Loving the World Appropriately: Persuasion and the Transformation of Subjectivity 9780226822112

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Loving the World Appropriately

Loving the World Appropriately Persuasion and the Transformation of Subjectivity

J a m e s L . K a st e ly

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82210-­5 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82211-­2 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226822112.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kastely, James L., 1947–, author. Title: Loving the world appropriately : persuasion and the transformation of subjectivity / James L. Kastely. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022001500 | ISBN 9780226822105 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226822112 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Persuasion (Rhetoric) | Rhetoric—Philosophy. | Subjectivity. Classification: LCC P301.5.P47 K37 2022 | DDC 808—dc23/eng/20220128 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001500 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Joe, Christina, Molly, Cora, and Amelia

C ont e nts

Preface / ix One

t wo

/ The Problem of Persuasion / 1

/ Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony / 27 / The Eros of Sameness and the Rhetoric of Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus / 61

thr e e

four

/ Responsiveness: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Subjectivity / 85 FIve

si x

seven

/ Persuasion, Conceptualization, and Emotion: Reconstituting Subjectivity / 105 / The Individual and Political Persuasion / 131

/ Persuasion, Tragedy, and Transformative Discourse / 161 e i g ht

nin e

/ The Ethics of Persuasion / 201

/ Conclusion: Persuasion in Light of Post-­Structural Rhetoric / 229 Acknowledgments / 233 Works Cited / 235 Index / 239

P r e fac e

Persuasion, as one of the two concepts that have traditionally defined rhetoric (trope being the other), stands in need of interrogation. In the history of rhetoric, persuasion has been viewed (positively) as presenting an ideal for communication, or (neutrally) as depicting the practical ways in which an agreement can be reached or a judgment made, or (negatively) as offering a way of disguising a coerced decision. These various views all assume that we have an adequate understanding of persuasion. But in the era of post-­structural rhetorical theory, the status of persuasion is unclear. As a consequence of a shift from the traditional account of figures as “devices of an elocutio that adorns and presents the invented thoughts of the speaker” to post-­Nietzschean view of figures “as mobile, shifting categories that are always at work in every encounter with the world” (Bender and Wellbery, 26), persuasion came to seem part of an outdated understanding of how discourse operates. This shift seemed so complete that Paul de Man could, without any need for discussion, state simply that eloquence or persuasion represents the derived sense of rhetoric (6). Persuasion was relegated to a minor role, and, more importantly, its demotion to a peripheral concern had the effect of negating it as an action/event that contributes to the theoretical grounding of the practice of rhetoric. To recover some of the wonder that should accompany the action/event that is persuasion, it is helpful to turn to the work of two very different contemporary thinkers who are not normally considered as rhetorical theorists: Anne Carson and Jonathan Lear. In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson reminds us that for the Greeks Peitho (persuasion) kept company with Eros. The two divinities represented powers by which one human being impacted another. What was remarkable, possibly mysterious, about them is that these powers achieved this impact in the absence of physical force. Accordingly, Eros and

x / Preface

persuasion were the source of both celebration and deep anxiety. As Carson argued, the ways in which Eros overtakes the lover disclosed, for the Greek lyric poets, a vulnerability that challenged a comfortable understanding of human autonomy. The power of Eros to impact individuals suggested that the boundaries of the self were permeable, and that people did not have the control over themselves that they thought. For the Greek lyric poets, this vulnerability was a source of anxiety. But it could also be a source of individual expansion. Such, Carson argues, was Plato’s revolutionary understanding of Eros. In the Phaedrus, Socrates advocated for a receptivity to the advances of Eros as a way into the philosophic life. He saw erotic desire as special force guiding lovers to a conversation of self-­discovery in which the lovers transcended their empirical, everyday selves. For Socrates, the risk of being open to a fundamental vulnerability was essential if individuals were to access the divinity within themselves. Although not identical to Eros, persuasion shares these two features of risk and transformation, or so I will argue. If an individual is open to persuasion, the use of artful discourse can occasion the transformation of the subject. Persuasion, however, is not limited to the effects of deliberate, directed discourse; nor does it always require the openness of the subject. Sometimes individuals can find themselves persuaded, even in cases where they did not seek, and possibly resisted, such a transformation. Such possibilities should make one both wary of persuasion and receptive to it. Persuasion, like Eros, is a power to be contended with. As Plato often had Socrates remind his interlocutors and the dialogues’ readers, persuasion should not be equated with knowledge. But if it is not knowledge, what is it, and why is it potentially either dangerous or beneficial? Too often, these questions have been framed from the perspective of the speaker or writer seeking to influence the audience or the reader. The concern has been with the acquisition and use of persuasion as a power. Since the possibility for the abuse of this power has been recognized as consequential, the issue for rhetorical theorists has been: how can the speaker or writer act responsibly? In an artful rhetoric, what should be the ethical or technical constraints on the speaker or writer? But if we view persuasion as an action/event parallel to the operation of Eros, that framing suggests that it might be more fruitful to address questions about persuasion from a new perspective. We can then ask: what is it that distinguishes an experience as an instance of persuasion? We can pose a question that has not been asked enough: why does an audience stand in need of persuasion? One obvious answer is that an audience needs persuasion simply because it lacks the information necessary to make a decision or to understand a

Preface / xi

situation. Persuasion addresses this gap in information. But often the acquisition of new facts, even when they are relevant and pressing, is insufficient to persuade a person. The need that persuasion answers cannot be only the absence of key facts. If persuasion, then, is not to be reduced to a change of mind occasioned by the acquisition of new information, what are the needs of an audience that are met by persuasion? And if persuasion is not assumed to consist simply in an audience agreeing with some position offered by a rhetor or simply changing its mind but rather involves something more complex, namely the transformation of the subject, what is it about subjectivity that creates a subject’s need for transformation? And what is the transformation that occurs because of persuasion? As soon as one looks at persuasion from the audience’s viewpoint, it becomes clear that a theory of persuasion depends upon a theory of rhetorical subjectivity. If persuasion is an action/event located in the subject, then it is impossible to understand persuasion if one does not have an adequate account of subjectivity. To provide such an account, I will draw heavily from Jonathan Lear’s Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Lear argues that one of Freud’s revolutionary contributions to the reconception of mind was a theory of subjectivity. Although Lear does not take his interpretation of Freud in the direction of persuasion, he provides a model of subjectivity that can be used to explain why persuasion is important and how it achieves its particular outcomes. According to Lear, as Freud worked through the discoveries that his analytic work produced, he was led to a developmental model of subjectivity, one that evolved into an understanding of Eros as a force of nature. I will argue that Lear’s interpretation of Freud supports an insight into a fundamental responsiveness at the core of human subjectivity. It is this fundamental responsiveness that makes persuasion, like Eros, possible as source of transformation. Persuasion, as an action/event that requires both freedom and necessity, is indebted to a core human responsiveness, and as this responsiveness develops, the subject can be transformed. Before such a theory of persuasion can be developed, at least two major objections to persuasion need to be addressed. First, it has been argued that the operation of persuasion can, and often does, conceal the occurrence of coercion. Indeed, the standard model of a speaker acting on an audience through a speech suggests, by the relationship’s structure, an unequal distribution of power, with the speaker able to impose a point of view on the audience. This model becomes even more troubling once one recognizes other factors, such as class, race, and gender, that further the inequality of status between speaker and audience. Such apparently structural inequality has led

xii / Preface

some thinkers to be skeptical of the operation of even well-­intentioned persuasion, and others to seek alternative, more politically just communication paradigms. The second reservation about persuasion is very different. As post-­structural theory has reconceived rhetoric in terms of a figurativeness that is the property of language in general and not simply a set of devices used by individual rhetors, persuasion has been considered as tethered to an outmoded rhetorical tradition that analyzes human communication principally in terms of the intentions of individual speakers. There has been little interest in exploring how a reconsideration of figurativeness as a property of language in general might also open up a new understanding of persuasion, or why such an understanding might be essential for retheorizing the relationship of figure to action. These two challenges to persuasion as a central concept for rhetoric are salutary. They make it clear why a traditional understanding of persuasion needs to be revised. Both the possibility of coercion and an expanded understanding of figure argue that a defense of persuasion framed in terms of the intentions of an individual rhetor will simply not address abuse that is structural or linguistic activity that occurs independently of individual intention. An account of persuasion framed in terms of the conscious intentions of the speaker will fail to respond adequately to challenges which locate fundamental problems arising outside of and despite any conscious intention of the speaker. This failure provides a strong reason to look at persuasion not as an action undertaken by a speaker but in terms of a transformation undergone by an audience. The question, then, is not how an audience can be led to think a certain way, but rather how an audience is constituted so that it can be transformed by its incorporation of some discourse? If persuasion is viewed as a particular instance of reconstitution, how must subjectivity be understood? Why might human subjectivity stand in need of persuasion, especially if persuasion cannot be equated with knowledge? Such questions require us to understand more fully the relationship of Eros and persuasion and to appreciate more completely what it means to be a creature who is moved by a fundamental responsiveness. Quite simply, we must ask: What does it mean to be a creature who can be persuaded? For readers who might appreciate some guidance before they make their way through the book, let me provide a brief roadmap of the argument. Chapter 1 addresses the issue of persuasion and its relation to coercion. Chapter 2 looks at two recent efforts to recuperate persuasion as a resource to make democracies more inclusive by enabling them to address intolerance and to pursue a more just political order. Chapter 3 argues that such

Preface / xiii

efforts at inclusivity are challenged by the perception of diversity as a threat and that this threat arises from the role of Eros in the ego’s development. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a theory of persuasion, grounded in the erotic nature of human beings, that investigates persuasion not as an action by a rhetor but in terms of the needs of an audience. These chapters make the argument for understanding persuasion as the transformation of subjectivity. Chapter 6 argues that although persuasion occurs within the individual subject, it is an inherently political activity. Chapter 7 offers tragedy as a paradigm for the rhetorical transformation of subjectivity. Chapter 8 then examines the ethics of persuasion conceived in terms of the transformation of subjects. Chapter 9 concludes briefly by laying out how a retheorized persuasion can recover agency in response to post-­structural theories of rhetoric that conceive of change primarily in terms of reconfigurations of linguistic systems.

one

The Problem of Persuasion

Rhetoric, in so far as this means the art of persuasion, i.e. of deceiving by a beautiful show (ars oratoria), and not mere elegance of speech (eloquence and style), is a dialectic which borrows from poetry only so much as is needful to win minds to the side of the orator before they have formed a judgment and to deprive them of their freedom; it cannot therefore be recommended either for the law courts or for the pulpit. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 53, 12 Persuasion is an essentially impure notion. One cannot persuade without persuasion’s other—­that is, force. One can speak of the force of persuasion but one would never say that one had been “persuaded” of the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem. The latter is simply shown, without any need of persuasion. But one cannot say either that persuasion is simply reducible to force. Persuasion is the terrain of what Derrida would have called a “hymen.” It is the point in which the “reasons” for a belief and the “causes” of the belief constitute an inseparable whole. —Ernesto Laclau, “Community and Its Paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘Liberal Utopia,’” in Emancipation(s), 116 Protarchus in Plato’s Philebus says, “I often used to hear from Gorgias that the art of persuasion is very different from the other arts, since everything is enslaved by it willingly and not by force.” The claims of the rhetoricians and sophists that they could bring this about, and the promises they made on this basis to their ambitious pupils, obsessed Plato, and a good deal of his philosophy was shaped by the concern to discredit their arts of persuasion. —Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 154

2 / Chapter One The same irresistible sensual charm, called peitho in Greek, is the mechanism of seduction in love and of persuasion in words; the same goddess (Peitho) attends upon the seducer and poet. —Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 49–­50

