—his friendship with Jim—to trump another set—those of a slave society’s political theology. He has phronetically—from Twain’s and our perspectives—judged the situation, rhetorically deliberated his options, and chosen to act in favor of his friend and at a certain cost to himself. Some of us might claim that the author has simply represented Huck as beginning to trade one ideology—call it pro-slavery or religious racism—for another—call it abolition or liberal humanism. Still, there is no doubt that we—in our time and place—prefer the latter to the former. Similar to Huck, the Muslim students who defended Nafisi were willing to take a risk in opposing—at least temporarily and in this specific instance—a certain ideological belief or perhaps simply the dogmatic application of that belief. To point out the

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rhetorical specificity of their phronetic decision is to take nothing away from our admiration for it. But such thinking about their judgment does qualify a bit the hope that Nafisi offers by citing it. That is, we have not moved from an “ideological stance” to a “non-ideological stance” in judging literature or anything else but from one ideology (or attitude toward it) to another, one Nafisi and most of us today approve. Judgment cannot be depoliticized in the way Nafisi assumes. Rather, our hope depends very much on understanding the political nature of our judgment and the rhetorical process through which our thinking can change.

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13 Narrative as Embodied Intensities | The Eloquence of Travel in Nineteenth-Century Rome

An ancient traveler once remarked to his Athenian audience, “As I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, ‘To the Unknown God.’ ” Here St. Paul tells of walking through the city and being impressed by the religiosity of its citizens. They were so religious that they not only had altars erected to the whole pantheon of local and national deities; they even erected an altar to some god they might have overlooked. But instead of using this citywalk discovery to chastise the Athenians for their idolatry, Paul strategically exploits it as an opportunity to tell his hearers the Good News: “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.” He states that he knows the name of their unknown god: He is the “God that made the world and all things therein. . . . [I]n him we live, and move, and have our being.” And now this God, the God, “commandeth all men every where to repent” and follow his risen Son, the embodied Logos. In this essay, I discuss another site of city walks, of moving bodies through space, in order to explore the relation of rhetoric to narrative. More specifically, I describe walking rhetorics and narratives of embodied intensities as I travel back and forth between hermeneutic theory and interpretive practice, between generalizing about narrative rhetoric and doing readings of particular examples of such. Once again I am trying to illustrate something I call rhetorical hermeneutics: the use of rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. In this case, I use some emplotted rhetoric to practice a bit of narrative theory (with Paul Ricoeur and Kenneth Burke) by doing mini-histories of embodied experiences of American travelers in Rome during the mid-nineteenth century.

I Following Ricoeur, I am thinking about narrative as the configuration of the temporal dimension of lived experience and experience as the temporality of

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living configured as narrative. Ricoeur writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” Narrative enables humans to grasp the nature of temporality, while narrative’s inseparable connection to temporality is what makes narrative meaningful. I want to illustrate concretely these somewhat abstract claims by using the records of American tourists in Rome to think about narrative rhetoric as embodied movement in space over time. I talk about literal bodies wandering through material circumstances, as well as figurative bodies used imaginatively to move thought and feeling into new locations. In so doing, I am not attempting to replace Ricoeur’s hermeneutic focus on temporality but merely adding to it an emphasis on the spatial dimension of narrative. For many Americans visiting Rome in the nineteenth century, the city became an imaginative landscape for thoughtful feeling about art, religion, and politics. Often such rhetorical imaginings developed through the narrative placement of real and fictive bodies into Rome’s urban space and its historical time. For example, in his 1857 journal, Herman Melville describes standing in the Coliseum and “repeopling” it with sculptures from the Vatican to bring stories of ancient gladiatorial spectacle to present life. He and other American visitors also repeopled the cityspace with specific historical persons (Caesar, Cicero, Paul) as a way of relating classical and Christian Rome to contemporary U.S. culture. On February 26, 1857, Melville writes of walking from the Roman Coliseum to the Capitoline gallery. There he gazes at the statue of the Dying Gladiator and notes that it “shows . . . humanity existed [then] amid the barberousness of the Roman time, as it [does] now among Christian barbarousness.” Almost exactly one year later, Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne was also greatly moved by this famous statue, though his response seems more aesthetic than ethico-cultural: “I was not in a very fit state to see it, for that most miserable sense of satiety—the mind’s repletion when too much rich or delicate food has been forced upon it—had got possession of me. . . . Still, I had life enough left to admire this statue, and was more impressed by it than by anything of marble that I ever saw. I do not believe that so much pathos is wrought into any other block of stone.” Here Hawthorne describes his reaction in distinctly corporeal terms, his somewhat numbed human body being enlivened by the marble one. Moving in and around the city, Melville and Hawthorne frequently experienced such intense somatic thinking and affects, recording their movements through figures of corporeal images, comparisons, and associations. Melville

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narrates walking along the Appian Way and seeing a “tomb with olive leaves on it,” which inspires his parodic allusion to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42, replacing the Apostle’s affirmation of the body’s eventual resurrection (“sown in corruption . . . raised in incorruption”) with his own resigned “sown in corruption, raised in olives.” The monuments along the Appian Way left an equally strong impression on Hawthorne, and the emotions evoked led to similar ironic thoughts about living and dying, in his case, emphasizing the contrast between the solid permanence of memorial stone and the relative fragility of human life. Hawthorne writes that “these old Roman tombs” with “their immense height and mass, their solidity, defying time and the elements” had “not availed to keep so much as the name of an individual or a family from utter oblivion.” Reusing the experience in his novel The Marble Faun, Hawthorne calls these entombed the “unknown dead” whose ambition for “everlasting remembrance” went for naught. Instead of such monolithic burial places, their bodies could just as well have been laid to rest under a “little green hillock, in a graveyard, without a headstone.” Hawthorne takes a certain perverse pleasure in the fact that these egotistical efforts to build such massive tombs “have turned out so utterly abortive.” In Melville’s 1857 journal, on the same day as his Appian Way tomb description, the Apostle Paul makes another appearance, this time in the name of a church along the Ostia road. Viewing St. Paul Outside-the-Walls inspires Melville’s brief meditation on the contrast between bodily sickness and “magnificent” architecture: “Malaria among the gilding. Building against Nature.” The next day Melville revisited the Coliseum and the journal notes his imaginative repeopling of it, later elaborating: “Coliseum, great green hollow—restore it repeople it with all statues in Vatican/Dying and Fighting Gladiators” and then commenting “Restoring ruins—/ . . . More imagination wanted at Rome than at home to appreciate the place.” At home, in his November lecture on “Statues in Rome,” Melville does indeed use his vividly affective imagination to embody his lived experience of the place. He speaks of standing in the Coliseum and emphasizes the imaginative reconstruction that was, then and now, in Rome and at home, constitutive of the embodied intensity of being in a place and of thinking within that affective being: “But the imagination must rebuild it as it was of old; it must be repeopled with the terrific games of the gladiators, with the frantic leaps and dismal howls of the wild, bounding beasts, with the shrieks and cries of the excited spectators. Unless this is done, how can we appreciate the Gladiator?” Melville comments

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on the imaginative work required of the spectator, explaining that the artist’s feeling must be matched by the visitor in viewing: “And so, restoring the shattered arches and terraces, I repeopled them with all the statues from the Vatican, and in the turfy glen of the arena below I placed the Fighting Gladiator from the Louvre, confronting him with the dying one from the Capitol. And as in fancy I heard the ruffian huzzas for the first rebounded from the pitiless hiss for the last, I felt that more than one in that host I had evoked shared not its passions, and looked not coldly on the dying gladiator.” Here Melville transforms his earlier journal references to Roman and Christian barbarity into a Christian compliment to the Roman sculptor: “None but a gentle heart could have conceived the idea of the Dying Gladiator, and he was Christian in all but name.” Thus, Melville makes good on his earlier introductory comment remarking on the human similarities between pagan Romans and modern Christians: “If we image the life that is in the statues and look at their more humane aspects, we shall not find that the old Roman, stern and hard-hearted as we generally imagine him, was entirely destitute of tenderness and compassion, for though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.” Many other American visitors to Rome had experiences not unlike Melville’s, examples of acting, moving, and being that I’d like to conceptualize as one protracted lived experience of rhetorical-hermeneutic embodiment—from the time of walking through Rome to the moment of lecturing or writing at home. That is, rather than seeing Melville’s lecture or another tourist’s travel writings as simply the report of an experience in the past, I suggest reading the later speaking and writing as more the temporary end point of one extended rhetorical experience of imaginative interpretation, stretching from a walk in Rome to standing at an American lectern or sitting at a writing desk. Melville’s lecture is helpful in emphasizing this rhetorical-hermeneutic dimension from the beginning to the end of his experience in and then after Rome. Besides commenting on the challenge of imaginatively recreating the statues in words for his later audiences, Melville also notes the initiating rhetorical power of the statues themselves, remarking on the way that the Romans’ pleasure in “these beautiful figures” affectively “persuades us” of our common humanity with these ancients. It is with similar embodied thinking—a combination of self-conscious recollection, intense bodily emotion, and traditional book learning about historical figures—that other visitors experienced Italy throughout the nineteenth century, especially the evocative classical and Christian sites of Rome. These embodied

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intensities of rhetorical experience did not just involve general feelings and thoughts of universal humanity; they also addressed more topical issues related to art, religion, and politics of the day. Another American tourist in Rome was the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey, a lifelong friend of Melville’s in-laws, who presided at the baptism of his children and at his father-in-law’s funeral. Long before Dewey’s support for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act made him a target for political condemnation by Emerson and Frederick Douglass, Dewey as a liberal divine visited Italy in 1833 and wrote of his strong identification with Cicero as representative of republican virtue, wise learning, and perfect eloquence. Dewey says, “When in my early youth I studied Cicero[`s] de Oratore, I thought I was to put myself under the teaching of a mere rhetorician; that he would tell me how to stretch out my hand and how to tone my voice, and things of that sort. But I soon found that the noble old Roman was demanding that the orator should learn everything— know everything—be everything; that, according to his idea, the whole rounded circuit of human perfection, came within the orator’s walk.” Though Dewey’s obvious point is that Cicero’s importance transcends the persuasive tricks of delivery, bodily arts of gesture and voice, he sums up the larger compass of the rhetorician’s art, its combination of eloquence and learning, the “whole rounded circuit of human perfection,” in the metaphor of the “orator’s walk,” the moving of one’s body across space. And this metaphor is literalized when Dewey himself steps over the ground where Cicero stepped. In the Vatican Museum, Dewey came upon an exhibit of the mosaic floor from Cicero’s Tusculan villa: “Though it is railed in, I was resolved to walk across it, and so I did; and doing so, was much more sure that I had trodden on the very spot on which Cicero had stood, than I shall be, if I visit the ruins of Tusculum.” Throughout the nineteenth century, classical Rome was thought of differently by different tourists at different times, for example, in the lived experience of the relation between pagan and Catholic Rome. Dewey sometimes imagined all Christians in stark contrast to the ancient Romans, as when he visited the Coliseum and watched “a company of friars . . . going around in solemn procession from altar to altar, and performing religious service, on the very spot where their elder brethren by thousands had poured out their blood; the mighty walls seemed to frown at the triumph of the despised and persecuted religion. But whether they frown or not, it is certain that all the remains of antiquity, whether religious or heroic, are made to bear marks of the ascendency of the new religion.” At other times, Dewey saw the classical Roman

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republican and the Protestant Christian not in opposition, but in alliance against a common enemy. In discussing Roman Catholicism as a system, Dewey described it as “the childhood of Christianity,” while Protestantism he considered “to be its manhood.” And though Dewey admitted that this manhood had its “own peculiar exposures,” he advocated “freedom in religious affairs” just as he did “freedom in civil affairs,” asserting quite simply that “the republicanism of Christianity is Protestantism.” At still other times, Dewey actually experienced a sympathetic attraction to Roman Catholicism: “I confess that I seldom enter these [Catholic] churches [in Rome] without an impulse to go and kneel at some of the altars. . . . My own feeling is . . . that if it were not for the faith, I should like many of the forms very well.” While some of Dewey’s fellow American tourists shared his mixed feelings and contradictory thoughts, others experienced in undiluted form an attraction to the city’s ancient heritage and a rejection of its contemporary version. Visiting Rome later in the century, Frederick Douglass noted that he “was much more interested in the Rome of the past than in the Rome of the present; . . . in the preaching of Paul eighteen hundred years ago than in the preaching of the priests and popes of to-day.” Douglass felt deeply while “walking on the same Appian Way where [Paul] walked, when, having appealed to Caesar, he was bravely on the way to this same Rome to meet his fate.” This moving bodily identification meant much more to Douglass than the various body parts and relics reportedly found under the dome of St. Peter’s—“the head of St. Luke in a casket, a piece of the true cross, a lock of the Virgin Mary’s hair, and the legbone of Lazarus”—as he sarcastically comments on the “wonderful things in that line palmed off on a credulous and superstitious people.” Indexing his own racial embodiment, Douglass continues in the same ironic vein: “I had some curiosity in seeing devout people going up to the black statue of St. Peter—I was glad to find him black; I have no prejudice against his color—and kissing the old fellow’s big toe, one side of which has been nearly worn away by these devout and tender salutes.” In his diary, Douglass noted the Roman ruins through which he walked— “the landing place of Paul, the tomb of Virgil, the house of Cicero”—but focused on what interested him most: “the fact that I was looking upon the country seen eighteen hundred years ago by the prisoner apostle on his way to Rome to answer for his religion. It somehow gave me a more vivid impression of the heroism of the man as I looked upon the grand ruins of the religion against which Paul dared to preach.” Douglass’s “vivid” Roman experience was of a piece with his

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memories of Athens, where at the Acropolis he “heard read Paul’s famous address to the Athenians” and “tried to imagine the state of mind incited.” In Rome, Douglass also intensely imagined the contemporary parallels to Paul’s movements in the ancient city: “These heathen Temples represent a religion as sincerely believed in as men now believe in the Christian religion, and Paul was an infidel to this heathen religion as much as [the atheist] Robert Ingersol is now to the Christian religion.” Like others before him, Douglass tells a tale of corporeal movement through an urban space experienced as a concentrated fusion of perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and spirituality.

II So far in this essay I’ve been describing these American visitors as embodied intensities walking through Rome, who then continue their experiences by writing or speaking in narrative form, sometimes imaginatively repeopling the city with religious and secular figures of the ancient past so as to live, move, and have their being with them in the immediate present. I now want to explore a bit further the relation between narrative rhetoric and embodied experience by turning to the literary theory of Kenneth Burke and relating it to the embodied intensities of the Hawthorne novel of Rome from which I have already quoted, The Marble Faun. I will then conclude by using Hawthorne’s passing reference to a Roman Catholic religious order to make a final point about narratives of embodied intensities within the very different genre of spiritual exercises. In his 1931 book, Counter- Statement, Burke resisted the growing separation of formalist and materialist approaches to literature by presenting a rhetorical theory of form that shifted attention from an author’s text to the audience’s psychology. Burke famously argues that narrative form is the psychology of the audience: “form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.” He explains that “if, in a work of art, the poet says something, let us say, about a meeting, writes in such a way that we desire to observe that meeting, and then, if he places that meeting before us— that is form. While obviously, that is also the psychology of the audience, since it involves desires and their appeasements.” Reader-response criticism of a later generation mostly ignored Burke’s 1930s work, while it also expanded the range of readerly experiences described, including, for example, the intended frustration of desire as well as its fulfillment. But more relevant to my purpose

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is Burke’s own description and further development of his theory of form as the audience’s psychology, especially two of his points about formal excellence as eloquence and formal rhythm’s alliance with bodily processes. Burke distinguishes between two kinds of audience psychology: the psychology of information and his preferred psychology of form. In art, the psychology of information has as its primary “methods of maintaining interest” the emotions of surprise and suspense in discovering plot facts; but the psychology of form’s most natural method is “formal excellence,” what Burke calls “eloquence.” In the psychology of information, “suspense is the concern over the possible outcome of some specific detail of plot rather than for general qualities” of eloquence. “ ‘Will A marry B or C?’ is suspense.” Whereas “in Macbeth, the turn from the murder scene to the porter scene is a much less literal channel of development. Here the presence of one quality calls forth the demand for another, rather than one tangible incident of plot awaking an interest in some other possible tangible incident of plot.” Burke seems to be contrasting plot information to something like a narrative dynamics of mood: “if an author managed over a certain number of his pages to produce a feeling of sultriness, or oppression, in the reader, this would unconsciously awaken in the reader the desire for a cold, fresh northwind—and thus some aspect of a northwind would be effective if called forth by some aspect of stuffiness.” For Burke, this eloquence, a kind of formal excellence in the narrative sequencing of moods, is “simply the end of art, and is thus its essence” (41). Intensity of eloquence determines the quality of a particular artwork. Burke notes that “intensity in art” is sometimes due to the formal arrangement within the work and sometimes to symbolic associations outside it (163): “That work would be most eloquent in which each line had some image or statement relying strongly upon our experience outside the work of art, and in which each image or statement had a pronounced formal saliency” (165). Burke goes on to develop his theory of form by linking narrative rhythms with those of the body. Literally, he claims that “the appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with ‘bodily’ processes,” not only “inhalation and exhalation,” but also the “alternation of the feet in walking.” That is, “the rhythm of a page, in setting up a corresponding rhythm in the body, creates marked degrees of expectancy, or acquiescence. A rhythm is a promise which the poet makes to the reader—and in proportion as the reader comes to rely upon this promise, he falls into a state of general surrender which makes him more likely to accept without resistance

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the rest of the poet’s material” (140–41). In such a way, the reader’s body can literally become “a generator of belief ” (105). Figuratively, too, Burke associates formal rhythm with bodily movement, as he describes how “the varied rhythms of prose also have their ‘motor’ analogies”: “A reader sensitive to prose rhythms is like a man hurrying through a crowd; at one time he must halt, at another time he can leap forward; he darts perilously between saunterers; he guards himself in turning sharp corners.” Literally and figuratively, then, Burke works out a theory of form that imbricates reading and bodily movement. He sums up, “We mean that in all rhythmic experiences one’s ‘muscular imagination’ is touched” (141). A brief return to Hawthorne’s novel of Rome will allow me to gather together the various points I have made about narratives of bodily movement. The Marble Faun is a narrative of embodied intensities as they are represented moving through the Roman cityscape by a narrator who creates an eloquence of traveling moods. It is a romance of “muscular imagination” that again and again repeats the stories of bodies wandering moodily through the streets of Rome. In Michel de Certeau’s terms, Hawthorne’s novel is constructed as a narrative of “pedestrian movements,” multiple examples of walking within Roman scenes constituted as “a space of enunciation.” These “walking rhetorics” function as speech acts that signify against the background of a cityscape grammar (a network of streets functioning as a physical set of constraining “rules” for movement) but also an urban pragmatics (a layered context of imaginative resources to experience). This Roman background pragmatics is not just the material possibilities of the city street map that get actualized by a particular body moving through town going this way instead of that way. Rather, a Roman city-pragmatics also refers to the overlay of artistic, historical, and political associations activated in the lived experience of any walker. In The Marble Faun, we find chapter after chapter given titles referring to different city pathways—“A Stroll on the Pincian [Hill],” “A Moonlight Ramble,” “Scenes by the Way,” “A Walk on the Campagna”—and filled with descriptions of embodied personalities walking, treading, staggering, directing their steps, “wandering without a purpose,” “strolling about the pleasant precincts,” “carried away by the turbulent stream of wayfarers,” “walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly ways,” “kneeling from shrine to Cross, and from Cross to shrine,” “straying together through the streets of Rome,” and on and on and on. A priestly body is thrown from a Roman precipice, and this murder motivates the further movement of bodies around, into, and out of the city. Two central characters, Miriam and Donatello, after

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their shared crime, “trode through the streets of Rome, as if they, too, were among the majestic and guilty shadows, that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained city.” The Roman scene of ancient history—paths where “Caesar may have trod”—not only enables the walking rhetorics of characters as they move through the city—walking rhetorics that signify as speech acts themselves and are the space of enunciation for characters’ speeches and dialogues—but also the material cityscape itself is represented as speaking. As one character puts it, “There are sermons in stones .  .  . and especially in the stones of Rome.” This narrative of embodied intensities moving through the Roman city nicely illustrates Burke’s contrast between a psychology of information and his preferred psychology of eloquence. Hawthorne was interested in the latter and was irritated when he had to add an epilogue because his first readers wanted to know what happened to the main characters, wanted to have plot information, rather than simply appreciating the narrative experience of “mood” (a term Hawthorne explicitly uses repeatedly throughout his story). As many critics have noted, Hawthorne, in his preface, emphasizes his choice of Italy as the scene of his romance because its shadows, antiquity, mystery, “picturesque and gloomy wrong” afford just the desired “sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon” as they would in his native America with its “broad and simple daylight” of “common-place prosperity”: “Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow” (854–55). In his added postscript, Hawthorne “reluctantly” responds to his first readers’ “demand for further elucidations respecting the mysteries of the story.” He does so reluctantly, he says, “because the necessity makes him sensible that he can have succeeded but imperfectly, at best, in throwing about this Romance the kind of atmosphere essential to the effect at which he aimed” (1239). He had hoped that his readers would have been content with his psychology of eloquence, a formal excellence of alternating moods, instead of asking for the facts required by a psychology of information. There’s another turn of mood in Hawthorne’s narrative conveyed through another movement of bodies around Rome. One of the novel’s central characters is the painter Hilda, an American expatriate, who witnesses the aforementioned murder and wrestles with what to do with the knowledge: “One afternoon, as Hilda entered Saint Peter’s, in a sombre mood, its interiour beamed upon her with all the effect of a new creation. It seemed an embodiment of whatever the imagination could conceive, or the heart desire, as a magnificent,

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comprehensive, majestic symbol of religious faith.” This child of the Puritans moves about the Roman Catholic church, feeling and thinking its intense attractions: “Must not the Faith, that built this matchless edifice, and warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can satisfy human aspirations, at the loftiest, or minister to human necessity at the sorest! If Religion had a material home, was it not here!” Looking upon Guido’s painting of the Archangel Michael “treading on the prostrate fiend,” the defeated Satan, Hilda “felt . . . that the artist had done a great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of Good. The moral of the picture (the immortal youth and loveliness of Virtue, and its irresistible might against ugly Evil) appealed as much to Puritans as Catholics.” Dropping to her knees before the enshrined painting, Hilda “laid her forehead on the marble steps before the altar, and sobbed out a prayer; . . . she hardly knew for what, save only a vague longing, that thus the burthen of her spirit might be lightened a little.” Rising, somewhat relieved, she had “a presentiment, or what she fancied such, whispered her, that, before she had finished the circuit of the Cathedral, relief would come” (1143–45). Earlier, the narrator comments that “Had the Jesuits known the situation of this troubled heart, her inheritance of New England puritanism would hardly have protected the poor girl from the pious strategy of those good Fathers. Knowing, as they do, how to work each proper engine, it would have been ultimately impossible for Hilda to resist the attractions of a faith, which so marvellously adapts itself to every human need.” Indeed, Hilda’s visit to St. Peter’s was part of a “dangerous errand .  .  . to observe how closely and comfortingly the Popish faith applied itself to all human occasions” (1138–39). The Jesuits were famous or infamous for this rhetorical accommodationism of meeting the recipients of their ministries where they were, at whatever stage of religious or intellectual or cultural development, whether during Jesuit sermons in churches, Jesuit teaching in classrooms, or Jesuit missionary work in foreign lands. Such adjustments to the needs and capacities of individuals were the hallmark too of Jesuits directing spiritual exercises and administering the sacrament of confession. It was in the space of the confessional that Hilda finally found relief for her conscience even as she remained true to her Puritan faith. But it was also this confession that led to the speculation about the reason for her later sudden disappearance from Rome: “The incident of the confessional—if known, as probably it was, to the eager propagandists who prowl about for souls, as cats to catch a mouse—would surely inspire the most confident expectations of bringing her over to the faith. With so pious an end in view, would Jesuitical morality

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be shocked at the thought of kidnapping the mortal body, for the sake of the immortal spirit that might otherwise be lost forever?” Nineteenth-century Jesuits appeared not only in the writings of other Roman travelers and novelists, but also in polemical books by Catholic apologists and Protestant conspiracy theorists; and Jesuits also moved through the streets of Rome itself, as their founder did four centuries before them. Ignatius of Loyola completed the last revisions of his Spiritual Exercises in Rome around 1540 and spent many years there establishing the Society of Jesus. During that time, he crisscrossed the city, giving the exercises and sometimes recording his experiences of walking. On February 19, 1544, after contemplating at Mass the “processions” of the “Divine Persons”—Father generating the Son and their love generating the Holy Spirit—Ignatius moved through Roman streets interpreting their contents through Trinitarian lenses and writing in his Spiritual Diary, “[W]hen I was walking in the city with great interior joy and when I saw three rational creatures, or three animals, or three other things, and so forth, I saw them as images reminding me of the Holy Trinity.” Nineteenth-century retreatants would read and experience similar moving narratives of embodied intensities in responding to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which early on Loyola describes in this way: “[ J]ust as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul . . . in seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life.” Among the practices promoted in the exercises, the one most relevant here is called “composition of place.” In this contemplative practice, retreatants are instructed to imagine, sometimes through appeals to all five senses, a New Testament narrative into which they will place themselves as participants. Called to remember the story of the Nativity or the Crucifixion, the retreatant is told to “see in imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem” traveled by Mary and Joseph or to consider the movements of Christ around Jerusalem during his last days. The retreatants should envision themselves as actors in such narrative scenes. In the Nativity story, for example, Ignatius encourages each retreatant to think, “I will make myself a poor, little, and unworthy slave, gazing at [the Holy Family], contemplating them, and serving them in their needs, just as if I were there, with all possible respect and reverence. Then I will reflect upon myself to draw some profit.” The profit one draws, the self-lessons one learns, constitute a stage in the retreatant’s journey toward choosing a vocation. The spiritual exercises are like “the garden built for a walker coming from somewhere else”

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and going toward another desired place, one of self-refashioning, a “giving way to the desire that comes . . . from the Other.” The Spiritual Exercises’ direct appeal to narrative imagination combines with a material situating of the retreatant’s body in a receptive position—kneeling, standing, sitting—in order to shape the retreatant’s faithful self in preparation for vocational election. In this way, as Michel Foucault observed in his late lectures, spiritual exercises function as technologies of the self, constituting subjects as believing actors, the body, as Burke says, becoming “a generator of belief.”  Or, in the words of Foucault’s teacher, Louis Althusser, the exercises as embodied practices of desire ideologically interpellate subjects within the apparatus of the church. Althusser’s evocative description of the process returns me to the speech with which I began: Paul’s narrative of his walk through Athens. Althusser talks of ideologies as actions inserted into practices governed by rituals inscribed within an ideological state apparatus, such as the Roman Catholic Church. He then sums up: “As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in the ‘Logos,’ meaning in ideology, that we ‘live, move, and have our being.’ ” The narrative rhetoric of such moving has been my focus throughout this essay about embodied experience as narrative and narrative as embodied experience.

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14 Conversation with Keith Gilyard

gilyard: Thanks for doing this, obviously. As you know, I have followed your work for some time with much appreciation, especially as you have laboriously developed the concept of rhetorical hermeneutics, which is a method for studying the production and reception of texts. Moreover, you are closely associated with the idea of cultural rhetoric, which you have defined on various occasions as the political effectivity of trope and argument in culture, and have made a case that English departments should be organized along lines of cultural rhetoric studies. I bring up all of this because sometimes folks in rhetoric and composition, many of whom see you as one of them, become nervous when cultural studies faculty try to become too involved in rhet-comp searches and hires. Yet, you provide strong intellectual support for the idea of cultural studies expanding into what some consider the realm of rhetoric and composition. In Reception Histories, for example, you use additional terms like rhetorically oriented cultural studies. In Disciplinary Identities, you term cultural rhetoric study a “specific rhetorical form of that heterogeneous movement known as cultural studies.” Could you play with these ideas a bit more, speak some about the rhetorical paths that you have traveled on the way to your present advocacy and how you might address the concern I have noted? Any more magic triangles? Like culture, theory, textuality? mailloux: Well, thanks a lot for the opportunity to talk with you. The issues that you note in your question are still important to me, and you raise some of the challenges relative to where I’m going. I continue to be interested in thinking and rethinking the institutional context for our work in humanities and the social sciences through cultural rhetoric studies. Cultural rhetoric studies continues for me to be a way of rethinking various relationships among disciplines in the human sciences. There are some very specific reasons why I have adopted the term cultural rhetoric, and I hope we can have a chance to talk about these.

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gilyard: What are the specific reasons? Let’s go into it. mailloux: One of those has to be the particular configuration of the discipline that I was trained in—English Studies—and the particular way that discipline has developed over the last hundred and twenty years as a study of language that ends up privileging a particular part of language, a particular kind of language: the literary. What that has meant over time is that other aspects of language, other fields within English Studies, have not been given the intellectual respect or the economic recognition of their importance for the discipline. One of those fields is the teaching of writing, what has come to be called rhetoric and composition. gilyard: It’s a cash cow for a lot of departments. mailloux: That’s right. A cash cow in different ways at different institutions. Each of the research institutions where I trained and have worked depended on English departments controlling the teaching of composition in order to fund the graduate program. So, as I sometimes say, I am able to teach my course “Rhetoric and Political Theology” with twelve students at the graduate level because the graduate students are being funded through the teaching of composition. That’s just one aspect of the way that composition is the economic base. gilyard: That doesn’t make you the bad guy, though, does it? mailloux: That doesn’t make me the bad guy. But what it does, given my institutional conscience, is make me feel responsible for the way that the field of composition has developed and the way people are treated within that field. One of the reasons that I hold on to the term rhetoric is that it has been traditionally associated with rhetoric and composition within English studies. I prefer the term to discourse or literacy or even writing. Rhetoric, conceived in a particular way as the use of language in contexts, the use of language that has effects in those contexts, bridges the activities of literature professors, students of literacy, teachers of composition, etc. Someone might say, “Well, you’re doing Foucauldian discourse analysis. Why don’t you just call it that? This will play better, be more persuasive within the way that the humanities are currently configured.” gilyard: But it wouldn’t play better in a lot of places I know, though. I mean, that would just take you further out of the game. mailloux: That’s my point. It would take you further out of the game if the game is that you’re trying to reconceptualize English Studies in such a way that Rhetoric and Composition as an intellectual field is not just supplemental or subsidiary but actually central. It seems to me to be very hard for somebody who

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embraces a notion of cultural rhetoric to simply privilege literary history, critical theory, or cultural studies. gilyard: Then why do you get this trepidation that I notice? Some people really fear that cultural rhetoric or cultural studies is an imposition on English Studies. But you say it belongs. mailloux: That’s correct. gilyard: And they’re saying that it’s an interloper. mailloux: Here’s where you have to have, not necessarily a double consciousness, but a double conscience. That is, for me the overall project is to reconceptualize not only literary and English Studies but, in my more grandiose moments, the human sciences more generally as Cultural Rhetoric Studies. Not just that, my project also is to provide a basis for rhetoric and composition to gain more institutional power. Now, the double conscience that I’m talking about is that I have responsibilities as an academic intellectual to the larger university project, but I also have a responsibility to the particular field of rhetoric and composition. That field may, in fact, not go along with my particular vision because of reasons internal to the field. And it certainly has been the case that for some compositionists cultural studies just takes the place of literary studies directing composition. So, in that view, rather than being an empowering institutional strategy, advocating rhetorical studies becomes a way that cultural studies can interfere in composition. But following a double conscience means that you have to play at least a double game, which means that you not only say that rhetoric and composition should be at the table in discussions of the future of English Studies, but that one of the reasons that it should be at the table is that it is one of those disciplines or fields that has a disciplinary identity and a professional legitimacy, just as nineteenth-century American literature or creative writing or whatever. gilyard: But that’s kind of what I wanted to ask about because you couple rhetoric and composition. I know there’s a historical association, but it seems that in some places, especially since the 1960s, composition has become an area of practice and study not tied so consciously to rhetoric. I remember being at conferences where people announced, “I’m a rhetorician.” In other words, “I don’t do that composition stuff.” So composition and rhetoric have been linked strategically but not in all places. I’m wondering how you see this playing out, this kind of negotiation that you’re talking about. mailloux: I am a rhetorician and thus have to be very sensitive to the particularities of the context in which the term rhetoric is used. It certainly is the

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case that there would be some places where an argument about linking rhetoric and composition would first have to be argued within the composition faculty. gilyard: Exactly. mailloux: And that’s part of my point. You can’t simply impose any kind of structure or terminology. I can’t all of a sudden, for example, start calling creative writing rhetoric. But I could, as I tried to do at Syracuse University, unsuccessfully. . . . gilyard: That was the magic triangle reference. . . . mailloux: . . . to get creative writers to think of rhetoric as a possible way of rethinking the relationship of creative writing to literary studies and composition. I understand that some people who identify themselves not as rhetoricians but as writing experts or literacy scholars might not want to use the term rhetoric. And my job in a particular situation is to try to give them reasons why the term will empower them and at the same time support them in developing their own identity. So that’s basically the trick in the positive sense. What that ends up meaning, though, is that you have to convince not only the composition specialists but also your other colleagues in the English department that composition is itself a field and thus you can’t just declare expertise simply because you have expertise in cultural studies. No. It’s the same way that a creative writer doesn’t claim to have expertise in critical theory, necessarily. gilyard: So in your searches, you still have to vet applications with respect to this dialogue that has to take place. mailloux: That’s right. And then you get into some really interesting situations. For example, UC Irvine once did not recognize composition as a scholarly field and thus thought of composition only as a service. As it has moved from thinking of it as a pedagogical service to a scholarly field that has a pedagogical component—just like critical theory or cultural studies or literary history—the kinds of people the department wants to hire in composition lines has changed. But it is also different, I would argue, than in departments where composition is already fully established, a place like Penn State, or in an entirely separate department like at Texas at Austin. So that’s where you get into the micro strategies. You might say that you don’t want to get somebody, for example, who was trained in literary studies and does writing on the side, who doesn’t recognize composition as a discipline, maybe only had to teach it in order to get through graduate school. On the other hand, in the particular situation at Irvine, where you only have a small number of lines in composition, and you’re thinking about wanting to empower yet simultaneously integrate composition into the larger

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arena, you don’t want to get somebody that is, let’s call it, a separatist writing scholar. gilyard: That won’t give you traction on that campus. mailloux: What that means is that there is a narrow range of composition specialists who self-identify also as rhetoricians that you want to hire. So this means recruiting somebody who knows the history of the field of composition, who knows the theoretical debates that are going on in writing pedagogy, who has a specific research project within composition that might relate to fields outside of it but at the same time is self-identified as a compositionist, is recognized at CCCC professionally, publishes in the composition journals but also can build bridges to those outside of composition. It’s that kind of person whom you would end up hiring that fulfills what I’m calling a double institutional conscience. gilyard: That’s based on particular contexts and readings of those contexts, which links to my next question because behind your whole project is philosophical pragmatism. Moreover, you are keenly concerned about politics. Do you still feel that pragmatism is a forceful political statement on its own? I think you’ve said something tantamount to that, at least I read it that way. But do you think pragmatism needs an adjective with some punch? mailloux: The answer to the first part of the question is, yes, I still think, both inside and outside the academy, that various forms of pragmatism are useful for supporting various kinds of political interventions. Having said that, though, the second part of your question is the more interesting for me, and that is, “Do you need an adjective in front of pragmatism to give it more rhetorical punch?” And I think that it’s more important within the academy than outside for it to have that adjective. I think of pragmatism as having not an inherent but a historical politics associated with it. I’ll come back to that notion of inherency. I think that it’s been associated with progressive movements since its beginning—with James and Dewey, and, in some of its more interesting formulations, with certain public intellectuals like one that you work on, Cornel West, and also, in a more problematic way, Richard Rorty. Outside of the academy, pragmatism has a good record up to a point given the way that pragmatists have entered the public sphere on questions of democratic deliberation, on questions of protection of human rights, on questions of examining and reconfiguring the unequal distribution of justice and the unequal distribution of wealth. Academically, though, we have a different case. gilyard: Let me hold on to the outside piece first because you mention West, and this is part of what was driving my question. It’s that he put prophetic

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up in front of his pragmatism because he wanted to dissociate it from what he called some rather benign politics of Dewey and some of the other people that you mentioned. He said they didn’t go far enough in certain areas, particularly in terms of race. So I’m thinking about this association of pragmatism with progressivism, but I’m also thinking about the far-left criticism of pragmatism. They say, “Is it any coincidence”—I think Howard Selsam, a student of Dewey at Columbia University, raised the question—“that the nation that developed pragmatism is the nation that developed the hydrogen bomb and stuff like that?” What I’m saying is that if you judge things just in pragmatist terms, meaning you’re looking at the outcomes, the effects of things, you can use it to justify nearly anything. mailloux: That’s right. gilyard: So then. . . . mailloux: Now here’s where I think pragmatism is like rhetoric: you could end up using it to undertake just about any political program. That is to say that I could train somebody in rhetoric—and even put it within a critical literacy or critical pedagogy context—and I might be training somebody to go out, enter into the public sphere, and argue for the oppressed. Or I might be training somebody to go out to oppress more effectively. It’s always a risk. gilyard: And that’s exactly my point. And that’s why I was asking about the term to which you might link pragmatism. If you could come up with a notion we agree on, something about, let’s say, democracy or genuine democracy, you could tie that to pragmatism and take the philosophy off neutral. mailloux: I have used the term pragmatism with an adjective—rhetorical pragmatism. But that doesn’t solve the problem that you’re talking about. But let me just try to elaborate why I think that that’s useful still. First of all, I wish I had come up with the term prophetic pragmatism. I do think that prophetic pragmatism, as West describes it, with its commitment to critical temper and democratic faith, is consistent with what I’m calling rhetorical pragmatism. gilyard: I think so too. mailloux: I would see rhetorical pragmatism being the broader category and one version of rhetorical pragmatism being prophetic pragmatism. The two are not inconsistent. I do think that West’s particular brand of prophetic pragmatism is an intersection of three traditions: Marxism, Protestant Christianity, and pragmatism. I only identify with one of them. He then, in a mix, is able to stir them up and come out with prophetic pragmatism that is theoretically antifoundationalist and politically committed to the analysis of inequalities, including

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those of race, gender, and economics. It would be a contradiction in terms if this prophetic pragmatism were then used by a reactionary force. gilyard: That’s what I’m saying. mailloux: But I’m as committed to pragmatism as West. That’s kind of a silly way to put it, but I think I’m fully committed and think that has been reflected in my institutional work, scholarship, and, to a certain extent, in any work that I’ve done as a public intellectual. gilyard: Well, one could see that in the work. mailloux: However, I view things a bit differently. For example, part of what drives prophetic pragmatism is an economic analysis that I’m not completely committed to, a certain Marxist class analysis. Then there is my own struggling relationship with Christianity. I still consider myself self-identified as a Roman Catholic, but it’s an ongoing struggle. Pragmatism is perfect for me in the sense that it reflects a kind of uncertainty and critical self-consciousness. But that isn’t always the best attitude to have for a political project. So I’ve struggled with this idea and decided that rhetorical pragmatism is consistent with other left pragmatisms but doesn’t have built into it certain kinds of certainties that those pragmatisms do. gilyard: Those pragmatisms really shouldn’t be all that certain if they are indeed pragmatist, right? mailloux: That’s the issue. And then you get into my particular formation as a pragmatist that owes so much to Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. And they would make the argument—and I’ve been convinced by it—that theory has no necessary theoretical consequence. Now I think Fish goes too far because I think theory has rhetorical consequences, which are political. And he doesn’t give enough acknowledgment to that. But Rorty makes the argument that a political commitment, or a political agenda of radical democracy, for example, or liberal democracy does not need to be undergirded foundationally by a philosophy. So this is another way of saying that, given the right historical circumstances, any theory can be used for any political agenda. Among those so-called circumstances are social and economic conditions. I might even say that there are certain ways of using prophetic pragmatism that could be, from a particular perspective, seen as reactionary. Just as you can use certain forms of Marxism—state Marxism—for certain kinds of totalitarianism. But, still, also as a pragmatist, I’m not only interested in the possibilities, I’m interested in the probabilities. And the probabilities are that it’s pretty hard to use prophetic pragmatism for that sort of thing. So I can’t go too far in that direction.