Historically, persuasion has been a central, if not the central, concept for the theorization and practice of rhetoric. As Robert Wardy puts it: “Rhetoric, let us say, is the capacity to persuade others; or a practical realization of this ability; or at least, an attempt at persuasion, successful or not” (1). Despite this centrality, there has always been a deep ambiguity at the heart of persuasion—­does persuasion really depend on and promote freedom, or is it rather an act of force that uses soft power to compel obedience or acquiescence? Kant, for one (as attested to by the above quotation), saw the persuasion effected by rhetoric as an instance not of freedom but of the deprivation of freedom. Kant argued that far from contributing to judgment, persuasion happens before a judgment can be made—­and hence that it precludes the audience from making a decision that reflects their own understanding or interests. Appropriating the language of poetry to seduce an audience, persuasion is an insidious form of coercion. Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, who agree with Wardy’s point about the centrality of persuasion to rhetoric, also agree with Kant’s claim that rhetorical persuasion curtails freedom, arguing that the central role of persuasion in the history of rhetoric has had the effect of encoding a practice of domination: “One manifestation of the patriarchal bias that characterizes much of rhetorical theorizing is the definition of rhetoric as persuasion” (209). They believe the prominence of persuasion and its often unreflective embrace by the Western rhetorical tradition represent a disciplinary self-­ignorance in which the domination and self-­aggrandizement of the rhetor is valued over the needs and integrity of an audience. Those who defend the role of persuasion in practices advocated by the rhetorical tradition often counter such claims with the argument that the abuses of persuasion by those in power represent individual lapses, and that rhetor’s larger goal of assisting the pursuit of freedom should be seen as an important alternative to the imposition of rule by force or deception. For example, where Foss and Griffin see persuasion as an inherently corrupt practice, the rhetorical tradition has contended that even if the practice of persuasion does not always live up to the ideal of a fully rational decision-­ making process, the “reliance on persuasion does imply . . . that between a given group of people there exist a tacit or openly-­acknowledged agreement

The Problem of Persuasion  /  3

to exclude the use of violence in favor of the use of language as the approved means of getting one’s way” (Buxton, 14). For the Western rhetorical tradition, it is persuasion that makes possible the voluntary association essential to a civil society, and persuasion is especially important to a democratically organized civil society. The disagreement between those who see persuasion as essential for freedom and those who see persuasion as an active threat to freedom could not be starker. These two broadly opposite views of the ethical and political role of persuasion raise some fundamental questions. Does the practice of persuasion as traditionally theorized serve the furtherance of human freedom, or is it complicit in the maintenance of power relationships that work against freedom, justice, equality, and the recognition of those without power? If rhetoric is a source of power, regardless of whether it is used in positive or negative ways, what is the source of efficacy for persuasion? How, when, and why is a persuasive discourse effective? What does it mean for a persuasive discourse to be effective? The traditional answer to these questions is given by a well-­established narrative in the history of rhetoric that offers a myth of origin in which persuasion arose as the morally laudatory alternative to decisions or understandings achieved through physical force. On this account, persuasion represents the grounding act for civilization, for it provides the foundational ethical and political underpinning not just for rhetoric but also for civil society. As is well known, a young Cicero, in De Inventione, argued that the suasive aspect of eloquent speech is transformative. It was persuasive speech that accomplished the defining transition from a proto-­human brute exis­ tence into a civil society in which people could avail themselves of a reason that until then had lain dormant. Through the consequent emotional and intellectual transformation effected through persuasion, individuals acquired the stability of character that enabled them to obey the rule of law voluntarily: Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he [a man who was great and wise] assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honorable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk. (Cicero, 7)

In freeing humans from a brute existence, one that was dominated by powerful and violent emotions, persuasion ushered in the possibility for a new

4 / Chapter One

and more stable psychological constitution. In so doing, persuasion en­ abled humans to begin to use reason (which previously had lain dormant) and consequently to take control of their lives because they could make decisions and not merely react unthinkingly to circumstances. Cicero’s myth argues that persuasion makes civilization possible. The capacity for persuasion is what distinguishes humans from brutes. Given that this acquired ability to consent freely to or disagree with a proffered position is a product of a society’s rhetorical inheritance, persuasion becomes the defining feature for a collectivity determining its own destiny. Those individuals who were collectively transformed by this founding act of persuasion became an audience receptive to reason. Speakers now had power not because of physical strength but because, through the operation of persuasion, they made the strongest or most compelling case. However radical this transformation effected through persuasion was, it did not eradicate the role of passion in human decision-­making. Humans did not become wholly rational or only rational. They continued to be moved by their feelings as well as by reason, but they were no longer simply captives to large internal forces that dictated responses grounded in either aggression or fear. The free or voluntary decision of the audience, effected through this revolutionary moment of persuasion, legitimized consent and fundamentally reorganized the emotional lives of human beings. In his book A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke rewrote Cicero’s mythic account of the origin of rhetoric and the role of persuasion in making a civil society possible. In place of a mythic narrative of a transformative moment, Burke offered an account of persuasion as discursive form, locating the motives behind persuasion in the essential nature and function of language, a function that serves to promote the cooperation among people necessary for society: For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (43; italics original)

In Burke’s complex account of human motivation, symbolicity is one of two major sources of motive (the other being animality). Persuasion, which enables cooperation through the use of symbols, is definitive and fundamental to who we are. For Burke, symbolicity, with its capacity to produce identity through the activity of persuasion, enables us to overcome a primal division:

The Problem of Persuasion  /  5 Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be man’s very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by those same conditions; rather, it would be as natural, spontaneous, and total as with those ideal prototypes of communication, the theologian’s angels or “messengers.” (22)

In its drive to overcome division, persuasion ultimately becomes, for Burke, a form of love. In Burke’s Empedoclean understanding, love and strife represent the competing motives for unity and separation, and they are given form in the complementary activities of persuasion and dialectic. Persuasion results from a natural motion toward union, and thus responds to a basic human need. However much he values this motion to union, Burke is also keenly aware that an unqualified praise of persuasion misrepresents the activity, and that its potential for abuse is an equally important and inescapable feature. Burke does not just make the obvious point that persuasion can be abused and collapse into manipulation; rather, he points to the problem of the ways in which a naturalized discourse can effect persuasion, even or especially when an audience is unaware of the action of persuasion. For Burke, the practice of science in a liberal democracy provides a cautionary example, for its self-­understanding argues that its authority rests not on persuasion but on a disinterested form of discourse. For Burke, this argument entails a form of self-­deception. He argues that—­regardless of the views of individual practitioners—­a scientific practice that supports a powerful military becomes paradigmatic for the way in which persuasion can operate clandestinely and mask motives that structure an activity. He contends that in a society that has become significantly militarized, the conduct of science can no longer be understood as an autonomous pursuit of knowledge—­ and, moreover, that scientists who are blind to this fact deceive themselves about the disinterested pursuit of scientific inquiry. In a society in which funding for science is dependent on the needs and goals of the military, scientists must be understood as engaging in a practice that, de facto, produces an understanding that legitimizes, cooperates with, and furthers a military agenda. The ideological context in which the discourse is created functions as a veiled source of persuasion, a source that is particularly persuasive precisely because it is veiled. The act of persuasion occurs before an audience, and maybe even the practitioners, are aware of its occurrence.

6 / Chapter One

Rather than being forcefully imposed either by violent fiat or by some disreputable spellbinder, the understanding of science as neutral and objective rather than as an adjunct to military purposes has been accomplished by the naturalization—­through a set of assumptions that are rarely argued—­of the relation between science and the needs of the military. The need for force to ensure this understanding has been rendered irrelevant before the fact. A persuasion that has been naturalized is a persuasion whose operation is not even perceived. Beyond the lack of awareness of the persuasive force of a discourse that has become naturalized, there exist further serious questions as to whether persuasion is, in fact, a consequence of the triumph of reason and whether it differs greatly from those decisions effected by the threat of violence. There is a question whether reason, rather than providing an alternative to violence, can itself be act of violence. That a communicative act might compel an audience through reason raises the possibility that what appears to be the free or voluntary consent of an audience may, in fact, be partly a product of coercion. This complexity can be traced back to the origins of the term designating persuasion. Buxton’s observation that peitho as a verb occurs most frequently in the middle voice—­in which the subject is both the agent and the recipient of the verb’s action—­highlights the ambiguity that inheres in the relationship between freedom and compulsion: The middle, peithomai, can usually be translated by one of three English words “obey,” “trust” or “believe.” All three have in common the notion of acquiescence in the will or opinions of another. Correspondingly, the active, peitho, conventionally translated as “persuade,” can perhaps best be understood as a factitive, meaning “get (someone) to acquiesce in (some belief or action),” or more explicitly, “get one’s way over someone in such a way that they peithomai.” (Buxton, 49)

While those persuading may be exercising freedom and getting their way, the recipients of persuasion seem to have forfeited the freedom to determine their own way or to have had that freedom appropriated by the persuasive speech of the speaker. This understanding of persuasion raises an obvious question: if the force of reason is compelling, can acquiescence to reason still be considered as freely given consent? Kant, no friend of rhetoric, argues that there need be no contradiction in a compelled assent to the dictates of reason also being an instance of freely made choice. But freedom for Kant is, at best, a regulatory concept and doesn’t really speak to the way in which the discourse of a speaker impinges

The Problem of Persuasion  /  7

on the understanding of an audience. Kant, focused on the requirements for practical reasoning, is attempting to lay out the ways in which subjects determine for themselves the right course of action. In his schema, an ethical precept is a rule discovered by rational creatures who then impose that rule on themselves because they are rational creatures. Such actors are simultaneously undertaking an action that is both free and necessary. The dictates of reason, which are of interest to Kant, are not result of the discourse of another but are generated by the self-­reflection of the subject. They are categorical imperatives. These are, in effect, events in which reason recognizes its own operation. If there is choice involved, it differs substantially from most other choices that we make and certainly from those choices that are usually considered as effected through persuasion. For those who are wary of persuasion, the issue is whether the use of reason in persuasion is a disguised operation of force by one party on another party. As Bryan Garsten points out, advocates for liberalism such as Judith Shklar view persuasion as one of a collection of coercive resources available to the state (Garsten, 216 n13). In her essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” Shklar argues that an inequality that is apparently structural for political organization means that one should be skeptical of the operation of persuasion and vigilantly guard against its serious abusive potential in the same way that citizens should consider the power of the police and military as suspect: “Given the inevitability of that inequality of military, police, and persuasive power which is called government, there is evidently always much to be afraid of” (27). For Shklar, a position such as Cicero’s—­one that claims persuasion created an equality where none had previously existed—­disre­ gards the way in which power operates. Soft power is still very much power, and it operates through coercion. Again, the problem with persuasion is not abuse by individual rhetors, but is structural and, in this case, resides in the inevitable inequality between the forces of the state and situation of the individual. At the core of Shklar’s liberalism is a deep skepticism as to the possibility of persuasion achieved through the uncoerced agreement of the audience. Such liberal concern points to the impact of power imbalances between those seeking to persuade and those who are the target of persuasion. The question is whether it is reason that compels agreement or some other factor, and this question in turn raises the question whether the traditional defense of persuasion adequately addresses the ways in which a variety of factors other than the sheer force of reason in fact determine what is persuasive. I. A. Richards, for one, argued that the rhetorical tradition’s allegiance to persuasion raises serious issues, so much so that he believed the rhetorical

8 / Chapter One

tradition needed to be rethought if a new rhetoric were to free itself from the aggression inherent in persuasion: The old Rhetoric was an offspring of dispute; it developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was the theory of the battle of words and has always been itself dominated by the combative impulse. Perhaps what it has most to teach us is the narrowing and blinding influence of that preoccupation, that debaters’ interest. (Richards, 24)