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But the point is that some academic versions of pragmatism restrict the necessary linkages between pragmatism as a theory and pragmatism as a politics. Then I end up having to make arguments that there are associative reasons, that there are shared tropes, arguments, and narratives that relate what I call rhetorical pragmatism to a commitment to radical democracy. Both rhetorical pragmatism and radical democracy, for example, share tropes of conversation and dialogue; they share arguments about the primacy of empowerment and the protection of minority rights; and they share narratives about the way that you come up with knowledge of truth: through deliberation. For those reasons, I would argue that there’s no necessary connection between rhetorical pragmatism and a commitment to radical democratic politics, but there are associative reasons. And at this particular time and place, within the academy and outside, rhetorical pragmatism, then, still seems to me to be a valid theoretical and political position. gilyard: I want to ask you a little bit more about pragmatism in relation to terminology, shifting back to the cultural rhetoric term because you prefer it to critical literacy, though the latter term may have more currency in the academy and seems to do significant work. At the same time, your notion of rhetorical hermeneutics is sometimes criticized, though you dismiss much of the criticism handily, often to my amusement. I love the way you take on and debunk the folks who are messing with you. You’re such a careful writer. One of my students was upset. He said, “You know, Mailloux should just let it go.” But I told him that you had to turn over everything because you didn’t know where the attack would come from. That’s just the way he writes, I tell people. You have to leave it alone. Appreciate it. mailloux: That’s a good observation. gilyard: Don’t hate; congratulate, you know. But I’m wondering if a strong pragmatist impulse might kick in and cause you to abandon some of your patented terminology if you find yourself spending too much time defending yourself—effects and results, right?—in the discursive spaces in which you operate. Some of the people are sympathetic, like my department colleague Rosa Eberly, for example, whom you mention in your work. She’s not hostile to the project of rhetorical hermeneutics, but she’s going to question the linking of production and reception. She sees rhetorical hermeneutics as a critical method whereas her focus is on rhetoric as a productive art. Of course, you counter that rhetorical hermeneutics contains tools and advice for both production and interpretation. In fact, you spend a lot of time arguing that we shouldn’t separate production

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from reception. And I agree with that, but it seems that if we spend all that time debating terminology, it might be time to use other terms. mailloux: Let me give you even more ammunition. Even using the term rhetoric in a more nonacademic public sphere is problematic. The term gets associated with something specious and with mere talk as opposed to action. People outside of the academy question why I continue to use the term, especially, as you indicate, because I have to spend considerable time defending it. Or the best example would be proposing cultural rhetoric at Syracuse and spending two years trying to argue for a curriculum. I couldn’t even get my friends to agree with this. Why keep doing it? Should I give it up just on the basis of my own premises about probabilities and effects and about pragmatism looking at outcomes to judge the truth about something? The short answer is “yeah, probably.” So why don’t I? The trivial reason is probably that it’s just too late in the day. But the less trivial reason is historical and theoretical. The fact is there are different ways to win debates that are internal to the academy and outside. Losing a particular battle doesn’t mean you necessarily lose the war. I do think that there are more people interested in rhetoric now within the humanities than there were twenty years ago. So within the academy, I do think that holding on to the term can have positive effects. Wayne Booth, someone with whom I disagreed somewhat but also praised in many ways, is an example of a person who held on to the term rhetoric. He did coin other terms, rhetorology and things like that. But rhetoric was something that he remained committed to, and that commitment had effects throughout literary studies and composition. That represents the sort of the political-institutional reason for holding on to it. That is, I gave you a rhetorical answer in response to the rhetorical critique. But the theoretical answer, which is situated within this historical moment, is that I don’t know of another term that does as much effective intellectual and political work as rhetoric. I mean, rhetoric can allow you to speak to those that are interested in ancient classical traditions, but, at the same time, there’s nothing more postmodern than rhetoric. Rhetoric gives you the classical and the postmodern. For those in English departments that are arguing between cultural studies and literary studies, between attention to the historical context of culture and close reading of texts, rhetoric is on both sides. I can do really close readings of texts and say I’m doing rhetorical work, but I also then do historical contextualizations of reception. So, again, rhetoric does both kinds of work. In addition, I think one reason theorists of various types have adopted rhetoric is because of

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certain sophistic traditions that allow you to avoid certain essentialist, foundationalist, and other kinds of traps. Rhetoric does all that work gilyard: Yeah, but it’s funny because when we were trying to bring the doctoral program in cultural rhetoric on board at Syracuse—you had left by then—rhetoric was considered the new thing. You know, some of the colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences who were against our proposal wanted to know why we were pushing this new discipline and felt that we should get in line and wait. I was sitting there, Louise Wetherbee Phelps also, thinking that rhetoric was older than any other discipline represented in the room. We also ran into trouble because of the term cultural. The anthropology department felt some ownership there, wanted to flex a little territorial muscle. As a result of all this, we were voted down the first time around. We came back, however, with a successful strategy, rhetoricians that we were. mailloux: These kinds of issues—and I wrote on this in my last book— have to do with disciplinary identities. Because of the work that I’ve done in administrative positions, as well as in my teaching and in scholarship, I’ve seen how disciplinary identities can get in the way of productive intellectual work. I found many times it wasn’t generation or gender or race or ethnicity or region or any of those kinds of identity markers that got in the way of really interesting conversations among scholars. It was disciplinary blinders that did. Rhetoric brings you so much that helps break down certain kinds of divides, including the divide between the social sciences and the humanities. Rhetorically, it’s about acknowledging certain kinds of vested interests and knowing that you have to get into conversation with them, yet having a vocabulary that’s going to bridge different gaps. gilyard: That’s what I think is the strength of Disciplinary Identities. You set up, as you usually do, rhetorical hermeneutics as the use of rhetoric to practice theory by doing history. Then the book moves into these contemporary problems, problems we have to deal with. I’m thinking about the 9/11 stuff, the comments about the panel you were on at Cardozo Law School with New York Times columnist Edward Rothstein. This is a bit different from some of your earlier work in which you set up the same theoretical move and then take us immediately back to the nineteenth century and to close reads. You don’t want to give up that type of thing; it’s part of your project also. But I think it is powerful, maybe an advance, to talk about contemporary issues and about how we might envision the academy. Unfortunately, you were not successful in

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convincing Mr. Rothstein of the value of your perspective. He saw you as just another academic postmodernist. mailloux: Because rhetorical hermeneutics is the use of rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, that leads me to do historical work, to do reception studies that are often in need of an archive. My training is in nineteenth-century American literature, so you get the reception study of Margaret Fuller reading Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative or of the Concord Public Library banning Huckleberry Finn. And then as I try to do that also in theory, that is, use rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, I end up doing a reception study of Heidegger’s statement that phronesis is conscience. It becomes harder as you try to relate that to contemporary issues. I do think that what I try to do with respect to the 9/11 issue is do a sort of reception history of my own argument. gilyard: I thought that was very effective. Very powerful. mailloux: Really, in the case of Syracuse or the 9/11 panel story, the work is partly a rhetorical history of my own failure and then an attempt to analyze why the failure occurred. Then I consider other ways of proceeding. gilyard: You talked about some identity markers earlier, and I want to go to this identity question because I find useful your notion of identity as interpreted being. And I know, of course, that you also argue that any such interpretation is historically and socially situated among other interpretations, including interpretations by the original being in question. But this formulation won’t be quite as satisfying to some folks unless a system of weighing, some sort of semiotic analysis is involved. For example, my sense of identity as a slow-walking, peaceful African American cannot simply be canceled by the negative construction of me by a hard-charging, club-wielding, noose-carrying white bigot. I can be canceled, but I can think of more useful contributions to discussions about identity. In other words, it seems that identity cannot equal the sum total of interpretations. Consider, for example, if I were an African American who did not identify with the ethnic group at all but claimed to identify primarily with my profession. I could still get attacked by the same club-wielding, noose-carrying bigot. So it seems that no useful definition of identity can be that it does not matter. I lean more toward performance explanations than essence explanations, but it seems a strong performance thesis has to be qualified, no? mailloux: This is a really good question, which means it’s really hard to answer! Let me try to think aloud here.

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gilyard: I say this in reference to some of what you’ve written about William Scarborough and then Booker T. Washington to some extent. I have that in mind. mailloux: Scarborough’s a good example of somebody who at certain moments and in certain contexts identified more as a professional classicist, one might argue, than as an African American. But that identification did not keep him from being discriminated against and not being able to get a hotel room at a professional conference or even, in the example that I give in Disciplinary Identities, in one of the activities of the conference itself. But he did say repeatedly, at least early in his career, he self-identified as a professional classicist and in those contexts of the professional conferences felt that he was treated as an equal. And he himself felt an equal. But that doesn’t provide a counter to your question. It actually just further elaborates it. So my initial response is to say you’re right; yes, performance theories of identity need to be qualified. On the other hand, let’s look again at the example that you talk about here: the idea of somebody who self-identifies as an African American and a human rights holder, a civil rights holder, as part of his or her identity, and in various ways performs that. And when I’m talking about performance here, I mean the performance of rhetoric and interpretation, that is, the way that you interpret yourself and the language you use in thinking and expressing that interpretation. So we have the situation of this African American that you’ve given me, and then some clubwielding, noose-carrying white supremacist has a very different interpretation of this person, one aspect of which would be that this person maybe isn’t even a person or is an innately inferior person. So that is an interpretation that then leads to actions. gilyard: Then the actions cancel out my identity, no matter what I interpreted that identity to be. It cancels out either way. That’s why I suggest we need a fuller definition of identity. mailloux: Okay. It cancels out, and your question said it very well that the I, the very being of the person, could be canceled out; he could be killed. Now, the interpreted being, the identity of the white supremacist leads him not only to identify himself in a particular way but to identify his object of violence. And the identity of the African American does not prevent him from that. gilyard: That’s why I relate it back to when you were talking about your pragmatism. That’s part of what my point is. It’s that if I assume a particular identity, it should have particular consequences. But if I get canceled from with-

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out irrespective of the interpreted being I assume, then it means that my identity makes no difference. I’m saying that can’t be your argument for identity, can it? mailloux: Well, I originally was going to say “no it can’t”; but now I’m going to say “yes it can” because, if you look at identity’s relationship to action, what would actually happen would be the following. Obviously, if the guy is coming at me wielding a club, you know, I’m not going to say, “Hey! My interpreted being is different than what . . .” That isn’t what I would do. I would put my arm out or respond in kind. Then I’m identifying not as a passive but as an active person; so my identity, my interpreted being, mobilizes me. gilyard: This is what I’m talking about in terms of the weighing. That’s why I was asking you about weighing. Isn’t there a way to talk about layered identity or some things being more salient than others? It’s like when we go abroad. We know how American we feel when we’re in Africa or Europe, and we don’t necessarily feel so American here. mailloux: In a very unoriginal way in Disciplinary Identities, I would call that hybrid identity. And so layered identity, multiple identity—we in different times and different places function with a different interpreted being. gilyard: You see, I go with layered over hybrid because what I’m saying is that hybridity assumes a sort of stasis, like I’m two fixed and more or less equal things at once. Let’s say, for example, I can’t get my arms up in time. Let’s say I’m captured and being lynched or something. Then I say, “Well, I don’t really identify as an African American. I’m hybrid, so just lynch the left half of me. At least I can get out of this halfway okay.” That wouldn’t work, would it? Or let’s say if somebody’s accused of a hate crime against me and I say, “No, you can’t charge them with a hate crime. You can charge them with assault but not a hate crime because I don’t identify as African American.” You get to absurd points, right? mailloux: But just a kind of metacomment. What we’re doing here—this is what seems to me to be so useful about rhetoric—is that we can go metarhetorical and analyze the way that the metaphor of hybridity and the metaphor of layeredness work in particular contexts. And so rhetoric is always able to do that kind of move. We’re using rhetoric to talk about rhetoric, and I just really think that’s a useful kind of tool. Okay, end of metacomment. gilyard: A good metacomment. mailloux: Right after 9/11, when some of the responses by American citizens of European descent were to go and beat up Arabs, there was an incident in which a Sikh was beaten up. That Sikh doesn’t identify as an Arab, let alone

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as an Arab terrorist. His identity doesn’t change when he’s beaten up. What he might try to do actually is use rhetoric to convince them, “Look, I’m not an Arab! Here are my credentials! I’m a Sikh!” There are ways that you can actually answer violence through interpretation and rhetoric. gilyard: Again, that’s if you get a chance. It’s like that scene toward the end of Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing. After the rioters seize the pizzeria, they approach the Korean deli, and the shopkeeper is swinging a broom to ward them off while exclaiming, “I’m black, I’m black!” One African American responds indignantly, “What do you mean you black?” and proceeds to explain that the Korean is not black like him. But another African American man intercedes, “Leave the Korean alone. He’s all right.” mailloux: It seems to me that if we ask what kind of identity that privileges, then we need something even different from hybrid or layered. We have to use something like strategic. But that it ends up being from a rhetorical perspective strategic all the way down. And then you get into interesting kind of theoretical . . . gilyard: And then that crosses with the politics because some people would criticize the notion of strategic without obligation. mailloux: That’s right. gilyard: It doesn’t mean identity is not strategic. It doesn’t mean it’s not rhetorical. It’s just that it’s more than that in some minds and people are definitely going to chime in politically. mailloux: This gets to the theoretical debates, which I certainly wouldn’t want to have if somebody were about to beat me but can have in a context like this. I could make the antiessentialist argument about identity. I do acknowledge, though, that sometimes that argument is just irrelevant. For example, early on in my career, there was a law and literature conference at which two women were giving papers. One gave a very sophisticated feminist analysis that used poststructuralist strategies to rethink the notion of woman and argued what relationship that had to contemporary domestic politics. Another woman got up and said, “Women make the best leaders.” Period. And then she gave some historical examples of women and said that women are inherently better leaders of countries. A couple of us who were sympathetic to feminism—but were more sympathetic to a poststructuralist version of it—began to respond. The first person raised his hand and challenged the second presenter and also asked the first presenter what she thought of her co-panelist’s argument. She wouldn’t

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answer the question directly. Then other people in the audience—males—raised their hands to say, “But you didn’t really answer the question, you know. What do you think about .  .  .” She still refused. It took another questioner or two before we realized that she was not going to turn on the other woman. The theoretical issue of essentialist versus antiessentialist was much less relevant at that particular moment politically than their showing some solidarity. So there are some times when theoretical issues just seem to be beside the point. On the other hand, antiessentialist, antifoundationalist critiques of identity politics have been very effective in broadening inclusiveness. gilyard: You mentioned Richard Rorty earlier. Rorty and Edward Said saw no role for religion in the public sphere. I don’t think you quite take the same stance. Now that I’m hearing comments about your conflicted Roman Catholicism, I’m interested in hearing you elaborate upon that issue. mailloux: In the places that I talk about Said and Rorty, for example, in Disciplinary Identities, I do group them as public intellectuals . . . gilyard: Secularists, right? mailloux: Secularists and, at least in Rorty’s case, an atheist. But now I would differentiate them further. Said had a particular political reason for pushing religion off the table—in the Middle East situation, for example: as a Palestinian, as somebody who both in his scholarship and in his public intellectual activism saw that the religious claims that were made, especially by fundamentalists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, made the situation worse rather than better. So he had a very good rhetorical reason not to bring religion into that kind of context. Said at one point talks about public intellectuals in terms of the rhetorical tradition. He says what we need is what the rhetoricians call inventio. And I’ve quoted that a couple of times. I just think it’s wonderful and really true about Said. He would go into a situation, and he would then say that the best intellectuals are those who are trying to move the conversation by inventing new ways to conceptualize the situation for the better. That’s what he tried to do with Orientalism. That’s what he tried to do with all of his work. For him, religion was not part of that, which was for me very understandable. Rorty is a different case. He felt for most of his career that the separation of church and state should really be absolute. He was traditionally liberal on that point. This goes back to that connection between theory and politics. He would say that there’s no connection, but those two presuppositions led him to doing very odd rhetorical performances. For example, he is invited to go down to South

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America to a conference to talk to liberation theology intellectuals. He goes down there and says to this group, who have based their politics on Catholicism and tried to change the status quo at great personal risk to themselves, “There’s no relationship between politics and philosophy. There’s no relationship between politics and theory.” And that seemed so oblivious to that particular rhetorical-political context. gilyard: In other words, he didn’t see religion as a language of negotiation and therefore part of the public sphere. mailloux: That’s right. gilyard: So if your public sphere constitutes itself as religious, then you’re not making good rhetorical moves if you take Rorty’s stance. mailloux: I sometimes tell my students that rhetoricians are supposed to (though there are no rules for this) use phronesis, meaning practical wisdom, go into a situation and be able to tell what the most effective means of persuasion are. To go into a church and claim, “There is no God. Now listen to me and what I’m going to talk to you about” is not very effective. Now, it’s very interesting that Rorty, at the end of his career, when he started working with Vattimo, actually said, “Well, you know, I really shouldn’t have been arguing for antireligion but anticlericalism.” gilyard: Right. mailloux: When he made that switch, he was fine-tuning the liberal critique of bringing religion into the public sphere, and I think he was more accurate in terms of what he really opposed, the various kinds of fundamentalisms that Sharon Crowley talks about in Toward a Civil Discourse. For various reasons—it’s not just 9/11—there’s been a return of religion to public culture and the academy. gilyard: Well, you know, Fish said it would be the next big thing. mailloux: It makes so much sense in terms of the public, nonacademic side, globally and domestically. If we don’t as rhetoricians pay more attention to how religious rhetoric works, then we’re just throwing up our hands at really being public intellectuals. So that has to be on the agenda in a way that it wasn’t years ago. That means, though, that there are going to be many different kinds of discussions, some of which aren’t going to be that useful. But I think Sharon’s book is just a really good example of trying to analyze things. And that book, by the way, is so interesting because of her own struggles with representation. She doesn’t tolerate the fundamentalist political position that she’s analyzing but yet

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tries to analyze the rhetoric of that position fairly. Rhetoric again becomes a useful tool. I’m teaching this course next quarter called Cultural Rhetoric and Critical Theory: Subjects, Events, Theologies, and we’re starting . . . gilyard: There is another triangle! mailloux: Yeah, well, I’ve got the triangles there—using rhetoric, practicing theory, and doing history. That is another triangle. In this course, we’ll start with Paul and Augustine, and then we’ll jump to twentieth-century receptions of Paul and Augustine. This we would start with Heidegger’s Paul and Augustine 1920s seminars, go to Arendt’s dissertation on love in Augustine, and then Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion, and then come up to some of the recent turns of later theorists like Derrida. Lyotard’s last book is on Augustine’s Confessions. There is Alain Badiou’s book Saint Paul. gilyard: That kind of answers the last question because I was going to ask you what you were up to. This course is one of the latest things you’re up to. mailloux: I would say there are two things that might be further developments. I will continue to look at identity in its various performances within and outside the academy, to think about disciplines, interdisciplines, and transdisciplines, and the relationship of academic intellectuals to public intellectuals. And there rhetorical studies has a great deal to contribute. I think of public intellectuals as being translators, commentators, inventors, and metacritics. To be a metacritic means that you can analyze how expert discourses are translated or new ones are invented in the way Said talked about or are simply applied in commentary in the mass media. Rhetoricians not only can participate actively as what I call hybrid intellectuals who are public and academic; but can also analyze such events and processes as metacritics. And so that’s one project. The other project really has to do with the rhetoric of political theologies. This is a historical and theoretical project that is probably way too ambitious and unrealistic. What I’d like to do is to look at the way Pauline Christianity over the last two hundred years has been appropriated by various interpreters and activists: for example, appropriated by both sides on the slavery question in the nineteenth century; and the ways, after the Civil War, it was used on both sides of the immigration debate. Also how Frederick Douglass identified with Paul throughout his career to the point of visiting Athens, standing on the Areopagus and hearing Paul’s speech to the Athenians. Next I’d like to take up how Pauline Christianity gets used in twentieth-century critical theory, in rhetorical hermeneutics from Heidegger through Badiou (exemplified in the course I just

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described). Then, and this is the stretch, I’d like to read back in a kind of feedback loop the twentieth-century theoretical perspectives into and out of the nineteenth-century receptions. gilyard: Ambitious. As you say. But you’ll get to some of it, though. mailloux: Some of it. Maybe.

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15 Political Theology in Douglass and Melville

“All our politics are every day becoming more religious, and our religion more political.” So read “The Politics of the New Testament,” reprinted in Littell’s Living Age in early 1845. The editors noted that American readers might disagree with some of the article’s conclusions, but they thought its “premises” could “hardly be disputed.” Those premises included assumptions about Christian theology’s necessary, direct relation to contemporary politics—assumptions that were, in fact, quite disputable throughout the nineteenth century. Especially during the antebellum period in the United States, speeches and journals were filled with questions about whether politics should be preached from the pulpit, about how religious dogma might influence political action, and about whether and how theology ought to guide government policy or direct political reform. In 1838 the prominent Unitarian minister Orville Dewey introduced the publication of his sermons on “the Morals of Traffic, of Politics, and of our social well-being as a nation” by asking, “What is the proper range of the pulpit? What is the appropriate business of preaching? The answer is plain—to address the public mind on its moral and religious duties and dangers.” But where are these to be found? “Are they not to be found wherever men are acting their part in life? . . . Are not men daily making shipwreck of their consciences in trade and politics? And wheresoever conscience goes to work out its perilous problem, shall not the preacher follow it?” Thus justified, Dewey included in his collection a discourse“on political morality,” which begins with Proverbs 14:34—“Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people”—and argues strenuously against the “evils of forsaking the moral guidance in political affairs” (274). American politics, he laments, has given itself over to party factionalism, leading to “the destruction of mutual confidence and respect” (276). It is the duty of the pulpit to help remedy this dangerous situation, to address “this momentous theme of the nation’s moral well-being” (279).

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Dewey’s particular version of Christianity later became a common target for the political theologies of both Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. In this essay, I compare the public thinking of Douglass and Melville as their rhetorics embodied different forms of political theology related to Pauline Christianity. Put another way, this essay tracks the rhetorical paths of thought in Melville and Douglass as they constitute part of the nineteenth-century reception of St. Paul as militant preacher and writer. In looking at how Melville and Douglass think with Paul, I describe some of their cultural rhetoric—the tropes, arguments, and narratives derived from Pauline Christianity—as well as their representations of rhetorical action: what they say, how they say it, and what they say about saying it, especially in relation to Paul’s proclamation of the Word. From Augustine to Locke, Paul’s epistles had served as a rich and somewhat pliable resource for political theory and practice. In the antebellum United States, Paul’s texts were employed to justify several ideological agendas in the public sphere and to provide theoretical support for various positions on controversial social and political issues. Different forms of political theology emerged in the period due to the circumstances of time and place, and competing groups not only appropriated Paul for their causes, but even called on his texts to explain how Christian scripture should be adapted to changing contexts. In a mid-1840s sermon, “On the Original Use of the Epistles of the New Testament,” Dewey uses First Corinthians 9:22 to begin his explanation of why the New Testament is still relevant to the present despite its being written for specific purposes in the past: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak; I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” Dewey points out that “Paul adapted his religious instructions to the men whom he addressed, to their particular character, circumstances, difficulties, trials, and speculations.” He then proceeds to show “what in the Epistles was peculiar to the times in which they were written, and what belongs to us.” He argues, for example, that it was necessary for Paul to emphasize justification by faith “because a new religion was proposed, whose first demand would of course be for faith in it.” But “what needs to be pressed upon us now . . . is not so much faith, as obedience.” Dewey explains that “the danger” now seems to be “not of trusting to the mercy of God too little, but too much; and of making not too much of our own works; but of making far too little.” In his sermons and publications, Dewey elaborated on what political work followed from his Christian theology, and many of his contemporaries did likewise, arguing for specific connections between theological doctrines and contemporary

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politics. In “Our National Religion,” J. H. Augustus Bomberger, writes: “Civil Government . . . can no more divest itself of its divine genealogy and obligations, than can the intelligent and moral agents constituting it get rid of theirs.” At the time an advocate of the Mercersburg movement within the German Reformed church, Bomberger challenges all who denied the obligatory relationship between Christian theology and national politics. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” does not mean that “Caesar has nothing to do with God” or that “the Civil Government had better avoid all reference to religion.” On the contrary, Bomberger argues, we must resist “the pernicious tendency of this false political theology.” As these various passages suggest, political theology deals with the connection between political practice and religious belief. More exactly, political theology is any implicit or explicit theory relating politics and theology, worldly action within power relations and speculative thought about a world beyond. A generative antithesis of the political is the friend-enemy opposition. In political theology, this opposition often receives a moral coloring: friend vs. enemy becomes saint vs. sinner, saved vs. damned, good vs. evil. During the 1840s and 1850s, competing political theologies with such antitheses constituted a significant part of the rhetorical context of writing and speaking about a range of topics that concerned both Douglass and Melville. One of the these political theologies, widely known as “Bible Politics,” was vigorously advocated by abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Douglass’s friend and ally to whom he dedicated My Bondage and My Freedom. Against William Lloyd Garrison’s position of nonparticipation, Smith championed voting and office holding in support of the antislavery cause, and he argued his case on theological grounds: “Let American Christianity not only cease from her opposition to and contempt of Bible politics, but identify herself with them, and on the Sabbath and from the pulpit, and in season and out of season, preach them; and insist that ‘he that ruleth over men must be just’ [2 Samuel 23:3].” Smith promoted “the antislavery politics of the Bible,” which made “it the duty of Civil Government, not to create and uphold the most grinding and bloody system of oppression, but to ‘Execute judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor’ [ Jeremiah 22:3].” In his “preaching of politics,” he declared “that Civil Government and Civil Rulers should, in every age, conform to God’s plain requirements of them.” Acting on these beliefs, Smith helped found the abolitionist Liberty Party in 1840, ran for state and national office, and served two years in Congress in the 1850s.

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Garrisonian abolitionists opposed such activities, appealing to a different theological grounding to argue against any participation in the formal political process. To vote or hold office was a compromise with evil, according to Garrisonians, not only because they interpreted the U.S. Constitution as supporting slavery but also because democratic government—“based on the ‘might makes right,’ alias ‘the majority shall rule principle’ ”—inevitably corrupts all political parties. A party “may talk piously about ‘Bible politics,’ and electing just men to rule in the fear of God; it may claim to be the very embodiment of Christianity; but this will avail nothing. Its means of success, its aims, its tendencies, all ensure its total depravation.” God’s justice must be achieved outside of party politics and the national electoral process. Garrisonian political theology thus pointed to a higher law beyond that made by elected officials, a divine law that required the abolition of slavery and the protection of the fugitive slave. “God commands us to ‘hide the outcast, and betray not him that wandereth [Isaiah 16:3],” proclaimed Garrison. “Let the will of God be done!” Years later, in surveying the Liberator’s accomplishments, Garrison remarked that no other journal had “vindicated primitive Christianity, in its spirit and purposes—the ‘higher law,’ in its supremacy over nations and governments as well as individual conscience— the Golden Rule, in its binding obligation upon all classes—the Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truths—the rights of human nature, without distinction of race, complexion or sex—more earnestly or more uncompromisingly” than the Liberator. Whatever their differences over means, political and Garrisonian abolitionists at least shared a common belief in the biblical imperative of bringing about the unconditional abolition of slavery. Similarly, a range of anti-abolitionists— Northerners and Southerners, from pro-slavery ideologues to antislavery gradualists—found Biblical support for their very different political agendas. After passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, these various anti-abolitionists intensified their appeals to Paul’s Epistle to Philomen, in which the author sends back the slave Onesimus to his master. Both slavery’s supporters and antislavery unionists appealed to this text as the appropriate response to what they claimed were abolitionist attempts to undermine the nation’s legal foundations. With hermeneutic ingenuity, abolitionists responded, in turn, by re-interpreting Paul’s letter against its apparent pro-slavery grain. Appeals to Paul in support of the slavery status quo appeared not only in political and theological writings, but in fictional representations as well, including the most famous antislavery novel of the period, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life

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among the Lowly. In chapter XI, “In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind,” the runaway slave George Harris argues with his ex-employer, who responds: “Why, George, no—no—it won’t do; this way of talking is wicked— unscriptural. George, you’ve got a hard master—in fact, he is—well he conducts himself reprehensively—I can’t pretend to defend him. But you know how the angel commanded Hagar to return to her mistress, and submit herself under her hand; and the apostle sent back Onesimus to his master.” “Don’t quote Bible at me that way, Mr. Wilson. . . . I appeal to God Almighty;—I’m willing to go with the case to Him, and ask Him if I do wrong to seek my freedom.” “These feelings are quite natural, George . . . but it is my duty not to encourage ‘em in you. . . . [T]he apostle says, ‘Let every one abide in the condition in which he is called’ [1 Corinthians 7:20]. We must all submit to the indications of Providence, George,—don’t you see?” George does not see and silences Wilson with a question about how he would view his duty if he himself were kidnapped and held in bondage by Indians. Abolitionists found still other ways to counter pro-slavery uses of Paul, both by reinterpreting passages supposedly in support of slavery and by quoting Pauline verses commanding neighbor-love or condemning “manstealing.” Appeals to political theology, then, played a conspicuous role both in debates among antislavery advocates and between those advocates and slavery’s defenders. But Christian theology’s relation to politics went well beyond the controversy over slavery in antebellum America and touched on many other topics argued in civil society. Besides abolition, Gerrit Smith’s broadsides argued for temperance, land reform, and Christian non-sectarianism, while Garrison’s abolitionist Liberator also supported women’s rights, universal peace, and nonviolent resistance. The rhetorics of these interrelated reform movements combined politics and theology in various mixtures and, again, in disparate genres that blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. In late 1852 Frederick Douglass’ Paper ran a serialized temperance novel by Rev. Joseph R. Johnson, “Uncle William’s Pulpit; or, Life Among the Lofty.” The story ends with the hero’s niece writing him a letter: “Do, I entreat you, faithfully preach Bible politics, and in the closing years of your life, let your testimony

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and example be fully given for a Righteous Civil Government.” The narrator continues, “Uncle William felt that to refuse to pursue such a course was inconsistent. If he should adopt Julia’s sentiments he could not escape the awful doom of being classed among the ‘radicals.’ ‘Ye that love the lord hate evil’ [Psalm 97:10]. This is radicalism; and with it may the world be filled!” This same issue of the paper published reports on the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“a revolutionary book,” in the words of an Episcopal minister); an editorial restating a question to the Practical Christian about its nonvoting strategy in the case of an antislavery candidate; and selected “Gems,” which include: “The lights of heaven do not shine for themselves nor for the world of spirits alone who need them not; but for us, for our pleasure and advantage. How ungrateful and inexcusable are we, if, when God has set up these lights for us to work by, we sleep or play, or trifle away the time of business, and neglect the great work we were sent into the world about!” To better understand the rhetorical details of these political theologies of the 1850s, we can turn to another nineteenth-century reader of Paul, Alexander Crummell. An Episcopal minister who studied at Cambridge University and served as a missionary in Liberia, Crummell also founded the American Negro Academy back in the United States. Many know Crummell best as one of W. E. B. Du Bois’s heroes in The Souls of Black Folk, where the author writes admiringly of the powerful effect of Crummell’s 1895 commencement address at Wilberforce University. Crummell’s speech began with a quote from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things [4:8].” It is precisely the way that Douglass and Melville thought “on these things,” how they thought political theology with Pauline Christianity in the 1850s, that we will track. One positive implication of such thinking was a democratic universalism, illustrated by Crummell in a sermon delivered late in the decade. In 1859 Crummell spoke in Harper, Liberia, on “The Fitness of the Gospel for Its Own Work,” taking as his text Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 1:14: “I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians.” Crummell argues that Paul’s many allusions to his own person—his many uses of “I”—are evidence not of self-absorption but of his complete identification with the Gospel. “The Gospel and himself become, as it were, identical in his soul: this is his life; aside from this he has no being.” Indeed, for Crummell, to talk about Paul is not primarily

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to speak of the Apostle, but rather of the Gospel itself, especially the Gospel as “the medicine for the deep and otherwise incurable diseases of the soul.” The ultimate disease of the soul, the source of all other miseries—“social, civil, religious, and political”—is sin, deadly sin. More specifically, it is that sin of which Paul is least guilty: “Sin in the heart, that is, selfishness, alienation from God, perfect absorption in self, that is the disease in every man and nation on earth which must be cured.” And the Gospel is perfectly suited for this healing mission, in theory and in practice, in theology and in history. Crummell then interprets his chosen text from Romans as meaning that “the Gospel is the complement to man’s universal needs and miseries.” He summarizes his interpretation by having Paul say “in effect, these words: ‘I know that men have intense spiritual ailments; . . . I see clearly the fact of soul-sickness, and God has made me an instrument for man’s cure and man’s relief. Hence I have announced this sacred medicine among my own kith and kin—the Jews. . . . but . . . it is as much my duty to preach it to Gentiles as to them. Yea, I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, to the wise and to the unwise.’ ” Thus, the text from Romans “shows most clearly how the personality and egoism of St. Paul fade and vanish before the glory and the power of the Cross.” At the same time, “it furnishes the great truth”—the main point of Crummell’s universalist sermon—“the fitness of the Gospel for all men.” To elaborate the political implications of Crummell’s reading of Romans, we can turn to still another, more recent reader of Paul: the French philosopher Alain Badiou. In his Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (1997), Badiou explains how the Christian subject is constituted by Paul’s preaching of the Christian gospel. When his rhetoric succeeds, Paul’s hearers say “yes” to the event of Christ’s Resurrection and remain committed to that “yes” through their words and deeds, their beliefs and practices—the truth-procedures of the Christian faith. The truth thus established is a “universal singularity.” Paul’s Christian truth is “singular” because it is based on fidelity to a particular, unique event, and “universal” because it is “offered to all, or addressed to everyone, without a condition of belonging being able to limit this offer, or this address.” According to Paul, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, “although himself a Roman citizen, and proud of it, Paul will never allow any legal categories to identify the Christian subject. Slaves, women, people of every profession and nationality will therefore be admitted without restriction or privilege.” Thus, argues the atheist Badiou, the Christian subject responds positively to a univer-

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sal message, one addressed to all thinking beings and assuming all to be thinking beings. It is the creation of this universalizing and universalized subject that Badiou identifies as the major accomplishment of the militant preacher Paul. And it is this same subject, constituted in relation to the crucified and resurrected Christ, that Crummell champions in his own preaching on Paul and develops as an exemplar for his self-empowering program for African Americans both in Liberia and in the United States. In 1872, when Crummell returned to the United States from his missionary work in Liberia, he brought with him his cultural rhetoric of race progress through Christian preaching. His version of black nationalism was linked to a conservative religious ideology of rigorous selfdiscipline and submission to divinely ordained political and church authority, suspicious as he was of the extremes of democratic politics. Crummell also remained confident in the power of Western intellectual traditions and in the inevitability of racial progress. Now, however, Crummell put these beliefs to rhetorical work in his preaching for the cause of African Americans in the United States rather than for Africans in Liberia. Crummell’s program contrasts with that of his sometimes rival Frederick Douglass. Crummell and Douglass clearly respected each other and shared antislavery, antiracist interpretations of the Christian Bible, but they diverged in their political theologies at least partly because of differing racial views and political strategies. As Wilson Moses intentionally overstates the case, “Douglass’s program was for black people to remember slavery and to forget that they were black. Crummell’s was for them to remember that they were black and forget slavery” Using Badiou’s vocabulary, we could say that Crummell and Douglass have different relations to the event of slave emancipation in the 1860s. Crummell grafted his commitment to this political event onto his fidelity to the religious event, his Paul-inspired Christian faith, while Douglass said “yes” to emancipation by partially secularizing Pauline universalism. Crummell called for a racialized subject and elaborated it by using Paul as a practical model, while Douglass directly challenged Crummell’s views, appropriating the universalism of Paul’s speech to the Athenians (Acts 17:26). Douglass argued that “the whole assumption of race pride is ridiculous. Let us have done with complexional superiorities or inferiorities, complexional pride or shame. I want no better basis for my activities and affinities than the broad foundation laid by the Bible itself, that God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.” But another difference between Crummell and Douglass