For Richards, the inheritance of persuasion crippled rhetorical theory. Integral to persuasion was combat, and the “combative impulse” remained at the heart of persuasion. However benign the motives of an individual rhetor might be, merely by engaging in an effort at persuasion that rhetor was, at some level, assuming a combative stance, either toward an audience or toward a fellow rhetor. Persuasion was combat. Brooke Rollins cites the work of several feminist rhetoric scholars who also raise serious questions as to the inherently aggressive and violent nature of persuasion and who seek alternative paradigms for rhetoric (541–­42). For these theorists, persuasion is particularly pernicious because it obfuscates an embedded power structure that falsely presents itself as an arena in which all speak with an equal voice. It ignores the role of hierarchy and access to discourse, and in its false but honorific form it validates the operation of force by presenting it as the operation of freedom. Further, this account of persuasion encourages values and behaviors that have the effect of making a disguised aggression into an admirable form of personal ambition and social exchange. Sally Miller Gearhart is unequivocal in her equation of persuasion and force: “My indictment of our discipline of rhetoric springs from my belief that any intent to persuade is an act of violence” (201). For her, persuasion is part of “the conquest/conversion mindset that sends us now as a species pell-­mell down the path of annihilation” (202). What makes persuasion particularly insidious is that it cloaks this aggression and represents itself not as an aggressor bent on conquest but as a collaborator who has the best interests of the audience at heart. Given this deception in which coercion masquerades as freedom, there is no reforming persuasion or possibly mitigating some abuses of persuasion; rather, persuasion as an action needs to be replaced by actions that promote harmony rather than conquest. Even if one grants the possibility of defining persuasion in terms other than conquest, difficulties still persist. Chief among these difficulties is that traditional accounts treat persuasion as if it were a discrete occurrence. Because the focus is on empowering a speaker to impact an audience, these

The Problem of Persuasion  /  9

accounts can fall into a paradigm of cause and effect—­the concern is how an artful speech produces a particular effect in the audience. Often the act of persuasion is discussed, if not explicitly represented, as a fairly straightforward communicative transaction that occurs as a discrete and individual event: a speaker makes a compelling case which is then accepted by a listener. But as Kenneth Burke pointed out, this traditional approach to persuasion fails to do justice to many instances of persuasion that are beyond this paradigm: Where public issues are concerned, such resources are not confined to the intrinsic powers of the speaker and the speech, but depend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communication, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a “good” rhetoric neglected by the press obviously cannot be so “communicative” as a poor rhetoric backed by nation-­wide headlines. And often we think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a genuine body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill. (Burke, 25–­26)

Burke recognizes that a variety of factors, some as banal as repetition, are as effective as an appeal to reason in achieving persuasion. Further, he understands that the agent of persuasion need not be a single skilled rhetor but can be a more diffuse set of factors. If persuasion marks a change in understanding, then there are multiple sources that can play a role in such a change. Among the diverse sources of persuasion are factors that operate in the unconscious. Burke cites complex internal sources of persuasion that move us but of which we are ignorant: For there is a wide range of ways whereby the rhetorical motive, through the resources of identification, can operate without conscious direction by any particular agent. Classical rhetoric stresses the element of explicit design in rhetorical enterprise. But one can systematically extend the range of rhetoric, if one studies the persuasiveness of false or inadequate terms which may not be directly imposed upon us from without by some skillful speaker, but which we impose upon ourselves, in varying degrees of deliberateness and unawareness, through motives indeterminately self-­protective and/or suicidal. (35)

Any account of persuasion that fails to consider the complex and often unconscious ways in which we persuade ourselves and, although Burke does

10 / Chapter One

not dwell on this, in which we resist persuasion, is inadequate to the complex and at times obscure ways in which persuasion takes place. If persuasion is to be a central and productive concept through which we theorize the ways in which humans hold and change beliefs and understandings that have ethical, political, and emotional valences for people and that, among other things, shape desires, then that concept cannot be limited to a traditional understanding of the operation of reason or to a paradigm that limits persuasion to being a straightforward event of cause and effect. In addition to not accounting for the operation of the unconscious, the traditional understanding of persuasion fails to recognize that more often than not persuasion requires an extended period of time to take effect, as individuals or collectivities need to work through changes that may require a restructuring of beliefs and commitments and of the emotional orientation embodied in those beliefs and commitments. Ordinary experience would suggest that serious change as a consequence of a single act is the exception and not the rule. A change of understanding more often takes place over time and in a complicated and multifaceted way. If persuasion is to retain utility and continue to occupy a central place in rhetorical theory, it needs to be rethought.

Gorgias: In Praise of Persuasion Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen provides a good place to begin rethinking the complex and contested place of persuasion in the Western rhetorical tradition, for “more than any other text, the Encomium invites us to confront the terrifying, exhilarating possibility that persuasion is just power, and that no human contact is innocent of its manipulative presence” (Wardy, 2). Gorgias’s Encomium embodies the ambiguity toward persuasion that seems integral to the concept. Gorgias argues that persuasion is both a species of force and a collaborative activity that requires the audience’s willing participation, or at least its voluntary acquiescence. This ambiguity is embodied in the very form of the Encomium, which presumably should be a discourse of praise. Gorgias, however, offers scant praise for Helen, instead spending a great deal of time discussing various possible causes that might attenuate her guilt. Indeed, the Encomium strays from its stated concern with Helen and becomes apparently sidetracked by its discussion of causes or excuses that would either negate or mitigate her responsibility for the Trojan War. The exploration of force seems to be where the true interest of the speech lies. This movement away from the speech’s ostensible subject raises the issue of whether the form of the speech is itself an instance of what Gorgias

The Problem of Persuasion  /  11

will label apate (deception). Is he involved in an intellectual bait-­and-­switch in which his real concern is not Helen but his own self-­promotion or, as he claims at the end of the piece, his self-­gratification? Is his text a rhetorical performance similar in kind to a drama in which the rhetor now assumes the role of protagonist and in which the audience, in order to experience the pleasure of the artistic performance, agrees to view the performance not as a work of fiction but as if it were a genuine performance? Is the speech intended as spectacle and is the audience expected to attend primarily to the brilliance of the performance? If that is the case, then the focus should be less on Helen’s innocence or culpability and more on the adroitness of Gorgias’s skill as a discursive performer—­as a rhetor. There is good reason to believe that the animating purpose of the Encomium is to provide an account of persuasion. As Charles Segal maintained in his now-­classic essay “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” “the speech itself, in fact, is as much an encomium on the power of logos as on Helen herself” (102). Michael Gagarin goes further and argues that Gorgias’s goal in the Encomium of Helen was not to persuade his audience of Helen’s innocence but rather to display innovative arguments that foregrounded Gorgias’s own originality and generativity of thought: The same is true of Helen. Gorgias could have concentrated on the traditional arguments about force and the gods, which could relatively easily be made persuasive, and then omitted the arguments on logos and eros. But whereas the first arguments are of little or no interest, the last two still interest scholars today and surely interested Gorgias’s contemporaries, for it is in these that Gorgias forces people to think about speech and emotion in new ways. It does not matter whether anyone is persuaded of Helen’s innocence; the important thing is that Gorgias’s arguments open up new ways in which to think about language, emotion, causation, and responsibility. (Gagarin, 286)

Gagarin’s argument must resonate with anyone who has studied Gorgias’s Encomium. It is easy to be struck by the cleverness of the argument, but I suspect few are persuaded to revise their belief that Helen bears some serious responsibility for what became the Trojan War. If the point were to absolve Helen of responsibility for the war, it is decidedly unsuccessful. Gorgias’s defense of Helen fails (or does not attempt) to do the one thing that is necessary, according to his own theory of persuasion, to make a case for Helen that would actually persuade an audience of her innocence. He does not devote any effort to bringing her plight and suffering before the eyes of his audience. Given his theory of the ways in which sensory impression (both

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oral and visual) work by provoking emotional responses in the audience’s psyche that then change the audience’s understanding of a situation, Gorgias should have devoted the majority of his defense to rendering a portrait of Helen as victim. Instead, he offers an argument. This strategy suggests that his primary concern is not absolving Helen but rather analyzing factors that might have played a role in coercing her decision. As Gagarin argues, Gorgias’s first two points—­that Helen was physically taken against her will by her abductor or that the gods ordained the events—­have, at least, the potential to mitigate Helen’s responsibility. But the fact that she was persuaded or that she was overtaken by the force of Eros seem like poor excuses for her culpability. What unites the four possible grounds offered for Helen not being at fault is that they all appeal to the role of force. The originality or provocativeness of the speech resides precisely in this equation. The operations of logos and eros are equated with physical violence and divine will as forces outside of the individual and against which the individual is powerless to resist. They mark the inevitability of power. This equation provides the grounds for a complex theorization of persuasion. To put it differently, Gagarin is right that the Encomium is not an effort to change the audience’s mind about Helen’s guilt; rather, it seeks to dazzle its audience with an innovative account of persuasion. In defining persuasion as an irresistible power, Gorgias argues on the one hand that persuasion cannot be distinguished from force; he offers, on the other hand, power or agency to those who are clever enough to master persuasion. For those who can master the art of persuasion, there is freedom; for those who are the recipients of its power, no freedom is possible. Gorgias devotes the longest section of his Encomium to the power of persuasion, giving it the central position in his speech. He initially characterizes speech as equivalent to, if not in fact being, a deity who can alter the internal emotional orientation of the audience: “Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished the most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief and instill pleasure and enhance pity” (Gorgias, 286). The power of speech is tied to a particular causality. Without recourse to physical force, speech can impact and change the emotions of the audience. Its causality is surreptitious, and that presumably makes it hard if not impossible to guard against this invasion of the psyche by an external force. But Gorgias’s account of the operation of speech is not quite as reductive or straightforward as this model of causality would suggest. His initial analysis of the ways in which speech can alter emotion assumes a collaborative relationship between the performer and the audience. The audience can be emotionally changed because it has placed itself

The Problem of Persuasion  /  13

in a position in which it is receptive to such change, and the anticipation of the speech’s emotional transport is one reason for an audience to make itself available to be impacted by the performance. Gorgias’s example of the forcefulness of speech is poetry, which he de­ fines as speech with meter. He turns to tragedy to explain the operation of logos on the psyche. When an audience attends a performance of a tragedy, the members experience “fearful shuttering,” “tearful pity,” and “grievous longing” as they witness the events of the drama unfold and hear the speeches of the characters. It is important to stress that the emotions the audience members experience should not be understood as being vicarious. They are real emotions. Gorgias’s point is that such emotions can be produced in an audience through the artistic use of speech. But for the tragedy to produce these emotions, it needs the cooperation of the audience: Thus the tragic spectacle demands a sort of collusion in pretence, which provides Gorgias with the opportunity for more audacious paradoxologia: we should conceive of the theatrical experience as a sort of contractual deception, relying on cooperation between the deceptive tragedian and the receptively deceived audience. (Wardy, 36)

Wardy’s characterization of the audience as “receptively deceived” neatly describes the audience’s willing participation in the conceit that it is witnessing a real event when it is in fact (and knowingly) watching a dramatized and highly stylized representation of an event. The emotional power of tragedy, rooted in the audience’s cooperation with the dramatic representation of events, establishes the capacity of artful speech to induce psychological changes in an audience. Gorgias’s choice of example is particularly apt, for as Buxton has argued, “there was no question of representing a settled and shared dogma: the aim of the dramatist was to persuade the spectators to accept his view (within the conventions used) of reality” (Buxton, 18). Gorgias’s argument draws on the available cultural understanding that saw the theater as fundamentally a rhetorical location, and the emotional transport of a particular drama as integral to both its dramatic and rhetorical success. In calling attention to the ways in which tragedy moves an audience, Gorgias is appealing to an experience whose authority the audience of the Encomium can grant. It is not so much that an act of persuasion is in some way like an event in the tragic theater, but that tragedy is an already existing persuasive act. There is a natural transition from the artifice of the theater to the larger concern of the role of artifice or deception as a central feature of speech. The distinction between what happens within and outside the

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theater cannot hold. Deception is integral to speech, and the role of deception both creates situations that necessitate persuasion and makes deception a resource to be used by persuasion. Deception provides the bridge from tragic discourse to witchcraft and magic: The “deception” which the Gorgianic rhetor practices is thus also connected with the apate or pseudos of the poetic tradition (e.g., Hesiod, Theog. 27–­28) and is a natural consequence of the above-­mentioned autonomy of the logos as a separate artistic medium: the logos demands the complete suspension of “rational” belief, for it has a pistis all its own; it works through “magic” and “enchantment” rather than the objective faculty of aletheia, and its results correspondingly are a poetic terpsis as well as the Sophia of B23. (Segal, “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” 112)

The persuasion (pistis) of tragedy and rhetoric is a consequence of deceit (apate) rather than truth (aletheia), a deceit that works a magic by providing a pleasure or delight (terpsis) independent of the operation of reason. The situation that Cicero mythically imagined as the source of civilization—­in which the sweetness of language was the source of persuasion—­recurs in the theater but also in any situation in which language is used artfully. The reason that poetry has such a powerful emotional impact on the audience is that it builds on and artistically deploys properties of language to which we naturally respond. We are persuaded not so much by the truth of the statement but by the emotions that are fostered. If one assumes that these emotions are not irrational, but as Jonathan Lear argues, proto-­rational, then they possess an authority that is responsive to the world and that commands our attention. Our emotional reactions become a source of knowledge. But Gorgias wants to make an even more daring and outrageous argument. His argument is not simply that we can be deceived by the emotional power of speech but that such deception is the norm. As Charles Segal observes, for Gorgias “man’s bent is toward error and not, as ultimately in the Platonic view, toward truth. The rhetor is simply adapting to practical use a given psychological fact, just as he accepts the conditions of human communication as the material on which to apply his linguistic tools” (“Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” 112). Rather than bemoan human weakness and regret that we are not fully rational, Gorgias wants to analyze what actually motivates us and then understand how that knowledge can be put to a practical advantage. For him, deception is not an ethical failure but a feature of human understanding.