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emerges out of Douglass’s intense focus on the figure of Paul as militant preacher. Whereas Crummell emphasized discipline over enthusiasm in his Episcopal religion and political program, we find Douglass alluding to Romans 1:16—“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”—and explaining that “The soul of the apostle’s utterance . . . is that he is not ashamed of the truth, because it is the power of God unto salvation. Like all grand reformers, this great apostle, filled with a holy enthusiasm, was not ashamed of the message in which, to him, was the power to save the world from sin, and the consequences of sin, though all the world were against him.” Still, when it came to confidence in the power of preaching, the force of rhetoric itself, Douglass and Crummell were not that far apart. In his eulogy at Douglass’s funeral, Crummell praised the character of the great man, declaring that “Paul on Mars hill is not a more striking and valuable lesson than Mr. Douglass upon the platform. They, both apostles, preached the doctrines of their Master. The Pauline echoes have been intensified by the Douglass reverberation; the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, was their theme.” A few years earlier, Douglass had named Crummell among those African American orators whose skill in speaking gave the lie to racial prejudice, whose performance could “be trusted before the most learned and enlightened audience in the world.” Though some might ask what such men have done for their race, the answer is clear: “They have only talked; but talk is itself a power.” And then Douglass used Paul as a prime example of his assertions: “Great is the miracle of human speech—by it nations are enlightened and reformed; by it the cause of justice and liberty is defended, by it evils are exposed, ignorance dispelled, the path of duty made plain, and by it those that live to-day are put into the possession of the wisdom of ages gone by. The words of Paul,” he went on, “still rock the world, though spoken two thousand years ago, for his words were mighty and powerful.” In his own world-rocking of the 1840s and 1850s, Douglass articulated a political theology that again and again turned to Pauline Christianity as its rhetorical foundation. In chapter XII of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass juxtaposes descriptions of his Christian “awakening” with that of his discovery of abolition. Not more than thirteen, Douglass had his “religious nature .  .  . awakened by the preaching of a white Methodist minister” and, after consulting with “a good colored man” and praying for weeks in doubt and fear, he “finally found that change of heart which comes by ‘casting all one’s care’ upon God, and

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by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend, and Savior of those who diligently seek Him.” From then on, he “saw the world in a new light” and “seemed to live in a new world, surrounded by new objects, and to be animated by new hopes and desires.” Douglass came under the influence of a devout old man, Charles Lawson, who told him that the Lord “had a great work” for him to do and that he “must prepare to do it.” Douglass never lost this sense of personal vocation, here tied to religious faith and preaching the Christian gospel. He later explained: “The advice and the suggestions of Uncle Lawson, were not without their influence upon my character and destiny. He threw my thoughts into a channel from which they have never entirely diverged.” But his belief in Christian theology was certainly tested time and again. He rejected the old slave religion: “I have met many religious colored people, at the south, who are under the delusion that God requires them to submit to slavery, and to wear their chains with meekness and humility. I could entertain no such nonsense.” Instead, he came to a political theology holding “that God was angry with the white people because of their slaveholding wickedness” and hoping “much from the abolition movement,” which he saw “supported by the Almighty, and armed with DEATH!” Throughout the 1840s, his views were aligned with Garrison’s pacifist, nonpolitical brand of abolition, and Douglass could be found debating the Bible with fellow black abolitionists and standing against slave insurrection at the end of the decade. In an 1849 controversy with Henry Highland Garnet, Douglass sarcastically challenged the black preacher: “We should like to hear a sermon from this Reverend man of blood and pretended disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, on the following passages of scripture: ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, . . . But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’ [Matthew 5:38–39].” Beyond such internecine disagreements over Bible politics, Douglass’s political theology concerned itself far more with vehemently condemning the hypocrisy of Southern Christian slaveholders and the anti-abolitionism of Northern churches. In the famous appendix to his 1845 Narrative, Douglass writes against “the slaveholding religion of this land”: “ ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness’ [Matthew 23:27].” His political theology distinguishes between “the religion of this land” and “Christianity proper,” asserting that “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—

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so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.” Douglass declares, “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” Following the anti-unionist Garrisonian line, Douglass specifies what he means by “the religion of this land” as “that which is revealed in the words, deeds, and actions, of those bodies, north and south, calling themselves Christian churches, and yet in union with slaveholders.” As is well known, Douglass’s allegiances shifted in the early 1850s from Garrisonian nonresistance to political abolition. Though he began to interpret the U.S. Constitution as antislavery rather than pro-slavery, his Biblical hermeneutics remained the same, and his abolitionist appeal to scripture continued—but now in support of participating in party politics and the electoral process. His speech of 5 July 1852 illustrates the transformation as he asks: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He answers with a rhetorical gambit of first complimenting his audience on their nation’s glorious past and its youthful potential and then turning on them in jeremiad fashion, by abruptly asking: “Fellowcitizens, . . . why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” Douglass leads up to this moment by manipulating various Biblical allusions to make his points. Early on he positively compares his American audience to the Israelites, saying that the “birthday of your National Independence” is for you “what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God” (360). He later notes that in 1776, the British government failed to recognize its oppressive rule, a blindness “characteristic of tyrants since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea.” The lessons of this madness, continues Douglass, now seem “wholly lost on our present rulers” in the United States (362). Then he develops this critical turn further by negatively equating his audience with “the children of Jacob,” who boast Abraham as father but have “lost Abraham’s faith and spirit”: Americans who trade “in the bodies and souls of men” today claim Washington as forebear, but “Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves” (367). Here Douglass abruptly asks his “fellow-citizens” why he has been called to speak on this day, for his people do not share in “the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence” (367). “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?” If so, Douglass declares, there are precedents for such acts: the Israelites exemplified “a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were

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thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!” But it is finally Douglass and his enslaved people that become identified with the Israelites, who, when exiled in Babylon, cry out, “let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” (Psalm 137:6) if the freedom of Jerusalem is forgotten. On this day, Douglass will “faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow,” the victims of American slavery, and therefore will not “pass lightly over their wrongs” and “chime in with the popular theme” of celebrating July Fourth (368). Turning to the “grossest infringements of Christian Liberty” (376), Douglass once again attacks those “eloquent Divines” who “have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system” (377). He ends this section on church complicity by juxtaposing Pauline universalism and democratic equality: “You profess to believe ‘that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth’ [Acts 17:26], and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you ‘hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage . . . a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country” (383). Before a concluding poem (by his old ally Garrison), Douglass once again appeals to scripture with a hopeful quotation from Psalm 68:31: “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God” (387). Like Douglass, Melville in the 1840s and 1850s harshly criticized Christian believers who failed to live up to their professed beliefs. From his first novel onward, Melville condemned those nominal Christians who so dramatically contradicted the lessons of Jesus, especially those expressed in his Sermon on the Mount. Again and again throughout his writing career, Melville publicly identified with victims of oppression and adopted the rhetoric of the Christian reformer in defending those who needed defending, as in White-Jacket when he called for the end of flogging aboard ship: “Join hands with me . . . and, in the name of that Being in whose image the flogged sailor is made, let us demand of Legislators, by what right they dare profane what God himself accounts sacred.” The narrator backs his appeal with the parallel to Paul’s demand in Acts 22:25: “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman? asks the intrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen, that it was not.”

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Later, Melville elaborated this political theology, promoting the “unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things” as he wrote enthusiastically in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in August 1850. Within the year, he sent the essay’s subject a letter asserting a “ruthless democracy on all sides” and maintaining that “a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.” This positive political theology of radical democracy receives its most vigorous articulation in the pages of Moby-Dick, with its apostrophe to the “just Spirit of Equality,” the “great democratic God,” and the celebration of human dignity, which is manifest, not in “kings and robes,” but “in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” “To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!” That is the concluding lesson of Father Mapple’s sermon earlier in Moby-Dick, and he cinches the point with a Pauline citation. “Woe to that pilot of the living God who slights [this lesson]. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! . . . Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!” But the truth that must be said is not just all positive political theology, not all patriotic advocacy of radical American democracy. Early on there is a tempering skepticism. It’s not just that Christians don’t live up to Christian ideals in their practice; it’s that the Christian ideal may not, in a certain sense, be practical. In White-Jacket, Melville wrote: “In view of the whole present social frame-work of our world, so ill adapted to the practical adoption of the meekness of Christianity, there seems almost some ground for the thought, that although our blessed Savior was full of the wisdom of heaven, yet his gospel seems lacking in the practical wisdom of earth.” Any doubts expressed here about the ideal itself are immediately undercut when what the Savior lacks turns out to be a decidedly non-Sermon-on-the-Mount “due appreciation of the necessities of nations at times demanding bloody massacres and wars” and the antidemocratic “proper estimation of the value of rank, title, and money.” In any case, the narrator concludes by adding that this earthly impracticality “only the more crowns the divine consistency of Jesus,” whose nature, “the best theologians demonstrate . . . was not merely human—was not that of a mere man of the world” Consideration of the “merely human,” however, leads Melville to more fully appreciate what St. Paul called “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thessolonians 2:7), a phrase Melville borrows in Mardi, Clarel, and Billy Budd. In his “Mosses” essay,

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he notes how a “great power of blackness” in Hawthorne’s writings “derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.” Indeed, Melville, in thinking through this uneven balance, “recognized a psychological truth in Calvinism” and a “theological reality” in Paul’s “mystery of iniquity.” Such recognitions ultimately lead Melville from a positive to a negative political theology: an ethical critique of nominal Christians accompanied by a political skepticism toward utopian reform movements grounded in (what he considered) naively optimistic religious and philosophical creeds. Melville’s negative political theology is strikingly manifest in his novels of the 1850s, in which he directly satirizes the hypocrisy of professing Christians, and allegorically represents the impracticality of Christian ideals. Central episodes of Pierre and The Confidence-Man illustrate these points. In Book XIV of the former, we find Pierre reading Plotinus Plinlimmon’s lecture on “Chronometricals and Horologicals.” “Christ was a chronometer,” accurately representing the otherworldly time of a heavenly Greenwich, which contradicts “the mere local standards and watch-maker’s brains of this earth.” Alluding to John 18:36, Plinlimmon asks, “Did [Christ] not expressly say—My wisdom (time) is not of this world?” But the lesson that Plinlimmon takes from this contradiction between the chronometrical heavenly and the horological earthly is not that of St. Paul, who writes in First Corinthians, “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (3:19). In his Bible, Melville marked the preceding verse: “If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.” In contrast, the practical Plinlimmon first proclaims the contradiction and then easily resolves it by advocating “a virtuous expediency” that “seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men” and “the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.” Plinlimmon declares, “though the earthly wisdom of man be heavenly folly to God; so also, conversely, is the heavenly wisdom of God an earthly folly to man.” But “God at the heavenly Greenwich” does not “expect common men to keep Greenwich wisdom” in this “world of ours.” What this “Chronometrical and Horological conceit” teaches, according to Plinlimmon, is “that in things terrestrial (horological) a man must not be governed by ideas celestial (chronometrical); that certain minor self-renunciations in this life his own mere instinct for his own every-day general well-being will teach him to make, but he must by no means

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make a complete unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other being, or any cause, or any conceit.” But it is precisely that “unconditional sacrifice” that Christianity requires, a lesson ironically conveyed through the Indian-hating example of John Moredock in The Confidence-Man. Melville’s difficult satire humorously exposes hypocritical Christians and allegorically explores Christianity’s impracticality. In the novel’s first chapter, Melville uses Paul’s words from First Corinthians 13 to introduce his devilish lampoon of American extremes in gullibility (too much confidence) and distrust (too little confidence). The stranger’s slate reads “Charity thinketh no evil” and “Charity believeth all things,” Pauline verses that are juxtaposed to the Barber’s sign—“No trust”—followed by the narrator’s comment: “An inscription which, though in a sense not less intrusive than the contrasted ones of the stranger, did not, as it seemed, provoke any corresponding derision or surprise, much less indignation; and still less, to all appearances, did it gain for the inscriber the repute of being a simpleton.” This ironic juxtaposition of signs sets up the series of encounters to follow. In various disguises, the Devil as confidence man plays a string of gullible or distrustful marks, leading up to what some critics see as the central episode of the novel, the frontier tale of Moredock the Indian-hater. In “The Metaphysics of Indian Hating,” Hershel Parker provides the most detailed explication of this story, “a tragic study of the impracticability of Christianity, and, more obviously, a satiric allegory in which the Indians are Devils and the Indian-haters are dedicated Christians, and in which the satiric target is the nominal practice of Christianity.” In this allegory, “Christianity is conceived as the dedicated hatred of Evil at the cost of forsaking human ties” and “most of the human race is represented as wandering in the backwoods of error, giving lip service to their religion but failing to embody it in their lives.” Given this interpretation of the tale, one might read its conclusion as a bit of sardonic political theology, as Moredock’s belief in “Indian diabolism” prevents him from accepting the nomination to be governor. After all, how could a governor of Illinois sneak “out now and then, during a recess of the legislative bodies, for a few days’ shooting at human beings, within the limits of his paternal chief-magistry”? No, he would have to refuse the honors of political office, for “to be a consistent Indian-hater involves the renunciation of ambition, with its objects—the pomps and glories of the world; and since religion, pronouncing such things vanities, accounts it merit to renounce them, therefore, so far as this goes, Indian-hating, whatever

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may be thought of it in other respects, may be regarded as not wholly without the efficacy of a devout sentiment.” It is ultimately the tragic impracticality of the Christian paradigm that leads to Melville’s particular form of political theology. Whereas Douglass uses Paul to support his positive intervention into abolitionist and later antiracist politics, Melville’s struggle with Christian faith and his Pauline recognition of human weakness leave him in a much more uncertain and ambiguous position toward political activism, a position I have called negative political theology. A positive political theology tries either to legitimate a particular political regime or to revolutionize an established one. A past Colonial Puritan theocracy and a successful contemporary religious nationalism are examples of the former, while Douglass’s abolitionism and 1960s liberation theology are examples of the latter. In contrast, negative political theology is “not directed toward establishing a different political system or replacing a political regime through political revolution.” Rather, it opens up a “more radical possibility: a theological delegitimation of all political power as [itself ] a political attitude.” Melville’s fiction of the 1850s sometimes approached this politico-theological negation in its tragic representation of the impracticality of the Christian ideal. The contrast between Douglass’s and Melville’s political theologies is perhaps most apparent in their fictional thinking about slave rebellions. In Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” a positive political theology represents the melodramatic clarity of friend-enemy relations, the unambiguous consequences of following one’s leader, and the explicit directness of Christian action against slavery. In this 1853 tale, a white Ohio Christian, friend of Gerrit Smith, aids a fugitive slave, admirably giving “bread to the hungry, and clothes to the naked,”; and later, slaves—“children of a common Creator”—revolt successfully on the slaveship Creole under “the triumphant leadership of their heroic chief and deliverer,” Madison Washington, the ex-fugitive slave. All such clear and definite meanings are absent from Melville’s 1855 “Benito Cereno,” which embodies a kind of negative political theology. In this notoriously ambiguous story, Melville provides no unequivocal standpoint from which to judge the events of a slave mutiny aboard the Spanish San Dominick, which to the approaching American Captain Amasa Delano looks like a “ship-load of monks” with “Black Friars pacing the cloisters.” The naively good-natured Delano, who “took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs,” struggles to understand the Spanish captain, Don Benito Cereno, a “hypochondriac

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abbot,” until it is revealed that the black manservant Babo, looking like “a begging friar of St. Francis,” had been in charge all along after a brutal slave revolt. Here one often fails to recognize who is friend and who is foe; following the leader can lead to death as easily as to life; and practical solutions, Christian or otherwise, to the problem of slavery are as difficult to infer as the overall attitude toward the most significant political actions represented. Despite such divergences in their political theologies, Douglass and Melville agreed in their unremitting criticism of misguided applications of orthodox religion to contemporary political problems. They took their contemporaries to task for failing to live up to the ethical principles of their Christian theologies and for perverting those principles in the defense of social injustice and political oppression. Both could ask of a Christian heaven whether those who freeze, On earth here, under want or wrong; The Sermon on the Mount shall these Find verified? is love so strong? More than Douglass, Melville thought skeptically about what he called “theologico-politico-social schemes.” Still, both valued the “one great political idea” Douglass found in the Christian Bible: “It is in substance, righteousness exalteth a nation—sin is a reproach to any people.”

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Notes

Introduction 1. For discussion of disciplines as institutional sets of epistemic practices, theories, and traditions, see Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 1–38; and for a rhetorical microanalysis of interpretive practices within one discipline, see Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, 19–53. The gold standard for rhetorical trandisciplinary approaches is, of course, Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2. See Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, ch. 1; Reception Histories, ch. 3; and Disciplinary Identities, ch. 2. On the reception of Heidegger’s philosophy more generally, see Janicaud, Heidegger in France; and Woessner, Heidegger in America. This reception includes the ongoing controversy over Heidegger’s relation to Nazism—see, for example, Derrida, Gadamer, and LacoueLabarthe, Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics; Badiou and Cassin, Heidegger; and Bakewell, Existentialist Café. 3. For theoretical and historical background, see Klein, Interdisciplinarity; Fish, “Being Interdisciplinary”; Nelson and Gaonkar, Disciplinarity and Dissent; Anderson and Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle; Drong, Disciplining the New Pragmatism; Moran, Interdisciplinarity; and Graff, Undisciplining Knowledge. 4. See Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 85–86.

Chapter 1 1. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad, 67. 2. James, Pragmatism, 32. 3. Cf. Said, “Traveling Theory.” 4. See Mailloux, Reception Histories; see also Cain, Reconceptualizing. 5. See Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, ch. 4, and Arac, Huckleberry Finn. 6. John H. Wallace, quoted in Sager, “Mark Twain School,” A-1. 7. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 8. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 9. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 495 (1954). 10. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 489 (1954). 11. Brown v. Board of Education, 345 U.S. 972 (1953). 12. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 492–93 (1954). 13. Quoted in Kruger, Simple Justice, 710–11. 14. “A Joint Resolution of the State of South Carolina,” 14 February 1956; and rpt. in Ziegler, Desegregation, 101. 15. Quoted in Baustein and Ferguson, Desegregation, 8. On the relation of rhetoric to ideology, see Mailloux, Reception Histories: ideologies are “sets of beliefs and practices furthering socio-political interests in certain periods and locations; these ideological networks define

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positions within cultural conversations where they appear as strategic arguments and rhetorical figures” (100). 16. Wechsler, “Toward Neutral Principles,” 34. 17. Ibid., quoting Otis v. Parker, 187 U.S. 609 (1903). 18. See essays by Paul Brest, Mark V. Tushnet, and Edwin Meese in Levinson and Mailloux, Interpreting Law and Literature; Sarat, Race, Law, and Culture; Martin, Brown v. Board of Education; and Balkin, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. For the citation in Bush v. Gore, see Justice Breyer’s dissent. 19. Cf. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 170–71. 20. See Mitchell, Against Theory. 21. Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, 155–64; see also Fish, Trouble with Principle. 22. “Joint Resolution,” 101. 23. “Joint Resolution,” 101, citing South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 439 (1905). 24. See Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, and Hirsch, “Meaning and Significance,” 202. 25. Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000). 26. Here are two sample comments from “What We’ll Remember in 2050: Nine Views on Bush v. Gore” (Romano). First, a guardedly positive view from Harvey J. Mansfield, Professor of Government, Harvard University: “It was unfortunate that the majority of the court had to go the equal-protection clause, which hasn’t been applied in voting cases before this and has potential for future mischief if it comes to be supposed that equal protection requires each vote to have the same power. That would run counter to our federal system. But I think the five conservative justices agreed to using the equal-protection clause in order to get two more votes, from Breyer and Souter, and that was a reasonable thing to do in the circumstances.” And then a more negative evaluation from William H. Chafe, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Duke University: “The most devastating parallel [between the 1876 and 2000 elections] is the central role that race—especially the meaning of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the 14th Amendment—played in shaping the outcome in both cases. . . . The heart of the irony is that large portions of those [Florida] votes that were invalidated, not counted, or prohibited were black votes. . . . Was there an issue of ‘equal protection’ in this election? It would seem so. Only it was not the one the court identified. The smoldering ember in this election dispute is the likelihood that minority voters in 2000—as in 1876—will once again see themselves as the primary victims of an election they view as stolen.” See also Gillman, Votes That Counted, and Ackerman, Bush v. Gore.

Chapter 2 1. See Mailloux, Reception Histories, 22–42; Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 42–44, 51–52, 118–21; and Mailloux, “Conversation with Keith Gilyard,” ch. 14 in the present volume; see also Fish, “Rhetoric”; Gilyard, Composition and Cornel West; Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric; Stob, William James; Jackson and Clark, Trained Capacities; and Danisch, Building a Social Democracy. 2. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 40–49, and Mailloux, Reception Histories, xii–xiii. 3. Mailloux, Reception Histories, 27–32; see also Porrovecchio, F. C. S. Schiller, and, more generally, Mailloux, Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism. 4. James, “Humanism,” Nation 78 (3 March 1904): 175–76, and rpt. James, Essays, 551. 5. Schiller, Humanism, xvii. 6. Schiller, Studies in Humanism, 31–32. 7. Hayes, “The Pragmatist.”

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8. For a different, more detailed argument tying Obama to pragmatism via Lincoln, see Schulten, “Barack Obama.” 9. Menand, Metaphysical Club, xi (emphasis added). 10. James, Pragmatism, 42. 11. Stout, Democracy and Tradition,13. 12. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, 63–71; see also Schultz, “Obama’s Political Philosophy”; Sanders and Koopman, “Obama and Pragmatism”; and Danisch, “Roots of Obama’s Rhetorical Pragmatism.” 13. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama, 22, 120, 250, and West, American Evasion, 150–64. 14. Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” A25. 15. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 96. 16. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 282. 17. Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” 237–38. 18. Zakaria, “Pragmatic President,” 18. 19. Obama, Audacity of Hope, 96. 20. It is, of course, far too early to evaluate the historical legacy of President Obama as a rhetorical pragmatist, but the opinion of one former supporter is equally sobering—see Strube, “A Talk with Cornel West,” 298–300. For preliminary rhetorical evaluations, see Abraham and Smith, The Making of Barack Obama, and Terrill, Double-Consciousness.

Chapter 3 1. See Sprague, Older Sophists, 18. On the translation and interpretation of Protagoras’s anthrōpos metron fragment, see Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 117–33. On the history of the term “humanism” and its application to various movements, see Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus”; Kristeller, “Humanism”; Knight, Humanist Anthology; and Kraye, Renaissance Humanism. 2. See Kuklick, Rise of American Philosophy, 251n. 3. See Mailloux, Reception Histories, 27–32; Mailloux, “Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism,” ch. 2 of the present volume; and Porrovecchio, F. C. S. Schiller. 4. See Foerster, Humanism and America; Grattan, Critique of Humanism; and Hoeveler, New Humanism. 5. See Althusser, “Marxism and Humanism,” and Althusser, Humanist Controversy. 6. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 55–56. 7. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 202–3. 8. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, xii–xix. 9. See Rubini, “Philology as Philosophy,” on the development of Grassi’s humanism argument prior to Heidegger’s 1947 letter, and Celenza, Lost Italian Renaissance, for the Italian context of Grassi’s defense; see also Foss, Foss, and Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives, 51–79, and Struever, “Grassi’s Choice.” 10. Heidegger, “Onto-Theological Constitution of Metaphysics.” 11. Grassi, “Rehabilitation of Rhetorical Humanism,” 144–45. 12. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 210. 13. Grassi, “Rehabilitation of Rhetorical Humanism,” 136–37. 14. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, 121. 15. Ibid. 16. See Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy. 17. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, 82.

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18. Ibid., 85. 19. Leff, “Tradition,” 135. 20. Ibid., 136. In his endnotes to this passage, Leff cites several texts in support of his generalizations, including Eden, Hermeneutics; Kahn, “Humanism”; Mendelson, “Everything”; Sloane, On the Contrary; Lanham, Electronic Word, 186–92; Conley, Rhetoric, esp. 17–20, 34–42, 109–50; and Struever, Language of History, 5–39. 21. Leff, “Idea of Rhetoric,” 90. 22. Leff, “Tradition,” 135. 23. In addition to essays cited in the following paragraphs, see Leff, “Burke’s Ciceronianism” and “Agency.” 24. Among his many essays on Cicero, see Leff, “Genre,” “Decorum,” and “Cicero’s Pro Murena.” 25. As Leff explains, his coining of “hermeneutical rhetoric” is a pointed disciplinary reversal of the terms in “rhetorical hermeneutics” (see Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, and Mailloux, Reception Histories), a shift in focus “from how rhetoric constrains understanding of texts to how interpretative processes become inventional resources in texts that purport to address extraverbal reality”; see Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” 197–98. 26. Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” 198–99. 27. Ibid., 206. Leff is quoting Lincoln’s 17 August 1858 campaign speech delivered in Lewistown, Illinois, before his first debate with Stephen Douglas. 28. Leff, “Tradition,” 143. 29. Leff, “Idea of Rhetoric,” 97–99.

Chapter 4 1. Kierkegaard, Journals, no. 489. 2. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a paper at the conference “Time Will Tell, but Epistemology Won’t: In Memory of Richard Rorty,” at the University of California, Irvine, on 14 May 2010. 3. Rorty, “Foreword,” xi; see also Neil Gross, Richard Rorty, 227. 4. Box 22, Folder 2, Richard Rorty Papers, MS-C017, Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Further references to this archive will be given in one of the following formats: RRP box:folder or RRP, web address. 5. See Mailloux, Reception Histories, 33n33. 6. Rorty, “Notes on Plato,” RRP, http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/241 (accessed 1 January 2014); see also Rorty, Take Care, 70, where he accepts differences between good, sincere, or formally valid arguments and those that are bad, insincere, or formally invalid but sees no need for “an additional distinction between logic and rhetoric.” 7. See Rorty, Contingency, esp. 11–12, 41. 8. See also Rorty’s positive review of Ceccarelli’s Shaping Science with Rhetoric (“Studied Ambiguity”); Mailloux, “Rhetorical Pragmatism”; and Mailloux, “Conversation with Keith Gilyard,” ch. 14 in the present volume. 9. Kierkegaard, Journals, no. 2163; and quoted in Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard,” 97. 10. Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard,” 98, 99, quoting Habermas, 133. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Ibid., 100. 13. Ibid. 14. Kierkegaard, Journals, no. 489; quoted in Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard,” 101.

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15. Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard,” 101–2. 16. These are actually the concluding words of the paper as slightly revised and published in Dreyfus, On the Internet, 88–89. The paper in its original published form ends more definitively—“Thus Kierkegaard is right”—but less expansively, referring only to the “leveling launched by the Enlightenment and perfected in the Press and the Public Sphere” with no final reference to the Internet; see Dreyfus, “Kierkegaard,” 109. 17. Rorty, “Comments.” 18. Rorty, Contingency, xiii–xiv. 19. The quotations in this and the next five paragraphs are from Rorty, “Comments.” 20. Rorty, “Response,” 221n2. 21. Rorty, “Philosophy,” 96, citing Kierkegaard, Papers, 182. 22. Rorty, “Response,” 221n2. 23. For other studies examining the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Rorty, see Rudd, “Kierkegaard’s Critique”; Visker, “Hold the Being”; Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard; and Simmons, “Violence and Singularity.” 24. See RRP 51:7. 25. Rorty, “First S. K. lecture,” 1, RRP 43:18. 26. Kierkegaard, Concluding, 33. 27. Ibid., 34n (my emphasis). The note is partly quoted by Rorty, “First S. K. lecture,” 1. 28. Rorty, “First S. K. lecture,” 1–2, at first quoting Kierkegaard, Concluding, 51. 29. Rorty, “First S. K. lecture,” 2; see James, Will to Believe, 14–15. 30. Rorty, “Religious Faith,” 85. 31. Ibid., 88–89. 32. Ibid., 95. 33. Thus, Kierkegaard stands as one of those Christians who successfully integrate (what Rorty calls) private and public final vocabularies—vocabularies that Rorty goes great lengths to keep separate. “For a few such people—Christians (and others) for whom the search for private perfection coincides with the project of living for others—the two sorts of questions come together. For most such, they do not.” Rorty, Contingency, 143. 34. Kierkegaard, Concluding, 121, quoted by Rorty, “First S. K. lecture,” 2 (my insertion in brackets).

Chapter 5 1. Rowe, “Future for American Studies,” 265; see also Rowe, New American Studies. 2. See, for example, Lowe, Immigrant Acts. 3. Examples of intersectional studies within U.S. cultural criticism have proliferated. For one early illustration within the New American Studies, see Wiegman, American Anatomies. 4. Of course the examples are not arbitrary; they emerge directly out of the same subject matter preoccupying a Comparative American Studies. Furthermore, the theory/practice split suggested here is overstated. 5. Rorty, “Cosmopolitanism,” 212. 6. See, for example, Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism.” 7. Rorty, “The Unpatriotic Academy.” 8. Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live, 91, 260. 9. Ibid., 142–46, 283n1. 10. I coin this term for Kant’s cosmological speculations by modeling it on the contemporary field of Comparative Planetology, the systematic study of similarities and differences

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among planets in our solar system and beyond. For the rhetorical context of Kant’s cosmology, see Dick, Plurality of Worlds, and Crowe, Extraterrestrial Life Debate. 11. Kant, Universal Natural History, 189–90. 12. See discussions of Protagoras in the opening sections of Mailloux, “Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism,” and Mailloux, “Humanist Controversies and Rhetorical Humanism,” chs. 2 and 3, respectively, in the present volume. 13. See Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict, and Fish, “Rhetoric.” 14. For examples of Platonic philosophy and Sophistic rhetoric being explicitly cited in the culture wars between traditional universalist humanism and cultural critique/poststructuralist theory, see Mailloux, “Rhetoric Returns to Syracuse,” ch. 7 of Reception Histories, 151–81, and the public statements made by Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment, in Cheney, “Conversation with Bernard Knox,” 36; cf. Cheney, Telling the Truth. For more general background, see Wilson, Myth of Political Correctness, and Mailloux, Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism. 15. Hu Shih, Development of Logical Method, 10–11. 16. Lieh Tze, VI, quoted in Hu Shih, Development of Logical Method, 12. 17. Hu Shih, Development of Logical Method, 13. 18. See Hu Shih, “Hu Shih,” 252, and Rorty, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids.” 19. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 26–29. In light of my essay’s own comparisons, I’d like to note in passing an interesting analogy Lyotard implies in this section of Just Gaming. It goes something like this: In ethics and politics, the Sophists’ notion of opinion-based judgments challenges Plato’s theory of the model Idea just as the Cashinahuas’ heteronomous narrativity challenges Kant’s theory of the autonomous will. 20. Lyotard, Differend, 9. 21. James, Pragmatism, 35. See discussion of pragmatism’s strategy of rhetorical mediation in Mailloux, “Euro-American Rhetorical Pragmatism,” ch. 2 of the present volume. 22. James, Pragmatism, 35. 23. Rorty, “Introduction,” 15. 24. Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live, 46, 175–76. 25. Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” 107. 26. Davidson, “Communication and Convention,” 279. 27. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 35. 28. Lyotard, “Universal History,” 321. Lyotard notes the gendered roles of the Cashinahua narrator and audience: “all males and prepubertal girls can listen” but “only males can tell stories” (320). Such gendering, of course, complicates further the constitution of the ethnocentric “we.” 29. Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live, 261. 30. See Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?,” and Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 198.

Chapter 6 1. See Mailloux, “Making Comparisons,” ch. 5 in the present volume. 2. Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 66–85. 3. Asen and Brouwer, “Introduction,” 3, citing Arendt, Human Condition. 4. John Dewey, Essays, 244. 5. Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 67–68. 6. For a Levinasian counter-argument, see ibid., 170n10, 182n22. 7. Ibid., 69. 8. In contrast, see ibid., ch. 5 on “Judgment.” 9. Ibid., 77–79.

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10. Ibid., 84. 11. See West, American Evasion, 228, 237, and West, Cornel West Reader, 133, 186. 12. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 7. 13. Cf. Muckelbauer, “Rhetoric,” and Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 180n18. I am grateful to Diane Davis for our ongoing dialogue, including her comments on an earlier version of this section. 14. Caussin, Eloquentia 6 (my translation). I thank Daniel Gross for leading me to Caussin’s text; see Daniel Gross, “Caussin’s Passion.” 15. See Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 9–66, and Mailloux, Reception Histories, 43–71. 16. See James Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 56–64; Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 41–50; and Enos and Thompson, Rhetoric of St. Augustine. 17. I am grateful to Christopher Wild and Uli Strasser for providing the initial impetus for this media perspective on early Jesuit theorhetoric. In their invitation letter to participate in a December 2009 conference, “Theology as Media Theory,” at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, they described the conference as taking “the historiographical commonplace ‘no Reformation without print’ ” and proceeding “from its chiastic inversion ‘no print without the Reformation’ to highlight the importance of theology to the fortunes of print and, more broadly, to the formation of media cultures throughout the early modern period” (letter of 27 April 2009). 18. Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan.” 19. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 333. 20. Quoted in Edwards, Printing, 81. 21. Quoted in Black, “Printed Bible,” 432; see Eisenstein, Printing Press, 304. 22. Dockhorn, “Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” 164, quoting Martin Luther, In XV Psalmos graduum. Weimer Ausgabe, XL/3, 59. 23. See Scribner, Simple Folk, and Newman, “Word Made Print.” 24. See Edwards, Printing, 115. 25. Campbell, The Jesuits, 343. 26. Bangert, History, 20–22; Aldama, Formula; and O’Malley, First Jesuits, 35–36. 27. See Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education. 28. Ratio Studiorum, 155–66; for a fuller description of the Ratio’s “Rules for the Professor of Rhetoric” and Soarez’s textbook, see Mailloux, “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding,” ch. 11 in the present volume. 29. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 55–110. 30. Schneider, “Luther with McLuhan,” 212. 31. Caussin, “From On Sacred,” 274–75. 32. Fumaroli, “Fertility,” 101; see also Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence. 33. On technologies of the self, see Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, and Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, Technologies of the Self. 34. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 120–21. 35. Ibid., 61. 36. Cf. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, and Rabbow, Seelenführung.

Chapter 7 1. Latour, “Thou Shalt,” 225, and Latour, Rejoicing, 32–33. For further discussion, see Mailloux, “Notes,” 425–30. 2. “Manifesto: Comparative Rhetoric,” 273. 3. Ratio Studiorum, 155.

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4. On Jesuit theorhetoric, see the “Doing Histories of the Past” section of ch. 6 in the present volume. 5. For a recent account of the Jesuit way of proceeding, see 35th General Congregation, Decree 2. 6. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 255–56; see Schloesser, “Accommodation.” 7. Cf. Arrupe, “Letter” on Jesuit inculturation. 8. 1 Corinthians 2:1–5, 9:22. 9. See McKevitt, Brokers of Culture; cf. Obstfeld, Borgatti, and Davis, “Brokerage.” 10. For an overview of the controversies, see Minamiki, Chinese Rites Controversy; for more recent bibliography, see Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers, 237–44. 11. Spence, Memory Palace, and Hsia, Jesuit in the Forbidden City. 12. Minamiki, Chinese Rites Controversy, ix. 13. Cf. the Jesuit casuistry famously satirized by Pascal in the seventh of his Provincial Letters (1656) and creatively discussed in Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 154–58. 14. See Mailloux, “Making Comparisons,” ch. 5 in the present volume. 15. See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 310–20, and Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 215–22. 16. See the “Jesuit Rhetoric” section of Mailloux, “Jesuit Eloquentia Perfecta,” and the conclusion of Mailloux, “Narrative as Embodied Intensities,” chs. 10 and 13, respectively, in the present volume. 17. See Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 3.

Chapter 8 1. Heidegger, Essence, 12–13. 2. Frye, Anatomy, 14. 3. Frye, “Allegory,” 12–13; cf. Frye, Anatomy, 89–90. 4. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 5. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 84. 6. Ibid., 72. Commenting briefly on Stoic and Neoplatonist writers, Gadamer anticipates recent classical scholarship in his claim about the common structure that symbol and allegory assumed in late antiquity; see Struck, “Allegory as Ascent.” 7. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 73–74. 8. De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 191. 9. Gadamer refers to the “rhetorical-hermeneutical concept of allegory” in explaining, “Allegory arises from the theological need to eliminate offensive material from a religious text—originally from Homer—and to recognize valid truths behind it. It acquires a correlative function in rhetoric wherever circumlocution and indirect statement appear more appropriate.” Truth and Method, 73; on Gadamer and rhetorical hermeneutics more generally, see Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 20–21, 59–61, 73–82; and on de Man and Gadamer, see Copeland and Melville, “Allegory and Allegoresis.” 10. De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality,” 187–88. 11. Ibid., 192, quoting Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual, 437–38, quoted in Fletcher, Allegory, 16n29. 12. De Man, “Rhetoric of Temporality, 192–93. 13. De Man, Allegories of Reading, ix. 14. Ibid., 131. For commentaries on and elaborations of de Man’s allegories of reading, see, for example, Miller, Ethics of Reading; Warminski, Readings in Interpretation; Jameson, Postmodernism; and Gasché, Wild Card of Reading.