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The inescapable presence of deception must necessarily alter the original example of emotional transport in the theater. As Gorgias develops his account of the power of persuasion, he no longer restricts deception to those instances in which an audience willingly submits to the deception. Rather, for Gorgias, the operation of deception in human understanding is what makes efforts at persuasion equivalent to the operation of witchcraft and magic: “Thus, by entering into the opinion of the soul the force of incantation is wont to beguile and persuade and alter it by witchcraft, and the two arts of witchcraft and magic are errors of the soul and deceivers of opinions” (Gorgias, 286). The magic of the theater is, in fact, a feature of everyday life. We live in a world of doxa (opinions or beliefs), and these are affective representations of a reality that we cannot access apart from these representations, which inherently must represent that reality as something other than it is. Gorgias argues that humans cannot accurately remember the past, perceive the present, nor anticipate the future. This inability to apprehend reality is not the consequence of some correctible fallibility; rather, it defines us. For this reason, “on most subjects most people take opinion as counselor to the soul” (Gorgias, 286). We exist at least one remove from truth, and we lack the capacity to move through our representations to the thing represented. Living in an enchanted world that has been created magically through an “incantation,” we are persuaded of the reality of that illusion and are moved to act on our persuasions as if they were facts. This vision is troubling only if one has an idea that we should have access to a fixed and stable truth, and that if we have the proper methods that can discount the distortions of our personal perspectives, we can access that truth. The alternative, Gorgias’s argument, is that we live in worlds of our own making and these worlds have emotional valences that influence how we act. We should acknowledge this fact and then determine how we can acquire agency in such a world. Our emotional reactions guide our actions, and these emotional reactions need not be irrational; rather, they can be genuine responses to the threats and opportunities that impinge on us through our sensory apprehension. But if doxa are not necessarily unreliable, they are, at best, an equivocal source of guidance. Opinion can be “slippery and insecure, [and it] casts those relying on it into slippery and insecure fortune” (Gorgias, 286). Helen, being young, was easily taken in by the witchcraft and magic of persuasion. She lacked the experience and judgment to resist and challenge the persuasive power of speech. And while she might have acquired a limited culpability for being carried away by a bewitching speech, and might have felt shame at being the victim of a seduction that she was powerless to resist, her

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failure was not a simple mistake. Her bewitchment marks a crucial transition in the argument. At first, Gorgias characterizes her being swept away by persuasion as her being carried away “just as if constrained by force” (286). But in the very next sentence, he drops the qualifying “just as if” and says bluntly that “persuasion has the same power as necessity” (286). Persuasion overwhelmed Helen: “her mind was swept away by persuasion” (286). The force of the speech was so powerful that she was compelled to obey, and the relationship that characterizes persuasion is one defined by force: the persuader achieves his will through the force of words against which the audience, in this case Helen, is powerless. There is no longer any sense of the audience as voluntarily participating in a discursive act that operates through the collective appreciation of the constraints of a genre. The reach of persuasion extends beyond the boundaries of poetry, and it is this reality that makes it available to those acts of rhetoric that take place outside of the theater. Gorgias next cites several instances of the operation of persuasion in a variety of venues: in the debates concerning astronomy, in the civic debates that occupy the public, and finally in philosophical controversies. Scientific fact, public decision, and philosophical speculation are all examples of rhetorical persuasion. Astronomers perform the witchcraft or magic of convincing their audiences of the reality of objects and events that they cannot see. Orators effect public decisions not by a recourse to truth but by employing a delight that is efficacious in moving audiences. Finally, philosophy, the practice that claims the authority of truth, is marked by a constantly changing intellectual terrain in which the whirlwind of a rapidly changing opinion overtakes an audience and becomes the source of conviction about the truth of a particular argument. Rather than grounding an epistemological stability, philosophy enacts a constantly changing and unstable understanding. To explain the power of these various instances of persuasion, Gorgias likens the power of persuasion to a drug. What drugs to do the body, persuasion does to the soul. The causality in operation in persuasion is of the same order as the physical causality operating in drugs. The operation of drugs on the body and of persuasive discourse on the soul are outside the will of the patient and are the media through which the physician or rhetor modifies the constitution of body or soul. Both drugs and persuasive discourse can be used for good or evil, but in any event their effectiveness remains independent of the will of the patient or audience. The issue of responsibility has become irrelevant. It makes no more sense to blame Helen for the effects of persuasive speech directed against her than to blame patients for the action of medication on their bodies. At the same time, those who possess

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the arts of medicine and rhetoric acquire enormous power because they can employ forces that naturally exist in order to effect purposes of their own. If Helen is a victim of persuasion, the rhetor who manages to master persuasion acquires a power to intervene in reality and to change the emotional orientation and the perception of an audience and hence to control their lived reality. Persuasion is a great lord.

The Goddess Peitho Gorgias does not end his Encomium with his analysis of the operation of persuasion but presents a fourth possible cause that might have occasioned Helen’s flight with Paris—­one that would excuse her from responsibility for her actions by locating yet another form of force or necessity that acted upon her. If it were not persuasion that moved Helen, it might have been Eros. In ways similar to those in which hearing represents the physical site of the operation of persuasive speech, Gorgias argues, sight marks the medium through which Eros compels the soul. The impact of a powerfully affective vision occurs before there can be any rational assessment of the situation. Gorgias’s example is the way in which the armor of an enemy can instill terror into a soldier before any rational response is possible. The vision is directly impressed upon the soul. The emotional response of terror can be so strong that it simply overwhelms cultural norms. The power of beauty is no less striking or less immediate than that of terror. Gorgias cites the range of emotions artfully evoked by sculptures—­the beauty of the form is compelling. When such beauty is encountered in another human being, it can be irresistible—­the response is both automatic and beyond the capacity of a human to control. Eros is a powerful god. To arrive at this conclusion is to come full circle. It is acknowledged by all that humans cannot withstand the power of the gods—­this was the first and uncontroversial excuse offered for Helen’s behavior. In the face of the god Eros, we are powerless. The power of persuasion and the power of Eros are traditionally attributed to the goddess Peitho. She is the goddess of both persuasion and seduction. What unites persuasion and seduction is that they both represent a vulnerability of the autonomous subject. Both seem to stand outside human will: one cannot be compelled to love someone else, nor easily will oneself not to love another. In both cases an outside force effects an irresistible change in the psyche. The change can be exhilarating but it is also terrifying, for it is evidence that one’s life can be determined independently of, and possibly in opposition to, one’s will. Anne Carson has detailed the anxiety that such vulnerability to Eros created for the Greek lyric poets, and

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it is easy to imagine a similar anxiety infecting those who fear persuasion. If Eros can at times be seen as a tyrant, persuasion is subject to the same perception. As conceived, the goddess Peitho is a tribute to this natural power of Eros and persuasion to overtake and transform people. An art that could harness that power would be formidable and possibly dangerous. Certainly, an understanding of persuasion (or Eros) that focused on the freedom of audience or lover to either collaborate with or oppose this power disregards the ways in which power is embedded in the relationship. Gorgias celebrates precisely what persuasion’s critics fear—­that the act of persuasion is a form of coercion.

An Important Rethinking of Persuasion In Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights, Arabella Lyon provides a powerful argument for no longer designating persuasion, with its theoretical commitment to locating power in the speaker, as the goal for rhetorical art. She prefers to ground rhetoric in deliberation, an activity based in recognition and reciprocity that promotes public discourse in the service of equality and justice. Lyon’s analysis of the limitations of persuasion is particularly helpful because she effectively challenges understandings and justifications for persuasion that have been central to the traditional approach to rhetoric, which indeed defined itself in terms of persuasion. She focuses not on Gorgias’s argument about the power of persuasion, which considered ethical concerns to be irrelevant, but on Aristotle’s account of persuasion, which is less a celebration of the power of persuasion and more a justification of its civic utility. Given the centrality of Aristotle’s position for the Western rhetorical tradition, Lyon’s discussion of the limitations of his account of persuasion raises concerns that require a serious rethinking of persuasion, if persuasion is to continue to function as a concept integral to a theory of rhetoric. Aristotle’s advance over his predecessors was to provide a theoretical foundation for rhetoric as an art. Unlike Plato, who raised ethical concerns about rhetoric, Aristotle approached rhetoric as a problem of defining the conditions for a practice that could claim to have artistic or technical integrity. He argued that the purpose of rhetoric was to assist audiences in making certain kinds of judgments. These judgments could be made more or less well. If that were so, then it should be possible to develop methods that supported doing the activity well. He identified three types of judgments that audiences (citizens) made. People needed to decide about guilt or innocence of those charged with a crime. Such judgments principally

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addressed the justice of a given action, and were concerned with past activities. People also needed to make judgments about the best course of action in particular situations. Such judgments focused on the future and were determined primarily by a concern with utility. Finally, there were times when an audience acted primarily as spectator and judged how convincingly a particular rhetor had made the case for a particular person’s excellence. These judgments focused on the present and were made on the grounds of the quality of the person in question, as brought forth by the speech of the rhetor. The Greek term kalos (the noble or the beautiful) designates the quality that a rhetor extols as defining the character of his subject. At the core of Aristotle’s technical revision of rhetoric was his recognition that a rhetor could not compel an audience’s judgment. Unlike Gorgias, he did not believe that the rhetor possessed skills that were either equivalent to magic or godlike. Rather, he begins from the simple observation that people routinely seek to persuade other people and that some people are more successful in those efforts. Whether their success is a product of natural ability or experience, the means of that success should be recoverable, and one should be able to formulate methods that will allow those who operate according to those methods to be more effective. That is, it should be possible to give an account of the skills and practices that underlie and support efforts at persuasion. It should be possible to develop these skills systematically and thus to synthesize them into a teachable art. Rather than persuasion being the exercise of a mysterious power, it is, potentially, a mode of action available to anyone willing to study the art and acquire the appropriate discipline. The potential availability of the art of rhetoric makes it a crucial resource for any polis in which the political power of the citizens rests on their ability to make good judgments. Through these judgments they would determine their understanding of the polis’s past and present and would enable the city to take future actions that best promoted its goals. Instead of being a resource reserved for those who were clever enough to impose their will on the city, persuasion became the means by which the citizens determined city policies. Persuasion was connected to agency, and freedom became both the condition necessary for persuasion and the consequence of responsible persuasive actions. The purpose of rhetoric as an art was to assist citizens in making the best judgments possible. Aristotle recognized that the art could be abused and that individuals could use it to further their own interests, but such efforts at persuasion did not provide evidence that persuasion itself was the problem. Rather, like any effective action, it was subject to disreputable use by those who violated the art’s in­ tended purpose.

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Unlike earlier practitioners of rhetoric who reduced persuasion to emotional manipulation, Aristotle developed a complex account of persuasion that recognized the role of multiple and diverse proofs in the production of persuasion. A variety of factors influenced a civic audience’s judgment. And these factors could be discovered and rendered systematic. Potential proofs for persuasion could be found under three large categories: logos, ethos, and pathos, and each of these categories could be further subdivided until an entire terrain of potential places from which to draw particular proofs could be mapped. Rhetorical artistry consisted in using these proofs to discover or invent the arguments that would be most persuasive with a particular audience. In its capacity for discovery, rhetoric provided a practical method to render contingency determinate, thus allowing a civic audience, guided by a rhetor, to make the judgments that best accorded with its values and history and that were responsive to the political environment in which the judgments were situated. Persuasion became, in effect, a continual and fluid process through which a polis might come to understand itself and act effectively. It is easy to understand why such an account would have a powerful influence on the history of rhetoric—­and why defining rhetoric as the discovery of the best available means of persuasion became a guiding purpose for the tradition. Persuasion, so theorized, offers an important resource for civic freedom and an indispensable aid to making uncoerced decisions. But however powerful and attractive this account of persuasion is, Lyon raises questions as to whether it does justice to three components of the rhetorical situation: audience, process, and commonality. Her first concern is that Aristotle’s account frames the issue of persuasion in terms of the action of a speaker on an audience. However nuanced his account is, it still “presumes a powerful speaker (even a demigod) and a docile audience, not a relationship between equal interlocutors” (Lyon, 33, emphasis original). Lyon argues that these assumptions about the power of the speaker and the lesser power of the audience are consequential. First, independent of any intentions of the speaker, the structure of the deliberative situation as conceived by Aristotle already has built into it a difference in the relative positions of speaker and audience that makes the authority and power of the speaker disproportionate. The speaker and the audience are not equal, and the interaction tilts decidedly toward the speaker being able to impose will and understanding on the audience. The speaker’s role is active, and the audience’s passive. The discursive act is unidirectional: a speaker acts on an audience. And although an audience retains the freedom to reject the speech of the speaker, the audience does not have the option of mounting a response that can challenge or amend the speech. The audience’s choice is

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limited to accepting or rejecting the speaker’s position, and the possibility for an interaction between the two parties is precluded by the structure of the situation. Unlike the interactive model of deliberation for which Lyon advocates, the Aristotelian model, which grounds deliberation in persuasion, does not really imagine a relationship between speaker and audience. There is no give-­and-­take. The lack of equality ensures that the audience is not granted the position from which to respond. Even if there is no explicitly forbidden possibility of response, the unequal situation means the audience is denied the initiative in responding. In effect, the audience is denied the most important opportunity to survey and define their choices; rather, their choice is limited to the options presented by the speaker. So even if there is uncoerced agreement, the agreement is not fully free. The persuasion, even if the audience consents willingly, disguises the way in which the power embedded in the structure of the relationship has already shaped the choice. If there are to be opposing arguments, they must come from an opposing rhetor and not the audience itself. The passivity of the audience is structural. The structural difference of position becomes especially troubling when there is a cultural difference between speaker and audience. The nature of the interchange means that the speaker’s cultural values assume a privileged position and those of an audience whose culture might differ can be suppressed without the speaker or the audience necessarily being aware of what has been preempted. The civic loss is not simply the suppression of the voicing of the audience’s culture but the larger missed opportunity of having a discourse that can interact with, challenge, enrich, and change the dominant culture. The rhetorical task of invention is thus muted. And again, to the extent that this loss is often not perceived, the concern should not be when persuasion fails to occur but when it succeeds. It then becomes an important contributor to a culture’s inability to entertain multiple perspectives and thus achieve purchase on the limits of its own self-­understanding. Lyon’s second concern is that persuasion, as understood by Aristotle, is “a process word, describing an action with an end” (Lyon, 33). She contrasts this “motivational” understanding of persuasion with one that focuses on deliberation as a performative act. A performative understanding of deliberation recognizes that “an act of deliberation may be the happening, organically unfolding and enveloping and not a pathway to transparent goals preordained in the speaker’s purposes” (Lyon, 33). In the Aristotelian model, meaning does not emerge from the interaction of audience and speaker; rather, it is a matter of the successful or unsuccessful transmission of understanding from the speaker to the audience. It is a discourse that forecloses

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surprise. For Lyon, one of the values of a performative model of deliberation is that in the back-­and-­forth between the parties, that process itself may generate a new and unanticipated understanding. The performative act plays a pivotal role in generating meaning and not in simply ratifying a preexisting meaning or decision. The dynamic of exchange—­one that can contribute to the understanding of both parties—­is important independent of any particular resolution. This dynamic helps shape the culture and practice of citizenry and enhances citizens’ understanding of themselves as active shapers of policy and not simply the recipients of the actions of others. Lyon’s third concern is especially important for those political states in which there is a diversity of cultures and a genuine heterogeneity of interests. According to Lyon, “Aristotelian persuasion, born of the polis, presumes a common core of interests, knowledges, and spaces; perhaps this is best exemplified by the ancient prominence of the enthymeme, with its missing term that glues community understanding” (33). What the structure of the enthymeme reveals is that a broadly shared culture and set of values are so ingrained in the population that a speaker can assume this understanding and hence does not need to include it specifically. The form itself reinforces the homogeneity of the culture, and thus ensures a cultural closedness of sorts in which commonly held opinions are not challenged but only reaffirmed. And this affirmation does not necessarily even surface to a conscious level. Any change or shift in understanding that might be revolutionary is simply preempted. In effect, persuasion can foster a cultural myopia that, in turn, can become a form of cultural self-­ignorance. In pointing out the ways in which a deliberation based on persuasion effectively serves to promote the continuation of a discourse that affirms the understanding of those in power, Lyon mounts a convincing case that persuasion, as traditionally conceived, does not contribute to a larger public discourse in which a community can engage in genuine self-­determination. Rather, Aristotelian persuasion has a more limited and practical role to play. It can help those in power and those who share the understanding of those in power make the decisions necessary to advance their interests in situations in which choices are necessary. There is an undeniable utility to such persuasion—­these decisions need to be made and making them well is consequential, but persuasion as a valued activity is limited and remains dependent on the assumption of an audience that is homogenous and relatively passive. The audience’s role is limited to approving or disapproving options that a speaker has determined in advance. The audience does not interact with the speaker or collaboratively shape an understanding or decision. Lyon concedes that “the purposes of persuasion are multiple and are

The Problem of Persuasion  /  23

of some use,” (35) but she goes on to conclude: “Too much focus, there, however, distorts recognition and reciprocity, limiting the outcomes of deliberation in imagining justice, political community, and difference” (35). She argues that deliberation as enactment, in contrast to deliberation as persuasion, is “responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants” (36–­37). Finally, “persuasion tends to work in the service of hegemony, for it is easier to argue for what is already present than to imagine futures and find proof for counterfactuals” (37). While Lyon seeks to do justice to both the complexity and the practicality of Aristotle’s account of deliberation as an instance of persuasion, she gives short shrift to two aspects of his theory that are important. First, Aristotle rarely considers deliberation as an instance of a single speaker offering or imposing an understanding or decision on an audience. Rather, he acknowledges that a deliberative situation is often, maybe always, one in which there are contending viewpoints: “We debate about things that seem capable of admitting two possibilities; for no one debates things incapable of being different either in past or future or present, at least if they suppose that to be the case; for there is nothing more [to say]” (Aristotle, 1357a, 12). If there were not disagreement and at least two live options, there would be nothing to deliberate. If a particular choice or outcome were uncontested, there would be no call for the art of rhetoric. There is an assumption in the rhetorical situation that power is contending with power. In analyzing this situation, Aristotle acknowledges the presence and force of an opposing speaker, and he explicitly discusses how a speaker should respond to an opposing speaker. Hence his concern with refutative arguments. And although Aristotle’s primary focus is on how an individual speaker can be effective—­a focus that can give the impression that deliberation is principally an action by which that speaker can be successful—­this focus only makes sense if a viable contending position exists. Aristotle is clear that we don’t deliberate in situations in which understanding is uncontested. His conception of deliberation as persuasion, while not dialogic in Lyon’s sense, is less monovocal than it may appear. The second aspect of Aristotle’s account of deliberation as persuasion that needs further attention is the role of pathos. If Aristotle opens his rhetoric with an objection to the sophists limiting persuasion to emotional manipulation, he reintroduces pathos in book 2 and provides a rich account of the ways in which perception and judgment are influenced by various emotional states. Persuasion is not simply a function of intellectual agreement. Genuine persuasion cannot be reduced to elicitation of consent. It is a more complicated event. Crucial to a successful persuasion is an emotional

24 / Chapter One

orientation, on the part of an audience, that allows the audience to experience emotions relevant to the situation under consideration. Aristotle’s theory of pathos argues strongly that one of the tasks of persuasion is to make an audience feel appropriately about the world in which they live. This task suggests that people can be confused about how they should feel about a particular person or event and that aligning audience, feeling, and world is an important contribution of a deliberation accomplished through persuasion. This understanding of the role of emotion in persuasion then argues that rhetoric not only seeks consent but also contributes to the constitution of subjectivity. One may worry whether this constitution reflects the diversity of a particular community, but it is important to understand rhetoric’s contribution to the constitution of a cultural or political subjectivity. Through its decisions, an individual or a community begins to understand its identity. This process may simply be one in which values are made explicit, but it can also be one in which values are discovered. Thus, again, persuasion need not be limited to promoting or reinforcing a single privileged position; rather it may be able to raise questions concerning an audience’s understanding of and commitment to a dominant position. But if these two rejoinders complicate Lyon’s critique, they should not be read as negating it. Lyon’s fundamental points are important for understanding how a particular view of persuasion remains ignorant of the political power that it exercises. This traditional account of persuasion represents falsely the freedom in the decision that results from the persuasion. What the two rejoinders to her critique suggest is that a theory of persuasion must deal with the incompleteness of an audience’s understanding and with the potentially conflicting ways of conceiving a situation. It must also consider the complex problem of how an individual or community comes to feel appropriately about the world, and about the ways in which feelings and world align. Any theory of persuasion that seeks to move beyond the limited role of reinforcing and policing the status quo must attend to both Lyon’s critique and to Aristotle’s recognition of the incompleteness and affective character of an audience’s understanding. A revised theory that does justice to the complex operation of persuasion must ask: is there a way to conceive persuasion where it plays an active role in altering the subjectivity of its participants not by incorporating them into an already existing understanding or making their beliefs, desires, and values conform to a culturally dominant position? Can a theory of persuasion further the ways in which those who are not part of the dominant culture can participate in a democracy? Can persuasion be theorized in such a way that it supports a polity’s progress to greater justice and equality? Can a theory of persuasion address how

The Problem of Persuasion  /  25

diversity can be seen as a resource and not as a threat to a community? These questions suggest that, if persuasion is to remain a central and generative concept for rhetoric and an activity that supports democracy, it needs to be radically reconceived. Chapter 2 will look at two recent attempts in which persuasion features as an important factor in the defense of democracy. Bryan Garsten seeks to address the problem of a marginalized and alienated population through a return to the traditional role of persuasion, while Ernesto Laclau turns to a post-­structural theory of language as a tropic system to support an argument for the possibility of a radical democracy. Despite their differences, both Garsten and Laclau frame the difficulties faced by persuasion and the opportunities derived from generalized tropes in terms of specific histories. But because their historical explanations pay insufficient attention to the affectivity of the subject and to the emotional threat posed by change, both will encounter difficulties. Chapter 3 will look at a recent exchange between Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips that theorizes the affective threat of difference as arising not primarily from historical circumstances but from the operation of Eros itself. Their understanding of the depth of resistance to diversity raises questions as to whether persuasion is possible when there is difference. The difficulties for persuasion encountered in these two chapters suggest that a reconceived persuasion needs to take seriously antiquity’s recognition of relationship between Peitho and Eros, both for what it positively reveals and for the challenges it presents.