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15. De Man, “Introduction,” xx–xxii. De Man is discussing the work of Gadamer’s student Hans Robert Jauss, who, in his aesthetics of reception, depends on concepts from his teacher’s hermeneutics—even while disagreeing with him at times, a point noted by de Man; see also Jauss, “Response to Paul de Man”; and de Man, “Conclusions.” 16. De Man, “Introduction,” xxiii. For additional discussions of the relation between deconstruction and hermeneutics, see Michelfelder and Palmer, Dialogue and Deconstruction.

Chapter 9 1. Miller, “Theology and Logology in Victorian Literature,” 288n2. 2. See note 15 below. I wish to thank Martin McQuillan, Erin Obodiac, Andrezj Warminski, and Hillis Miller for various kinds of help with the primary documents discussed in this essay. 3. Miller, “Linguistic Moment,” 59–60n6. 4. De Man, “Bachelard and Burke,” 17–18. 5. De Man to Burke, 30 January 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers. (I am grateful to Penn State librarians Sandy Stelts and, especially, Jenna Sabre for their generous assistance.) On the planned table of contents for The Resistance to Theory, see de Man’s letter to Lindsay Waters, 11 August 1983, rpt. in Waters, “Introduction,” lxix–lxx n68. The chapter on Burke was never completed; see Godzich, “Foreword,” xi. The posthumously published Resistance to Theory reprints two 1982 essays with implicitly positive mentions of Burke: “The Resistance to Theory” and “The Return to Philology,” de Man, Resistance, 6, 22. 6. Burke to de Man, 16 Feb 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers. 7. De Man, “Bachelard and Burke,” 23, quoting Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 276. 8. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 282, quoted in de Man, “Bachelard and Burke,” 23. 9. De Man, Allegories, 3. 10. Burke to de Man, 4 March 1982, Kenneth Burke Papers; see Burke, “Four Master Tropes.” 11. Burke to de Man, 4 March 1982, referring to de Man, Allegories, 64–67. 12. De Man, Allegories, 137. 13. Burke to de Man, 4 March 1982. For another comparison of Burke and de Man in light of their correspondence, see Sprout, “`To See Our Two Ways.’ ” 14. I am extremely grateful to Anthony Burke, Michael Burke, and Julie Whitaker for their kind hospitality during my visits to the Burke family home in Andover, New Jersey, which houses Burke’s private library. Thanks also to Jack Selzer for inviting me along, and to William Schraufnagel for help in locating Burke’s copy of Allegories of Reading, which is inscribed: “For Kenneth Burke / with admiration / Paul de Man / January 1982.” 15. While theotropic appears once in the published version of Allegories of Reading (p. 261), de Man used the term at least seven times in the draft manuscript, “Textual Allegories.” For example, “Theotropic Allegory” (“Textual Allegories,” 98) was the title at one point for the book’s chapter 10, “Allegory of Reading” (Allegories, 221), and de Man replaced “theotropic systems” in the manuscript (“Textual Allegories,” 158) with “god-centered systems” in the published version (Allegories, 260). 16. Burke, “Theology and Logology,” 162. 17. Burke, “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats,” 463; quoted in Burke, “Theology and Logology,” 162. 18. Burke, “Theology and Logology,” 162–63; see Burke to Miller, 18 June 1977, Kenneth Burke Papers. 19. Burke, “Theology and Logology,” 163n1; see Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 172–272.

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20. Burke, “Theology and Logology,” 164n1. For more of Burke’s take on what he was up to in writing about Keats’s poem, see Burke, “Methodological Repression,” 411: “all that I thought I was doing was analyzing an exceptionally well-put-together art-heaven”; and Burke, “Nonsymbolic Motion,” 831: “Our art-heavens such as Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ . . . bridge the gap by aesthetic conceits, each in its way inviting the realm of symbolic action to take over, in terms of images that stand for things (materials) themselves symbolic.” 21. Cf. Burke, “Dramatism and Logology,” 89: “Though my aim is to be secular and empirical, ‘dramatism’ and ‘logology’ are analogous respectively to the traditional distinction (in theology and metaphysics) between ontology and epistemology. My 1968 ‘Dramatism’ article (in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) features what we humans are (the symbol-using animal). Logology is rooted in the range and quality of knowledge that we acquire when our bodies (physiological organisms in the realm of non-symbolic motion) come to profit by their peculiar aptitude for learning the arbitrary, conventional mediums of communication called ‘natural’ languages.” 22. De Man, “Textual Allegories,” 134. 23. Ibid., citing Rousseau’s Profession de Foi in his Oeuvres, 571. As Miller has suggested, de Man is misleading here since around the cited passage, Rousseau actually makes no reference to “god” at all; see Miller, “Paul de Man at Work,” 72.

Chapter 10 1. Kilpatrick, “Crucial Issues,” 2. 2. Rutten and Soetaert, “Revisiting the Rhetorical Curriculum.” 3. Biesta, “Good Education,” 39–41. 4. Biesta, “Becoming World-Wise,” 823. 5. See section III of Mailloux, “Making Comparisons,” and the conclusion of Mailloux, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” chs. 5 and 7, respectively, in the present volume. 6. Despite emphasizing the contrast between socialization and subjectification, Biesta is not unaware of their overlap or the difficulties I am raising here; see especially Biesta, Beyond Learning; Biesta, “Education-Socialization Conundrum”; and Biesta, “Good Education,” 41. 7. Cf. Dreyfus, Being- in-the-World, 154–58. 8. Mailloux, Reception Histories, xii. 9. Enoch, “Becoming Symbol-Wise,” and Biesta, “Becoming World-Wise.” 10. James, Pragmatism, 42. 11. Burke, “Nonsymbolic Motion,” and Burke, “Afterword.” 12. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 44–62. 13. Burke, Grammar of Motives, and Burke, “Theology and Logology.” 14. Burke, “Linguistic Approach,” 27–28; see Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 359–79. 15. Burke, “Linguistic Approach,” 24. 16. Ibid., 33–35. 17. Ibid., 36. 18. See Mailloux, “Theotropic Logology,” ch. 9 of the present volume. 19. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, vi, 7. 20. Ratio Studiorum, 155–56; see Mailloux, “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding,” ch. 11 in the present volume. 21. See Mailloux, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” ch. 7 in the present volume. 22. Clarke, “How to Build,” and Schroth, “Eloquentia Perfecta.” 23. Duminuco, Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, 161–293.

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24. Arrupe, “Secondary Schools,” quoted in Duminuco, Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, 198n56. 25. Duminuco, Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, 251. 26. Ibid., 245. 27. Traub, Do You Speak Ignatian? 28. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 183. 29. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 129. 30. See the concluding paragraphs of chs. 7 and 13 of the present volume. 31. Duminuco, Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, 245–46, emphasis added. 32. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 136, 205–7. 33. Burke, “Linguistic Approach,” 14, 28. 34. See Maryks, Saint Cicero; Harrington and Keenan, Jesus and Virtue Ethics; and Harrington and Keenan, Paul and Virtue Ethics. 35. Burke, “Linguistic Approach,” 28. 36. Biesta, “Becoming World-Wise,” 821. 37. Ratio Studiorum, 155–56; see also Mailloux, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” ch. 7 in the present volume. 38. Cf. Dreyfus, Being- in-the-World, 220–21, and Rorty, Contingency. 39. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 59–61.

Chapter 11 1. Finn, Tom Playfair, 75. 2. Finn, Harry Dee, 180, 197. 3. Finn, “Need of Juvenile Catholic Literature,” 578. For more on Finn as Jesuit author, see Molson, Francis J. Finn. 4. See Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education. 5. Ratio Studiorum, 155–56. 6. See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 255–56; and Mailloux, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” ch. 7 in the present volume. 7. Ratio Studiorum, 155. 8. Flynn, “De arte rhetorica by Soarez,” 44. 9. Ibid., 105, 108–9. 10. Ibid., 110–11. 11. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 12.1.1; see Meador, “Quintilian’s ‘Vir Bonus.’ ” 12. See, for example, Reggio, Orator, 73, “Christianus orator debet esse vir bonus,” and note 16 below. However, not all Jesuits agreed that moral virtue was part of the formal definition of either rhetoric or eloquence. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, the French Jesuit Frédéric-Marie Guérin approvingly quoted the earlier views of Perpinian: “As to the contention of several very noble rhetoricians that eloquence is a virtue, and cannot be found except in a good man, that is a thing very much to be wished for, but there is little truth to it. . . . Nothing stands in the way of wicked men both possessing eloquence and abusing its power in order to weaken and overturn everything excellent.” Guérin, Composition, ix–x, quoting Perpinian’s “De arte rhetorica discenda” (1561; English translation by J. Mark Sugars). Still, the relation of eloquence to virtue was and remains an ongoing concern within Jesuit rhetoric, whatever disagreement there might be over the actual definition of eloquence itself. 13. Pachtler, Ratio, 398, and Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 394. 14. See Nan Johnson, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric; and Carr, Carr, and Schultz, Archives of Instruction.

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15. On late nineteenth-century curricular debates and the Ratio, see Mahoney, Catholic Higher Education, and McKevitt, Brokers of Culture. 16. In line with the rhetorical tradition I am tracking, see Kleutgen, Ars Dicendi, 139, for his use of Quintilian 12.1.1 (“vir bonus dicendi peritus”) in a sample essay on the thesis “Nemo orator nisi bonus.” 17. Finn, Father Finn, 32. 18. For biographical details, I have depended on Finn’s memoir, Father Finn, confirming dates for both Coppens’s and Finn’s assignments by consulting the listings of faculty in the relevant college catalogs. 19. Course of Studies for the Colleges of the Missouri Province, 19–30. On Meyer’s support for Finn, see Finn, Father Finn, 128, 148, 182; on Meyer more generally, see Miros, “Rudolph Meyer.” 20. “Obituary,” 200. 21. Stephen Carr places Coppens’s textbook among what he calls the “compositionrhetorics” of the late nineteenth century, which combine rhetorical principles and rules with writing exercises; see Carr, Carr, and Schultz, Archives of Instruction, 66–68; see also Wozniak, English Composition, 270, and Brereton and Gannett, “Jesuits,” 147. 22. Catalogue of St. Xavier College, 1885–86, 4, 12, 13; Catalogue of St. Mary’s College, 1894–95, 18, 20. 23. Eighth Annual Catalogue of Marquette College, 1888–89, 4, 17; Catalogue of St. Xavier College, 1897–98, 3, 4, 15. Coppens’s text was not without its critics among Jesuit instructors. During the 1886–87 consultation process leading up to the publication of a standard curriculum for the Missouri Province (see note 19 above), the Central Committee on Studies commented in a first draft of its report: “It is the sense of the committee, as of the colleges, that Coppens’s Introduction, though the best text-book on the subject, stands in need of much improvement. The matter for Poetry is deficient; the treatise on Dramatic Poetry is wanting in development; that on Epic Poetry is too meager”; see “Course of Studies 1887.” 24. Coppens, Practical Introduction, 152–55. 25. Ibid., 210. On similar cultural anxieties over novel reading and the “Bad Boy Boom” of the 1880s, see Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, 99–129. 26. Finn, Father Finn, 11. Also, in one of his schoolboy novels, Finn records the Jesuit prefect’s thought that a student’s admiration for Fabiola’s characters was clear evidence of that student’s “beautiful soul.” See Finn, Percy Wynn, 24. 27. After 1887, the standard catalogue description for the rhetoric class in many Jesuit schools was based on that in the Course of Studies for the Colleges of the Missouri Province, which included “English—Precepts: Coppens’ Oratorical Composition; Dramatic Poetry; History. For reference: Quintilian, Kleutgen, Blair” (19). 28. Ninth Annual Catalogue of Marquette College, 1889–90, 4, 16; Catalogue of St. Mary’s College, 1894–95, 17; and Catalogue of St. Xavier College, 1898–99, 4, 12. 29. Adams, Lectures, I:157. After publication, Adams’s lectures were only “very occasionally cited” in subsequent rhetorics; see Carr, Carr, and Schultz, Archives of Instruction, 45. 30. Coppens, Oratorical Composition, 12. 31. See Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric. 32. Coppens, Oratorical Composition, 12. 33. Ibid., 12–13, quoting Cicero, De Oratore, 1.8. 34. Coppens, Oratorical Composition, 26; see Lecture 34 of Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 381. 35. Coppens, Oratorical Composition, 230–32, 248–50, 271–72. 36. Constitutions, 185; and Ratio Studiorum, 137. 37. Catalogue of St. Joseph’s College, 1893–94, 3–4.

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38. Coppens, Oratorical Composition, 26. 39. Coppens, Who Are the Jesuits?, 7. Coppens writes further, “It is by going through the . . . exercises under the direction of a Jesuit that all the Jesuits of the world, in every succeeding generation, have been formed to their peculiar spirit. . . . From that book therefore we can most readily learn the spirit and the purpose of the Jesuits” (8). 40. Finn, Father Finn, 42–43. 41. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 154. For Meyer’s comments on “The Two Standards,” see Meyer, “Spiritual Diary”; see also the later discussion in Meyer, Science of the Saints, 395–407. 42. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 150. See the concluding section of Mailloux, “Narrative as Embodied Intensities,” ch. 13 of the present volume.

Chapter 12 1. Flint, “Women and Reading,” 511. 2. Nafisi, Reading Lolita, 94, quoted in Flint, “Women and Reading,” 511–12. 3. Arendt, “Thinking,” 160, 175–76. 4. See Hariman, Prudence, and Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 43–66. 5. Flint, “Women and Reading,” 512. 6. Ostrow, “Literature as Freedom,” quoting Nafisi, Reading Lolita, 108–9. 7. Hewett, “Bad Books Hidden,” my emphasis. 8. Some reviewers of Reading Lolita point toward this lesson. For example, Darlene Erickson claims that the book represents “an unusual environment” where “the cultural context within which one reads the novel becomes an integral part of the reading experience itself ”; see Erickson, review, 144. 9. Kamran, review, 505. 10. Ibid., 506. 11. Nafisi, Reading Lolita, 122. 12. Ibid., 128–29. 13. Ibid., 135. 14. We can begin to make these distinctions by viewing attitude as a “stance toward something” and suggesting that one can have various stances toward a certain belief. Ideologies are particular kinds of beliefs (and practices) that serve specific socio-political interests at specific times and places; see Mailloux, Reception Histories, 100. 15. Nafisi, Reading Lolita, 341. 16. Bahramitash, “War on Terror,” 230; the reference is to a phrase used by President George W. Bush, for example, in his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002. See also Dabashi, “Native Informers,” and Byrne, “Collision of Prose.” I am grateful to John Carlos Rowe for bringing these two references to my attention; see his provocative “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho.” 17. Nafisi, “It’s Literature.” 18. I thank Vivian Folkenflik for referring me to this NPR episode. Cf. Nafisi, Republic of Imagination.

Chapter 13 1. Acts of Apostles 17:22–31 KJV. 2. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 52.

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3. I thank Jim Phelan for this formulation and for other helpful suggestions. I am also grateful for comments I received on earlier versions of this essay from participants at meetings of the Melville Society, the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and the English Department Faculty Colloquium at Loyola Marymount University. 4. Melville, Journals, 111. 5. Ibid., 106. 6. Hawthorne, 23 February 1858, Italian Notebooks, 102. 7. Melville, 11 March 1857, Journals, 111. 8. Hawthorne, 3 March 1858, Italian Notebooks 117–18. 9. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1203. Cf. the more positive experience of the Appian Way recorded by Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: “What legions have stepped on these very identical stones, with their worn traces, in which I plant my own foot? . . . Horace and all the poets—the superb Zenobia, in her fallen estate, yet in eastern pomp, came this way to her regal villas. What way in all the earth is so rich in memories as this?—and I actually step upon it, without any doubt.” Sophia Hawthorne, Notes, 250. 10. Melville, Journals, 111, 158. 11. Since there appears to be no extant authorial manuscript or published version of Melville’s lecture, I rely upon the Northwestern-Newberry editors’ reconstruction of Melville’s text based on detailed contemporary newspaper reports; see notes on “Statues in Rome” in The Piazza Tales, 723. On Melville’s relation to Italian culture, see Berthold, American Risorgimento; on Melville and the visual arts, see Sten, Savage Eye. 12. Melville, “Statues,” 404–5. Hawthorne also noted the imaginative investment required of any appreciative viewer of art: “Like all other works of the highest excellence, however, it makes great demands upon the spectator; he must make a generous gift of his sympathies to the sculptor, and help out his skill with all his heart, or else he will see little more than a skilfully wrought surface. It suggests far more than it shows.” Hawthorne, Italian Notebooks, 102; see also Fernie, Hawthorne and American Art. But a larger point might also be made of Melville’s and Hawthorne’s comments: imaginative investments are always part of the embodied intensities that constitute the lived experiences of place and their later interpretations. This same imagination in and of place is required while reading or performing various discursive genres—from novels and travel narratives to tourist guidebooks and spiritual exercises. 13. Cf. John Dewey on “having an experience” in his Art as Experience, 42–63. 14. Melville, “Statues,” 404. 15. See Baker, Fortunate Pilgrims; Vance, America’s Rome; Martin and Person, Roman Holidays; on nineteenth-century European tourism more generally, see Buzard, Beaten Track; and William Stowe, Going Abroad. 16. Parker, Herman Melville, 469–70, 549. For attacks on Orville Dewey’s 1850s politics, see Emerson, Journals, 351, and Douglass, “What to the Slave,” 380; on Dewey more generally, see Mailloux, “Political Theology in Douglass and Melville,” ch. 15 of the present volume. 17. Though Athens was eventually to overshadow Rome in the U.S. political imaginary during the nineteenth century, Cicero remained a significant figure with which Americans could think and experience their ethical and political lives at home and abroad; see Winterer, Culture of Classicism, and Rosner, “Cicero in Nineteenth-Century England and America.” 18. Orville Dewey, “Identity of All Art,” 329. 19. Orville Dewey, Old World and the New, 106. 20. Ibid., 84, 166, 150. 21. For the larger literary-cultural context of anti-Catholicism, see Franchot, Roads to Rome, and Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 22. Douglass, Life and Times, 1003–4.