two

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony

For Gramsci the exercise of power (or the relation between ruler and ruled) rests (or should rest) on an inverse relationship between force and consent, which, in turn, depends upon the generation of consent. The more weight consent acquires, the less force is necessary. To Gramsci the power and resilience of a sociopolitical order (the “state”) is defined by the individuation of consent and persuasion within concrete political and social structures. Hegemony is the institutionalization of consent and persuasion within both the civil society and state. —Benedetto Fontana, “The Democratic Philosopher: Rhetoric as Hegemony in Gramsci,” 99

Despite the serious and legitimate reservations Lyon and others have raised concerning the ways in which the activity of persuasion can mask the operation of force and power, there remain compelling reasons to revisit the role of persuasion in rhetoric and its potential for facilitating uncoerced agreements and promoting a sense of larger political solidarity for a democratic community. The currently contentious political atmosphere, with its increasing polarization and the rigidity of a fiercely maintained partisanship, fueled in part by anxiety over social and economic change, makes it imperative to search for effective alternatives to this partisanship. Both Bryan Garsten and Ernesto Laclau turn to rhetoric to provide the key resource to address crises challenging the preservation or further realization of a democratic political order. In the case of Garsten, this crisis manifests as an increasingly menacing intolerance that threatens modern liberal democracy; in the case of Laclau, the crisis presents less as a threat and more as an opportunity to correct injustices arising from late capitalism and to create a more just and socially responsible radical democracy. To recover

28 / Chapter Two

persuasion as a resource that can enable contemporary democracy to reconstitute the polity, Garsten turns to the Western rhetorical tradition and its use of controversy. But as powerful as his analysis is, it finally fails to handle the challenge that hegemony poses for persuasion. In contrast, Laclau turns to post-­structural theories of rhetoric that frame hegemony as a tropological operation holding promise for the advance of radical democracy. But if his embrace of post-­structural rhetoric treats hegemony as central to the operation of political power, his account also proves unsatisfactory. When Laclau defines subjectivity wholly in linguistic terms, human agency is lost. The difficulties encountered by both these efforts argue for a radical rethinking of the constitution of the subject in terms of a new theory of persuasion—­ one that reconceives the ancient relationship between Peitho and Eros.

The Problem of Political Stridency and Garsten’s Defense of Persuasion Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the safeguarding of democracy depends not only on the design of a constitution structured as a system of checks and balances but also on citizens abiding by two informal democratic norms. These are mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 102–­17). Both these norms imply a willingness to see people holding alternative positions as opponents and not enemies. When tolerance and forbearance abate, polarization increases, as contending groups no longer feel any need to engage their opponents in discussions intended to formulate policy. As polarization increases, any attempts to persuade are abandoned, and there is a move toward a more authoritarian politics. The political process becomes the simple exercise of force as one party imposes its will on all others. Bryan Garsten’s Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment, in its sustained defense of persuasion, attempts to provide an alternative to this movement toward an authoritarian politics. At the heart of Garsten’s defense of deliberation as persuasion is his response to what he considers to be a crisis in contemporary democratic discourse, one that leads to a “modern political stridency” (183). For Garsten, there is a fundamental and disturbing irony in that an effort at discursive reform intended to foster greater tolerance has had the unfortunate consequence of doing just the opposite and of abetting a new and dangerous form of dogmatism: . . . Today we confront not only religious fanaticism but also a distinctly modern form of zealotry born as a response to liberalism. The frustration of

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  29 being left out of the rewards and discourse of Western liberalism, a sense of alienation that is only intensified by the liberal preference for toleration over engagement, has produced responses to modernity that are as dogmatic and dangerous as the religious fanaticism that liberalism was meant to contain. And to make matters more confusing, the sentiments of alienation often present themselves as manifestation of religious fervor. (Garsten, 17–­18)

What Garsten labels “liberal alienation” (184) is a symptom of a deep skepticism about democracy, one that sees democratic discourse as a not particularly veiled cover for a political system rigged by the powerful to favor the powerful. Given the events of the last several years, Garsten’s book, published in 2006, seems remarkably perspicacious. The crisis he identified has only become more pronounced, as this paranoid fanaticism has moved from the margins of discourse and become a more acceptable position to voice. In their pronounced expression of frustration and alienation, many who have felt excluded from benefits of global economies have turned to toxic versions of nationalism that represent a rejection of the contemporary cultural, social, and political worlds. This felt sense of “liberal alienation” has, according to Garsten, created a dangerous opening for demagogues who can exploit their audiences’ feeling that they no longer have control over key decisions that affect their lives. He traces this consequence to the rise of a modern politics and, in particular, to a radical shift in the ways in which political decisions are theorized in modern liberal states. For him, the contemporary crisis in liberal political discourse is rooted in a turn away from the traditional role of rhetoric in political decisions. This turn was a movement away from, and despair at the possibility of, meaningful political deliberation—­a turn motivated by a deep skepticism about the capacity of ordinary citizens to deliberate in a reasonable and unprejudiced way. What troubles Garsten is that the apparent responses to this crisis seem incapable of either restoring a sense of belonging to a community or supporting a tolerance essential to any political society that is diverse and that values diversity. He draws a bleak picture of two competing dogmatic forms of discourse, neither of which will promote a vibrant and healthy political discourse: This leaves us in a delicate position, caught between two forms of dogmatic rhetoric that seem to require opposite solutions. Religious zealotry seems to call for the modern liberal strategy that arises from Hobbes’s attack on rhetoric. The alienation and fanaticism that arise in response to liberalism,

30 / Chapter Two however, seem to call for an alternative strategy which engages more directly with religious opinion. The first strategy seems too hostile to the politics of persuasion, and the second too vulnerable to demagogy. (Garsten, 18)

This situation of untenable positions argues strongly for a third alternative approach to political discourse, one that can address dogmatism without falling victim to either of these first two approaches. This search leads Garsten to call for a return to a rhetoric of deliberation, a rhetoric that values and pursues persuasion. Such a return to rhetoric would provide a way to invite those who feel excluded from the rewards of the liberal state back into political conversations, for the focus on persuasion would necessitate taking into account the audience’s beliefs and commitments. By allowing members of this audience to feel that they were being heard, an effort at persuasion could provide an opening to those who feel marginalized in and by modern liberal democracy. Rather than attempting to impose an understanding on an audience, a rhetor concerned with being persuasive would need to address the audience as both individuals and a group that has sufficient intelligence and contact with reality to make good decisions. For Garsten, this choice of deliberation as persuasion testifies to a faith in the audience’s capacity for judgment and to the need for a rhetoric whose success is dependent on appeals to this capacity. The belief in the capacity of the ordinary citizens to make sound, but not infallible, practical judgments and the acknowledgment of the worth of a diversity of opinions would promote respect for all citizens and would encourage their participation in a discourse they believed could play a role in shaping their lives.

Garsten’s History of the Abandonment of Deliberation For Garsten, the history of modernity can be written as the displacement of persuasion by the pursuit of certainty and unanimity. To explain the current state of liberal alienation, he narrates a history in which anxiety over the destructive consequences of controversy led to the marginalization of rhetoric as various theorists sought a discourse grounded in a sovereignty guaranteeing judgments that were certain and not distorted by private interest. To those worried about the consequences of faction and civil strife, traditional rhetorics that considered controversy as an important political resource seemed incapable of supporting a society that felt the disintegrating pull of private interest. This specter of civil disintegration and increasing faction that were part of an emerging modernity suggested to some theorists that controversies themselves needed to be precluded and that a rhetoric based

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  31

in controversy should be abandoned and replaced by a form of discourse better able to provide stability and a new central authority. In Garsten’s narrative, the decline in the belief of the efficacy of rhetoric was accompanied by the rise of a concept of sovereignty. In the turn to sovereignty, the role of the audience as central to the process of deliberation was replaced by an authority outside the audience, absolute, and resistant to the audience’s particular beliefs and passions. This new authority is variously conceived—­as a delegated and absolute representation, as a prophetic nationalism, or as a public reason (Garsten, 11–­12). What unites these differing conceptions is the imperative to remove judgment from the ordinary citizen and place it with an authority that stands apart from these citizens. What all these attempts seek to accomplish is the elimination or neutralization of controversy, with its potential to cause social disruption and division. What is sought is an authority that is transpersonal. The three figures central to Garsten’s narrative are Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Garsten argues that, despite their significant differences, these thinkers share a commitment to theorizing a source of sovereignty which removes decision-­making from the ordinary citizen, who is viewed as irredeemably prejudiced and incapable of moving outside the limited perspective of private interest. In Garsten’s account, Hobbes initiated this tradition of modern liberal discourse, for his interpretation of the threat posed by controversy and the need to eliminate that threat at all costs set the terms for the discussions of sovereignty that subsequently shaped modern liberal political discourse. Garsten argues that “Hobbes entertained a deep mistrust of citizens’ capacity to exercise the sort of practical judgment that would have been required to make political controversy susceptible to compromise or deliberation” (26). For Hobbes, the threat of civil war and the origin of that threat in the private passions and beliefs of ordinary citizens who had those passions and beliefs ginned up by revolutionary Puritan preachers imperiled the state and fed energies toward armed conflict. He was particularly troubled by those Puritan preachers persuading their audiences of the authority of private conscience. These preachers argued that private conscience issued understandings that were certain and that had the force of final authority. This position effectively eliminated a role for reasoned public discourse. If truth was a matter of private conscience, it could not be contradicted by argument. Hobbes sought an approach to public decisions that could counter the force of private conscience and remove these decisions from the control of the ordinary citizens. He wanted, Garsten contends, to “minimize uncertainty and controversy” (28) by constituting an authority that was absolute,

32 / Chapter Two

one that was sovereign. If such an authority were to come into existence, there had to be a previous and foundational act in which citizens alienated their right and power to make political decisions to this authority. That is, this one initial act of freedom was intended to negate any subsequent acts of freedom. This act vested a central authority in the sovereign. As the agent entrusted to ensure the peace and tranquility of the state, the sovereign had absolute authority over political decisions. Since this authority was created by the initial compact of the citizens with the sovereign, they, for their part, owed the sovereign total obedience. Participation in civic life was dictated by the imperative to obey, and obedience was the condition of citizenship that served as the bulwark against private conscience, with its inevitable pull to political disintegration. In Garsten’s narrative, the idea of sovereignty was taken over by both Rousseau and Kant, each of whom sought to protect a shared general understanding by removing the distorting effect of private interest from political decisions. Where Hobbes vested authority in an agent external to private citizens, Rousseau and Kant sought to relocate this agency within the individual. To achieve such a sovereignty—­one that transcended particularity but was, nonetheless, located in the individual—­Rousseau argued for what Garsten characterized as a “rhetoric of prophetic nationalism” (Garsten, 58). Rousseau proposed the use of a poetic and musical language to effect a psychological reconstitution of individuals so that a shared feeling or set of passions united them in a common moral sentiment. There would be no need for an external force, such as Hobbes postulated, because each individual would be moved and overtaken by this primitive feeling that allowed a participation in an underlying oneness of all people. These individuals, so moved, would voluntarily reconstitute themselves. They would no longer see themselves as separate and alienated and competing individuals but would perceive a common bond—­they would be transformed from individuals to citizens. Since this transformation originated in a response to their feelings which led them to recognize this common bond, it would require no external authority. This internalized sovereignty could achieve the same end of civic accord that Hobbes sought but had the advantage that citizens would now voluntarily police themselves. To the extent that they were reconstituted by this shared passion, they would cease to see themselves primarily as individuals, and thus faction and discord would be eliminated. Controversy, with its potential for social division, would have been prevented. For Kant, the internalization of a new moral authority was not a function of promoting a social passion but of the disinterested operation of

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  33

reason. Kant countered the effects of particularity with reason’s capacity to detach itself from the immediate contents of a decision and to universalize the maxim involved in the decision. In effect, those making decisions as rational actors emptied themselves of the accidental particularity of their personal histories. They judged not as individuals but as representative rational agents. The representation that Hobbes placed in the sovereign was now assumed by individual actors who viewed themselves as representatives of a universal reason. Because a reasoning creature, using critique, could come to a maxim compelled by reason’s need to be consistent and to apply universally, the maxim reconciled freedom and necessity. The decision was not compelled by an external authority but by the individual’s efforts to be fully rational; in escaping this determination by external factors, the decision was an act of freedom. Equally, because the maxim followed necessarily from constraints imposed on reason operating according to the rules that ensured the integrity and consistency of the process, the conclusion was neither arbitrary nor a consequence of private interest or perspective but one that followed necessarily from reason—­which sought rules that could be universalized and that held independently of the concerns of the particular individual. When an individual reasoned, that individual did so as a rational and not a historical creature. The laws that were discovered or determined applied to any and all beings, insofar as they were acting rationally. The individual was providing maxims as a consequence of self-­legislation. Since reason was shared by all but not the exclusive property of any individual, its dictates led to conclusions that were both necessary and universal. As such, the operation of reason again made controversy impossible.

Garsten’s Defense of Persuasion Garsten argues that Aristotle’s defense of practical judgment provides an important rejoinder to those like Hobbes who assume that the average citizen cannot resist the power of a skillful orator. Aristotle was well aware of the abuses of rhetoric by its sophistic practitioners, and his reform of rhetoric did not seek to transform the practice ethically but to limit its scope by shifting the basic paradigm of the practice from a concern with forensic rhetoric to a concern with deliberation (Garsten, 118). Garsten argues that Aristotle recognized a stability in the audience’s character—­its beliefs, its historical understanding, and its values were grounded and, for the most part, persisted. Also, Aristotle credited the fact that deliberation did not just occur occasionally and in response to overtures by orators; rather, deliberation “occurred when one was anchored, for a moment, to some criterion of

34 / Chapter Two

judgment” (Garsten, 127). Individuals might subsequently be required, for a variety of reasons, to revisit that criterion. To operate by revisable criteria is to participate in the larger, normal process by which people are constantly adjusting to their immediate circumstances. Deliberation is not an activity reserved for rare or special occasions; rather, it is an ongoing activity. Consequently, individuals develop skill at deliberation—­as deliberation is woven deeply into the fabric of everyday life. The process is inherently stable because individuals tend to adopt practices and understandings that allow them to respond successfully to worlds in which they live. Survival depends on both having a stable orientation to the world and being able to modify that orientation as circumstances demand. Practical judgment is what allows individuals to negotiate these challenges. Aristotle formulated his art of rhetoric by systematically investigating the ways in which such judgments are made. By observing the normal operation of successful persuasions, he was able to theorize an art of persuasion that enabled practitioners to assist or sway an audience’s judgment by constructing discourses that were effective because they were based on “the available means of persuasion in each case” (Aristotle, 1355a, 14). When audiences deliberated, they actively reviewed and considered a proffered judgment within a complex set of standards that involved inferential reasoning. The audience drew on its assessment of the reliability of the character of the speaker—­and they paid attention to their own emotions, which provided important information about the relation of an audience to the decision that it needed to make. Where modern opponents to persuasion seek certainty and universality, Aristotle valued partiality. He understood that partiality need not be equated with an unreflective prejudice. In acknowledging that practical judgment was inevitably located in those situations whose outcomes were consequential for the participants, Aristotle assumed that such a situation was the kind that called for deliberation. People deliberate on concerns that impact them, over which they have some control. These decisions are not made from a perspective which is universal or devoid of particular content. Rather, people’s beliefs, values, and history do and should play a determinate role. This partiality helps frame an issue productively; it is part of efficiency in decision-­making. And while partiality can sometimes blind one to possibilities that are not immediately evident, it can equally function to direct attention to elements that are most pressing and deserve most attention. If partiality is not elevated to a position immune from the impact of other factors, it can be a key resource to help guide an audience as to what is

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  35

or should be important in a situation that calls for a decision. An alert and open partiality can be an immensely valuable guide in deliberation. If Aristotle provides Garsten with an account of practical judgment that defends the integrity of a persuasion reached through the practice of a rhetorical art governed by the purpose of guiding an audience’s judgment, Cicero offers an account of persuasion that emphasizes the role of probability as a legitimate source of political knowledge. An eminently practical thinker, Cicero was skeptical of any philosophical position that claimed a certain and exclusive possession of the truth. He recognized that people often need to make decisions and act in the absence of certain knowledge. He believed “one could orient one’s actions according to perceptions, judgments, and opinions without thereby assenting to their truth” (Garsten, 152). In an imperfect world, the perceptions, judgments, and opinions that result from people conducting their daily lives acquire authority. While these are not infallible and should not be treated as infallible, one must nevertheless acknowledge their genuine utility. To hold these probable conclusions provisionally is simply to exercise common sense. Opinions can contain the seeds of knowledge (Garsten, 159), and the effort to reconcile eloquence and philosophy is, at heart, an effort to make a more persuasive discourse—­ because the judgments based on the normal occurrences of daily life acquire greater power (and persuasiveness) by being made systematic. But if a probabilistic rhetoric was to be a resource for political decisions, there also had to be a commitment to preserving the political institutions that would protect such practices. Cicero was an institutionalist who valued a politics that acknowledged and respected a community grounded in “an agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good” (Garsten, 167). He called this collection of those who shared this appreciation of and commitment to justice and the common good “a people.” A people constituted by these two values could deliberate about matters that affected them as a whole. The people had “two features conducive to such deliberations. First, in being a ‘partnership,’ a people would have the spirit of trust and fellow feeling that rhetoricians since Aristotle had declared necessary for effective persuasion. Second, political bodies which maintained this spirit, such as the senate, would also preserve independent judgment” (Garsten, 169). Both a cultural and an institutional force are necessary to a practice of persuasion that is essential for a political organization seeking to negotiate controversy. Controversy is only to be feared when there is an absence of trust and the absence of a commitment to maintain those institutions and practices that make deliberation possible.

36 / Chapter Two

For Garsten, the rhetorics of Aristotle and Cicero demonstrate that persuasion need not degenerate into manipulation and pandering if there are commitments to both practical judgment and public trust. That private interest must necessarily corrupt deliberation, as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant worried, is not in fact inevitable. There can be a place for a deliberative rhetoric, Garsten argues, if it takes seriously past and potential abuses and puts in place some constraints that significantly reduce the effect of these abuses. While no constraint can eliminate abuse, it may be possible to create structures that make such abuses less likely and that have the important consequence of productively addressing current modes of intolerance that once again threaten to shatter a commonly held political life.

Justification: A Contemporary Alternative to Modern Liberal Discourse Modern liberal theorists did not share Aristotle and Cicero’s confidence in an appropriately disciplined rhetoric. Alarmed by conflicts that threatened disorder and determined to promote and protect civil peace, modern liberal discourses offered a restrictive account of the function of the state, one that was principally negative. The state was conceived as the orga­ nized power that prevented others from interfering with one’s own pursuits. These discourses further reasoned that the exercise of such a power would unite people by creating a commonly shared set of procedures that could be endorsed by citizens because its purpose would be to ensure that individuals were left alone to determine their lives by their own values. The cost of this noninterference was that issues that mattered greatly to people, such as their religious beliefs, were excluded from the public sphere in the name of tolerance. For some who were deeply religious, such tolerance was then felt as its own form of intolerance—­it was a tolerance that precluded the relevance of their religious beliefs to the larger political discourse. Because of this preclusion, individuals and groups felt marginalized. To counter this feeling of marginalization and to recognize that disagreement need not be a source of faction but could, rather, serve as a beginning point for an earned integration, theorists began to revisit the role of argument in democracy. Recent theories of deliberative democracy are an attempt to move beyond the inheritance of early modern liberal thought, “which sought to escape the uncertainties and controversies involved in arguments, especially arguments about religion” (Garsten, 187). The potential attractiveness of such an approach to civic discourse is that “the deliberative democrats aim to usher argument back into the center of

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  37

political theory” (Garsten, 187). They begin with an acknowledgment that democratic discourse often originates in disagreement. The political purpose of this discourse is to move from this state of disagreement and, through a fair and public process, form policies and discover understandings that can then make legitimate claims on citizens. For Garsten, this championing of argument as essential to the political process is a decided advance over those modern approaches that vested an invincible authority in a sovereignty. But, as Garsten is quick to point out, deliberation, as theorized by the proponent of deliberative democracy, does not offer a discourse guided by the purpose of persuasion. Instead, these theorists see deliberation as a process through which a political will is legitimized. Because the process is governed by rules grounded in the logical conditions necessary for communication and thus governed by the values of consistency and fairness, the conclusions of these deliberations are universalizable. In this model, deliberation does not persuade; it justifies. Decisions achieved through processes governed by the rules logically necessary for communication become the basis for the legitimacy of public policies and understandings. These decisions can claim the necessary assent of all. But for those who feel marginalized, it is this claim of necessary assent that is perceived as a contemporary form of intolerance—­it requires them to disregard values that are central to their lives. Garsten argues that if these theories of deliberative democracy escape the privileged form of sovereignty that suppressed private interest in the public sphere, they nonetheless reintroduce a new form of sovereignty in the set of logical procedures necessary for communication. The intent of these procedures is to empty out the individual and private subjectivities of those participating in the discourse. The discourse becomes universalizable because the participants have no individual identity. There is an enforced homogeneity of the actors—­the rules of the conversation bind all to positions that can be occupied by anyone in the conversation, a circumstance only possible because the positions are both empty and constrictive: “In bringing a concern with deliberation to the center of political theory, the deliberative democrats open the door to persuasion, but insofar as they view deliberation primarily as a process of finding arguments acceptable to all at once, they close it again” (Garsten, 189). Their concern with justifying the legitimacy of political rule becomes simply another form of the social-­contract theory that they sought to replace (Garsten, 189). To the extent that such discourse seeks to legitimize the public will, it seeks to compel agreement. If conclusions are reached through processes logically entailed by the practice of public communication, they are universalizable and, thus, binding. To the extent that these theories of deliberative democracy seek to

38 / Chapter Two

eliminate the private from political consideration, they reenforce the very alienation they are intended to ameliorate, for it is precisely this elimination of the private that is one of the key factors driving contemporary disillusionment. For those at the margin, representative democracy is a game rigged for those in power, who necessarily see the world differently from those at the margin. This disillusionment is furthered by a suspicion that one cannot trust the discourse of those in power because it finally is not universal but masks very decided interests and holds in contempt those who see the world differently. Those who are discontented see their viewpoints as precluded. The controversies that cannot be given voice become suppressed and toxic. They erode public trust.