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23. Douglass, “Diary,” entries for 2 February and 19 March 1887 (frames 24 and 35). I have discussed these passages in another rhetorical context in “Re-Marking Slave Bodies,” 111–13; see also Levine, “Road to Africa.” 24. Cf. analyses of the nineteenth-century “gender geography” and the “urban imaginary” in Ryan, Women in Public; Brand, The Spectator and the City; and Bailey, “Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces.” 25. For other uses of the term “embodied intensities” not unrelated to my own, see Snow, “Performing All Over the Place,” 246; Nanopolitics Group, “Nanopolitics”; and cf. notions of bodies as affective intensities in motion, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 260. 26. For a thick cultural description of the rhetorical context in which Burke wrote his first critical book, see Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village; see also Hawhee’s Moving Bodies for a suggestive rhetorical history of Burke’s preoccupation with bodies and language. 27. Burke, Counter- Statement, 31. 28. For later reader-oriented theory, see Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism; Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions; Rabinowitz, Before Reading; and Rabinowitz, “Other Reader-Oriented Theories.” 29. Burke, Counter- Statement, 37–39. 30. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 97–98, 100. 31. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 935, 971, 1092, 1202, 1000, 1080, 1227, 1126, 1101, 1233. On the novel’s Roman context more generally, see Levine, “Antebellum Rome”; Carton, The Marble Faun, 45–69; Natterman, “Dread and Desire”; and Rowe, “Hawthorne and Transnationality,” 98–106. 32. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 999, 1176, 979. 33. On Jesuit rhetorical accommodationism, see O’Malley, First Jesuits, 255–56; also see Mailloux, “Jesuit Comparative Theorhetoric,” and Mailloux, “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding,” chs. 7 and 11, respectively, in the present volume. 34. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1201. 35. Bangert, History of the Society of Jesus, and Schroth, American Jesuits. 36. Dalmases, Ignatius of Loyola, 157–89, and Ravier, Ignatius of Loyola. 37. Ignatius, “Selections,” 246. 38. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, 121. 39. Ibid., 150; see the conclusion of Mailloux, “Rhetorical Ways of Proceeding,” ch. 11 in the present volume. 40. Certeau, “Space of Desire,” 96. For other approaches to the narrative rhetoric of the Spiritual Exercises, see Barthes, “Loyola”; Boyle, Loyola’s Acts; and Conrod, Loyola’s Greater Narrative. 41. Burke, Counter- Statement, 105. See Foucault, Hermeneutics; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, Technologies of the Self; and Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, especially 126–27. 42. Althusser, Lenin, 171, quoting Acts of Apostles 17:28.

Chapter 14 1. Keith Gilyard, Distinguished Professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, conducted this interview on 7 November 2007 at the University of California, Irvine. In this first question, he refers to one of the triangles proposed to organize curricular reform in the English Department at Syracuse University in 1986—see Mailloux, Reception Histories, 158.

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Chapter 15 1. “Politics of the New Testament,” 185; the article was reprinted from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. 2. Orville Dewey, Moral Views, vi. 3. See below notes 34, 35, and 47. 4. See Augustine, De civitate Dei, esp. bk. 6, chs. 5–7 on Varro’s concept of civili theologia; Locke, Notes on the Epistles of St Paul; and Assopardi, Cult of St. Paul. 5. Orville Dewey, “Original Use of the Epistles,” 200, 209, 210. 6. B[omberger], 318, 326. On the Mercersburg movement, see Ahlstrom, Religious History, 53–60. 7. On political theology, see Scott and Cavanaugh, Blackwell Companion; Davis, Milbank, and Žižek, Theology and the Political; and de Vries and Sullivan, Political Theologies. 8. See discussions in Schmitt, Concept of the Political; and Mouffe, Challenge of Carl Schmitt. 9. On the historical context of political rhetoric in which Douglass and Melville acted, see Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence; Clark and Halloran, Oratorical Culture; Robertson, Language of Democracy; Benson, Rhetoric and Political Culture; Warren, Culture of Eloquence; Hartnett, Democratic Dissent; and Buchanan, Regendering Delivery. 10. Smith, 22 December 1848 letter. 11. Smith, To Those Ministers, 1. 12. For more extensive treatments of Smith’s Bible politics, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men; and Sernett, North Star Country. 13. “James G. Birney,” Liberator. 14. “Speech of Wm. Lloyd Garrison,” Liberator. 15. Garrison, “Valedictory.” 16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 94–95. 17. For more examples of pro-and antislavery interpretations of the Bible, as well as bibliographies of additional scholarship, see Shanks, “Biblical Anti-Slavery Argument”; McKivigan and Snay, Religion; Harrill, “Use of the New Testament”; Mailloux, “Re-Marking Slave Bodies”; and Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes. 18. J. R. Johnson, “Uncle William’s Pulpit.” 19. Crummell, “Solution of Problems,” 399. 20. Crummell, “Fitness of the Gospel,” 176–82. 21. Ibid., 180–81. 22. Badiou, Saint Paul, 9, 13–14. 23. For a more general presentation of his evental philosophy, see Badiou, Being and Event; and for additional discussion, see Badiou, Manifesto; Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities, 114–21; and Badiou and Tarby, Philosophy. 24. Moses, Alexander Crummell, 228; see also Moses, Creative Conflict, 40–42, 109–10. 25. 16 April 1889 speech in Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:413. The front page of the inaugural issue of Douglass’s The North Star displayed the contrasting politics of the two African American leaders: In his report on “The Colored Convention” in Troy, New York, William Nell summarized the debate over the Committee of Education’s recommendation to establish a separate college for African American men. Crummell chaired the committee, while Douglass opposed its recommendation. See The North Star, 3 December 1847, 1. 26. 20 November 1883 speech in Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:140. 27. Crummell, “Eulogy.” 28. 6 September 1891 speech in Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:476–77. On Douglass’s later identification with Paul during his visits to Rome and Athens in the 1880s, see section I of Mailloux, “Narrative as Embodied Intensities,” ch. 13 of the present volume.

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29. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 231, 233. 30. Ibid., 226, 231. 31. “Rev. Henry H. Garnet.” In the 1850s, Douglass’s public stand on slave insurrection changed; see Goldstein, “Violence as an Instrument”; Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, 93–100. 32. Douglass, Narrative, 97–100. 33. Douglass, “What to the Slave,” 367. 34. Douglass includes Orville Dewey among “the chosen men of American theology” who are “champions of oppressors” (379). On Dewey’s support of the Fugitive Slave Law and earlier comments by Douglass, see Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 2, 334, 354. In his journal, Emerson also criticized Dewey—his cousin’s husband—writing that he was one of those preachers who “deduce kidnapping from their Bible,” and that “if this be Christianity, it is a religion of dead dogs”; see Emerson, Journals, 351. 35. In Typee (1846) Melville writes that he is “inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity” (125–26). Arriving in New York City in late 1844 and about to begin writing this book reporting the vices of Christian missionaries, Melville, the former seafaring man, might have heard or read about Orville Dewey’s 25 November 1844 sermon, “The Character and Claims of Sea-Faring Men” at the Church of the Messiah in New York: “The cause of Christianity in heathen lands suffers grievously for the vices of sea-faring men. On all pagan shores our missionaries complain of this influence.” See Dewey, Character, 11. 36. Melville, White-Jacket, 142. 37. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 248. 38. Melville to Hawthorne, early May 1851, in Melville, Moby-Dick, 538. 39. Melville, Moby-Dick, 103–4. 40. Ibid., 53, paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 9:27. Responding to Hawthorne’s letter praising Moby-Dick, Melville defended the exalted “gibberish” of his own letter—“I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces”—by identifying with Paul in his response to Festus (Acts 26:24–25): “My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms . . . make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent.” See Melville to Hawthorne, 17 November 1851, in Melville, Moby-Dick, 545–47. 41. Melville, White-Jacket, 324. 42. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 243. 43. Parker, “Delusions,” 366–67. 44. The reading of Melville’s political theology as both positive and negative obliquely joins the interpretive tradition emphasizing the conflicted or paradoxical doubleness of Melville’s religious views, a tradition extending from Hawthorne’s comment that his friend could “neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief ” to more recent critical elaborations. See Hawthorne, English Notebooks, 423; Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible, 16–17, 77–78, 110–11; Herbert, Moby-Dick and Calvinism, 1–19; Buell, New England Literary Culture, 180: “Traditional theology is exposed as phantasmal, but in spectral form it still haunts the narrative”; and Franchot, “Melville’s Traveling God,” 160: “From Typee to Clarel, Melville’s fiction explores this dual heritage of the potent/impotent god. . . . At once flight, pilgrimage, and touristic travel, Melville’s art investigates this doubled and paradoxical religious inheritance—struggling against its power while lamenting its death.” 45. Melville, Pierre, 211. 46. Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 335.

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47. Melville, Pierre, 212, 214. Parker argues that Melville had at least one local target in mind who represented this compromising and compromised version of Christianity— Orville Dewey, longtime friend of Melville’s in-laws; see Parker, Herman Melville, 65–67, and cf. section I of Mailloux, “Narrative as Embodied Intensities,” ch. 13 of the present volume. 48. Melville, Confidence-Man, 11–12. 49. Parker, “Metaphysics,” 494–95. 50. Melville, Confidence-Man, 151, 161. 51. Terpstra and de Wit, “No Spiritual Investment,” 324. Terpstra and de Wit derive their notion of negative political theology from a reading of Jacob Taubes’s reading of Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans” in Taubes’s Political Theology. 52. Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” 146, 152, 163. 53. Melville, “Benito Cereno,” 48, 84, 52, 57. 54. Melville, Clarel, 270. 55. Melville, Pierre, 280. 56. Douglass, “Northern Ballots and the Election of 1852,” 397, quoting Proverbs 14:34.

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Index

Adams, John Quincy, 132 Adorno, Theodor, 138 Alberti, Leon Battista, 37 Alger, Horatio, 126 Althusser, Louis, 35, 157 Arendt, Hannah, 73, 138, 174 Aristotle, 82, 87, 126, 127, 128, 131 Arrupe, Pedro, 119 Asen, Robert, 73 Augustine of Hippo (Saint), 79, 84, 112, 174, 177 Austen, Jane, 137 Babo (fictional character), 192 Bachelard, Gaston, 105 Bachmann, Paulus, 80 Badiou, Alain, 174, 182–83 Benedict XIV, Pope, 88 Benjamin, Walter, 96, 98 Biesta, Gert, 113–14, 202n6 Blair, Hugh, 128, 131, 133, 204n7 Bomberger, J. H. Augustus, 178 Booth, Wayne, 166 Brady, Tom P., 16 Breyer, Stephen, 194n26 Brouwer, Daniel, 73 Bruni, Leonardo, 37 Burke, Anthony, 201n14 Burke, Kenneth, 5–7, 41, 104–12, 113–14, 116–18, 120–24, 145, 151–54, 157, 174, 201n5, 207n26 Burke, Michael, 201n14 Bush, George W., 21, 26, 142, 205n16 Caesar, 146, 150, 154, 178 Caussin, Nicolas, 78, 82, 83 Cereno, Captain Benito (fictional character), 191–92 Certeau, Michel de, 153 Chafe, William H., 194n26 Cheney, Lynn, 198n14 Cicero, 40, 41, 82, 87, 126, 127–28, 130, 131, 132, 146, 149, 150, 206n17 Cochran, Ephraim (fictional character), 57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 99

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Confucius, 88 Coppens, Charles, 126, 129–34, 204nn23, 27 Corax, 115 Crowley, Sharon, 173 Crummell, Alexander, 181–82, 183–84, 208n25 Crusher, Dr. Beverly (fictional character), 68 Crusher, Wesley (fictional character), 64 Darmok (fictional character), 67, 72, 74–75 Data, Lt. Commander (fictional character), 67–68 Dathon, Captain (fictional character), 72–74 Davidson, Donald, 68–69, 122–23 Davis, Diane, 72–75, 77 Defoe, Daniel, 100 Delano, Captain Amasa (fictional character), 191 de Man, Paul, 5, 6, 93, 98–103, 104–9, 111–12, 200nn9, 14, 201nn14, 15 (ch. 8), 201n15 (ch. 9), 202n23 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 93, 111, 174 Dewey, John, 24, 29, 30, 45, 49, 59, 63, 71, 73, 162, 163 Dewey, Orville, 149–50, 176–77, 206n16, 209nn34, 35, 210n47 Donatello (fictional character), 153–54 Douglass, Frederick, 7, 149, 150–51, 168, 174, 177– 78, 181, 183–87, 191–92, 208n25, 209nn31, 34 Dreyfus, Hubert, 4, 44–54 Du Bois, W. E. B., 181 Eastland, James, 16 Eberly, Rosa, 165 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 79 Eliot, Charles W., 34 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 149, 153, 209n34 Erasmus, 37 Erickson, Darlene, 205n8 Felix, Antonius, 78 Ficino, Marsilio, 37 Finn, Francis, 125–26, 129–31, 134, 204n26 Finn, Huckleberry (fictional character), 13, 14, 125, 142, 143, 168

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index

Fish, Stanley, 4, 23, 164, 173 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 137 Flint, Kate, 137–39 Folkenflik, Vivian, 205n18 Foucault, Michel, 7, 157 Frye, Northrop, 94–95, 98, 102 Fuller, Margaret, 168 Fumaroli, Marc, 83 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 5, 41, 93, 95–98, 102–3, 200nn6, 9 Gaonkar, Dilip, 40 Garnet, Henry Highland, 185 Garrison, William Lloyd, 178–80, 185, 187 Gatsby, Jay (fictional character), 137, 139–42 Gilyard, Keith, 3, 7, 158–75, 207n1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 99 Gore, Al, 21 Grassi, Ernesto, 3–4, 35, 36–39, 40, 43, 195n9 (ch. 3) Gross, Daniel, 199n14 Guérin, Frédéric-Marie, 203n12 Gunn, Giles, 23 Habermas, Jürgen, 46–47, 49 Harris, George (fictional character), 180 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 146–47, 151, 153–54, 188, 189, 206n12, 209nn40, 44 Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 206n9 Hayes, Christopher, 25–26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 52–53, 54 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 34–37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 48–49, 71, 75–76, 84, 93–94, 111–12, 168, 174, 193n2 Hewett, Heather, 139 Hilda (fictional character), 154–55 Hirsch, E. D., 20 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 26 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 104–5, 110 Hu Shih, 62–63 Ignatius of Loyola (Saint), 81–82, 119–20, 121–22, 134, 156 Ingersol, Robert, 151 Isocrates, 41, 42 James, William, 13, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 45, 53–54, 64–65, 116, 137, 162 James, Henry, 137 Jauss, Hans Robert, 201n15 Jefferson, Thomas, 31

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Jesus Christ, 54, 78, 83, 125, 127, 134, 156, 182–86, 187, 188, 189 Jim (fictional character), 142–43 Johnson, Joseph R., 180 Joseph, Saint, 134, 156 Joyce, James, 61 Kamran, Cameron, 140 Kant, Immanuel, 61, 197–98n10, 198n19 Keats, John, 106, 109–12, 202n20 Kierkegaard, Søren, 4, 44–54, 197nn16, 33 Kirk, Captain James T. (fictional character), 57 Kleutgen, Joseph, 129, 131, 204nn16, 27 Klock, Joseph, 13 Kloppenberg, James T., 30–31 Kuda, Ving (fictional character), 61 Kuhn, Thomas, 193n1 Lao-Tze, 62 Latour, Bruno, 5, 86 Lawson, Charles, 185 Lee, Spike, 171 Leff, Michael, 3, 35, 39–43, 196n25 Levinas, Emmanuel, 72 Lincoln, Abraham, 26, 28, 33, 41, 42, 195n8 Locke, John, 177 Louis XIII, King, 78 Luther, Martin, 79, 80–81 Lyotard, Jean-François, 63, 69–70, 72, 174, 198nn19, 28 Madison, James, 31 Mandel, Emily St. John, 1 Mansfield, Harvey J., 194n26 Mapple, Father (fictional character), 188 Marx, Karl, 49, 52 Mary (mother of Jesus), 134, 150, 156 McQuillan, Martin, 201n2 Melville, Herman, 7, 146–49, 177, 181, 187–92, 206nn11, 12, 209nn35, 40, 44, 210n47 Menand, Louis, 26 Meyer, Rudolph, 129, 134 Mill, John Stuart, 52 Miller, J. Hillis, 6, 104–5, 107–11, 201n2, 202n23 (ch. 9) Miriam (fictional character), 153–54 Moredock, John (fictional character), 190 Moses, Wilson, 183 Nabokov, Vladimir, 137 Nafisi, Azar, 6, 137–44

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index Niebuhr, Reinhold, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 102, 105, 109 Obama, Barack, 25–26, 30–33, 195nn8, 20 Obodiac, Erin, 201n2 O’Malley, John, 87 Onesimus, 179–80 Ostrow, Sonja, 139 Packer, George, 25 Parker, Hershel, 190, 210n47 Parmen (fictional character), 57 Paul III, Pope, 81 Paul the Apostle (Saint Paul), 7, 38, 75–76, 78, 83, 84–85, 87, 145–47, 150–51, 157, 174, 177, 179–84, 187–91 Peirce, Charles, 26 Perpinian, Peter John, 126, 128, 203n12 Phelan, James, 206n3 Phelps, Louise Wetherbee, 167 Philomen, 179 Picard, Captain Jean-Luc (fictional character), 60–61, 64, 67–69, 72–74, 76 Pierre (fictional character), 189 Plato, 23, 25, 34, 37, 38, 45, 57, 61–62, 63, 65, 93, 104, 198n19 Playfair, Tom (fictional character), 125, 129 Plinlimmon, Plotinus (fictional character), 189 Plutarch, 53 Protagoras, 24, 25, 30, 34, 40, 53, 61, 62, 63 Proust, Marcel, 102, 108, 110, 111 Quintilian, 40, 82, 87, 127, 128, 131, 132, 204n16, 204n27 Rabinow, Paul, 45 Reggio, Carlo, 203n12 Ricci, Matteo, 88 Richelieu, Cardinal, 78 Ricoeur, Paul, 7, 93, 145–46 Rorty, Richard, 4, 23, 44–46, 48–54, 58–60, 62–66, 68, 70, 162, 164, 172–73, 196n6, 197n33 Rothstein, Edward, 167–68 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 100–102, 108–9, 202n23 Rowe, John Carlos, 57, 205n16 Sabre, Jenna, 201n5 Said, Edward, 172, 174 Salutati, Coluccio, 37

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233

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 34, 35 Sawyer, Tom (fictional character), 13 Scarborough, William, 169 Schiappa, Edward, 23 Schiller, F. C. S., 3, 24–25, 28, 30, 34 Schneider, Manfred, 79, 83 Schraufnagel, William, 201n14 Searle, John, 44 Selsam, Howard, 163 Selzer, Jack, 201n14 Smith, Gerrit, 178, 180, 191 Soarez, Cyprian, 82, 126–28 Socrates, 37, 61 Souter, David, 194n26 Spock (fictional character), 57 Stelts, Sandy, 201n5 Stout, Jeffrey, 23, 27–30 Strasser, Uli, 199n17 Talmadge, Herman, 16 Teng Shih, 62 Tertullus, 78 Thucydides, 41 Tillich, Paul, 31 Troi, Deanna (fictional character), 68 Truth, Sojourner, 28 Twain, Mark, 14, 19, 143 Uncle William (fictional character), 180–81 Valla, Lorenzo, 38–39 Vattimo, Gianni, 173 Veblen, Thorstein, 106 Vico, Giambattista, 37 Virgil, 150 Warminski, Andrezj, 201n2 Washington, Booker T., 169 Washington, George, 186, 188 Washington, Madison (fictional character), 191 Waters, Lindsay, 201n5 Webster, Daniel, 132 Wechsler, Herbert, 16–17, 18 West, Cornel, 23, 31, 46, 75, 162–64, 195n20 Whitaker, Julie, 201n14 Wild, Christopher, 199n17 Wiseman, Nicholas, 131 Wolfowitz, Paul, 142 Wright, Jeremiah, 31 Zakaria, Fareed, 32

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