Persuasion, but in a Tamed Form If the discourses of deliberative democracy do not escape the problem of a transpersonal and authoritative sovereignty, then Garsten’s challenge is to provide an account of deliberation as persuasion that addresses both the need of those marginalized to be included meaningfully in political discourse and the equally important problem that persuasion has a history of abuse that has led to political division and fostered hatred. He is clear about the challenge he faces: “It is not possible to open the door to persuasive rhetoric without also opening the door to its perversions” (Garsten, 176). It is his “hope that judgment can be tamed without being alienated” (176). Garsten begins from a concern that does “not underestimate the threat of demagogy and polarization” (199). It will not do simply to assert the damage of theories of sovereignty and to argue for the value of controversy as a way to include those who have been excluded by the approaches of modern liberal theory to political discourse. There needs to be a clear-­eyed vision of the abiding problem of demagogy. Populations have been misled, and they have acted against their own best interest and values. The theorists who argued for the necessity of a sovereign were responding to real problems. If their solutions have led to the current atmosphere of increased political stridency, then a new model of deliberative persuasion must demonstrate that persuasion need not have those consequences. To find a model of deliberative persuasion that can effectively counter the inherent temptation and force of demagogy, Garsten looks to Madison’s approach to representational government. Like Hobbes, Madison was concerned about the ways in which ambitious and unscrupulous individuals could pervert the public sphere for their own benefit and the detriment of others. His solution involved the dispersal of judgment (Garsten, 202). He

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was fully aware that any form of government or practice of public discourse founded on the belief that one could reform the ethically unscrupulous was naive at best. The question was to how contain and minimize the influence of such actors. Madison’s solution “consisted in delegating government to representatives and extending the size of the republic” (Garsten, 206). These two initiatives were intended to reduce the possibility of a single individual or a small group acquiring undue power, and they would also promote a more extended deliberative process. They would work against un-­thought-­ through or precipitous action. Madison believed further that offices in a representative government would themselves impact the ways in which particular representatives un­ derstood themselves. First, even if a representative was ambitious, the structure of representation would impose limits on what that individual could do if he were to accomplish his ambition. The individual’s desire to maintain and protect the prerogatives of the office would influence behavior—­he would not act in ways that lessened those prerogatives. Madison also believed that the function of serving as a representative would, over time, impact the character of the representative. Acting as a representative, a legislator would develop “certain legislative habits of mind and ways of speaking different from those he or she would have developed as an executive or an activist” (Garsten, 207). Playing the role of legislator would shape an individual’s judgment, as he developed the habit of approaching issues from the point of view of legislation. Equally, such an individual would learn how to speak so as to be effective as a legislator. The role would shape the political ethos of the individual occupying it. If one wished to be an effective legislator, one would act in a certain way. Presumably, a legislator who did not act thus would not remain a legislator for long. An ineffective legislator would be voted out of office. Madison’s second strategy was to spread out the deliberative process both geographically and structurally. The more extensive the deliberative body, the less power any one element would have. A government structured as a set of diverse and competing interests and offices would be less susceptible to “a pressure toward uniformity” (Garsten, 208). This structure would have checks and balances built into it. With the increased variety of perspectives in competition, the resulting deliberation should be more inclusive and better reflect the diverse opinions and interests of the citizens. The representatives would not only represent a single private interest but would need sufficiently broad support from the electorate to whom they would be responsible. Simply by virtue of representing a spectrum of interests, the individual representatives would already have to have more

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inclusive viewpoints. This expansion was furthered by the diversity of government offices—­each with its own interests and pressures to accomplish its particular mission. This dispersal of judgment was intended to tame persuasion. It also created a form of sovereignty that arose from the activity of self-­ government and did not stand apart from citizens exercising their judgment through a representative: what is sovereign is the people’s will as it emerges from all the various activities of representative government. There is no sovereign general will prior to or separate from those activities, no popular will that can be discerned by careful attunement to public opinion polls, nor one that can be derived by careful reasoning about the sense of the community, the history of its principles and values, or a hypothetical account of deliberation under ideal conditions. (Garsten, 209)

Garsten sees in this Madisonian scheme for a republican form of government a deliberative process that culminates in an activity of persuasion in which the citizen’s beliefs and values are brought into productive controversies that provide for a vital commonwealth.

The Continuing Problem of Marginalization Does a representative form of government that reflects Madisonian republicanism effectively counter the political stridency that Garsten seeks to diminish? There are reasons to doubt that it does, or at least that it sufficiently diminishes that stridency so as to allow the crisis to be ameliorated. That our current practices are derived in part from Madison’s vision of checks and balances, and that new forms of intolerance have arisen despite these practices, argues that intolerance and a sense of disenfranchisement remain serious problems. One question that can be asked is: do those who feel disenfranchised and in whom this stridency is mounting feel that they are being represented by their representatives? The fact that the anger is there argues that this representative structure does not provide what these marginalized groups recognize as genuine representation of their interests. Recent years have seen a vitriol that had existed at the margins of society become more acceptable as mainstream discourse. One consequence of the unequal distribution of benefits is a disaffection for the political process, which is seen as being controlled by those who have acquired a preponderance of its benefits. Representation is conceived as a sham, and there is cynicism as to the possibility that those who see themselves as excluded from the benefits

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  41

of modern liberal society might acquire genuine representation. These individuals and groups are persuaded that they are the victims of other, sinister groups. Further, it can be argued that contemporary political stridency is fueled not only by a sense of not receiving the benefits of a liberal society but also by a fear of change. The nostalgic pull to a time that may be more in the mythic than the actual historical past is one symptom of the anxiety of being in a world that is changing rapidly and in which the old markers of order are disappearing. Also, Madison’s hope that the seriousness of the representative’s office would promote an ethos of tolerance in the representative did not adequately anticipate how representatives can also foster faction. Rather than enlarging a representative’s vision, the pressure to get reelected could do just the opposite and narrow that vision. In a highly gerrymandered system of representation, appealing to an audience’s prejudice can be a very effective strategy for getting reelected. The actual structure can increase the opportunity and reward for demagoguery, which is not tamed but encouraged. There is another problem with a persuasion tamed by a representative structure. Arabella Lyon speaks to this problem in her concern that Garsten’s account of persuasion does not address the “criticism of persuasion’s other critics—­feminist, postcolonial, postmodern—­whose arguments are more telling, as they worry about hegemonic power discursively fortressed and protected by persuasion” (32). She is less concerned with manipulation and pandering and more concerned with the ways in which an already embedded power structure perpetuates itself. She argues that the ways in which those who are dominant can foreclose genuine persuasion are as worrisome as potential violence spawned by those who feel disenfranchised. Finally, Garsten restricts his discussion of the importance of persuasion to those situations that occur within a formal political structure. But this arena may not be the best one for understanding how political change takes place. More often than not the discourse that takes place within the confines of legislation has already been significantly shaped by a larger and more diverse set of informal discourses. Major and consequential changes such as the acceptance of gay marriage as a civil right happened because of changes in public attitudes that preceded and prompted the legislation. This change was substantial—­one might argue revolutionary—­and it occurred because a population was persuaded by a variety of arguments and experiences that undermined long-­standing and widely held attitudes. Although this change was, for the most part, peaceful, for those who felt culturally marginalized and continually under attack, the change was perceived as yet one more assault on their values. What might look like

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persuasion to mainstream culture was viewed as a hegemonic imposition by more conservative elements of the culture. It is for such a reason that hegemony is a challenge to any theory of persuasion—­because however much a social, political, or cultural change may appear on the surface to be only an instance of persuasion, for those who disagree with the change, the apparent uncoerced persuasion in fact conceals either the operation or threat of force.

Persuasion and Hegemony: Laclau’s Turn to Rhetoric In his essay “Community and Its Paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘Liberal Utopia,’” Ernesto Laclau challenges the possibility that persuasion can be detached from force. His concern is not with the way that regimes or individuals may have abused persuasion or with any apparent efforts at using persuasion to disguise the exercise of force. Nor is he concerned with the ways in which the practice of persuasion, whether advertently or inadver­ tently, can function to maintain the status quo by not acknowledging the ways in which a dominant discourse forecloses dissenting voices. Rather, his concern cuts deeper. In the quote from him that I used to introduce chapter 1, he argues: Persuasion is essentially an impure notion. One cannot persuade without persuasion’s other—­that is force. One can speak of the force of persuasion but one would never say that one had been “persuaded” of the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem. The latter is simply shown, without any need for persuasion. But one cannot say either that persuasion is reducible to force. Persuasion is the terrain of what Derrida would have called a “hymen.” It is the point in which “reasons” for a belief and the “causes” of the belief constitute an inseparable whole. (Emancipation(s), 116)

For Laclau, the concept of persuasion is unthinkable independent from the concept of force. The necessity that joins the two concepts is analytic. Persuasion cannot be equated simply with a practice that changes a person’s mind, nor can it be reduced to the operation of force. Laclau’s example of the Pythagorean theorem makes that clear. A speaker may start from a situation in which the audience does not believe in the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem, or doesn’t know about it, or doesn’t understand it. The speaker may then use a variety of strategies to prove or demonstrate the correctness of the theorem. If these strategies succeed, the audience will change its mind about the correctness of the theorem. But, as Laclau points

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  43

out, it seems wrong to label such a change of belief as the result of persuasion. An individual who understands the proof does not have the option of disagreeing; choice is not involved in the belief. All changes in belief are not necessarily instances of persuasion. The changes that count as persuasion have the odd quality of being both voluntary and necessary. Laclau begins his critique of Rorty by questioning whether it is possible, even in theory, to disentangle persuasion from force. He acknowledges that we recognize that persuasion and force are not necessarily the same thing: it is one thing to seek to change someone’s beliefs by talking with that person and another to change those beliefs through the use of threats, physical violence, or intimidation. But Laclau maintains that one “cannot establish between the two as sharp a distinction as Rorty does” (Emancipation(s), 112). If one leaves aside those cases of strict logical or mathematical demonstration, Laclau argues that all actions of persuasion contain an element of force. Using Donald Davidson’s example of an alcoholic who decides to give up alcohol, Laclau points out that the repression of a desire (in this case to have a drink) cannot be simply an intellectual agreement but acquires meaning because the alcoholic uses force to suppress the desire to drink. The decision to not drink does not transform the desire; it represses it. This repression is an act of force, and the decision to not drink, if it is at all meaningful, requires the willful denial of a desire. To say that an alcoholic has been truly persuaded to no longer drink alcohol then requires one to acknowledge that this persuasion is only possible if it includes this act of force. Laclau wants to go even further. He challenges not only the possibility of persuasion without force; he argues that the total elimination of force as a political ideal is not desirable. He believes that disagreement is an integral part of our social and political lives. As he puts it, “a world in which reform takes place without violence is not a world in which I would like to live” (Emancipation(s), 114). For Laclau, “the process of reform is a process of struggles” (Emancipation(s), 114). He argues that serious challenge to a prevailing and dominant political position will, most likely or possibly necessarily, provoke resistance. It is difficult under the best of circumstances to move a dominant group away from a position from which its members benefit, and in which they believe, to a new understanding, especially if that new understanding is less advantageous to them. To effect change in such circumstances may require a turn to force. For Laclau, the motivation behind a strike, for example, is not so much to convince those in power of the error of their ways, but to use force to move them to accept change. To argue about the inescapability of force and its desirability is, of course, not to endorse indiscriminate violence. The issue for a “radical democracy”

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is “which forms of power . . . are compatible with democracy, not about the elimination of power” (Emancipation(s), 115). Democracy begins in disagreement. Different groups and individuals perceive and value things differently. The question becomes how to use these differences to advance that democracy so that it honors core principles. Also, these core principles themselves are not static, but are capable of being redefined as various groups vie to set the meanings of those terms. Laclau argues that “it is impossible to avoid the collision of different demands and language games with each other” (Emancipation(s), 115). There will at times be deep clashes, and it may not be possible, even in theory, to reconcile the demands. That irreconcilability would suggest one limit to persuasion. To resolve a situation in which there are irreconcilable demands requires that one position be given preference over the other. However much there may be reasons for this preference, finally the dominant position achieves priority because it has been imposed—­that is, it is a consequence of force. For Laclau, the question becomes which exercises of force are acceptable in a democracy. This question leads to another: what is the proper relation of force to persuasion in a democratically organized society? The answer for Laclau is found in a concept that seeks to explicate the relationship of change, contingency, and the emergence of new social and political understandings: “There is a name in our political tradition which refers to this peculiar operation called persuasion, which is only constituted through its inclusion, within itself, of its violent opposite: this name is ‘hegemony’” (Emancipation(s), 117).

Laclau’s Turn to Hegemony For Laclau, both in the work in which he is the sole author and in his coauthored work with Chantal Mouffe, the concept of hegemony develops over time in an ever-­complicating response to a crisis in Marxism (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 7). Laclau and Mouffe argue that this crisis arises from the inadequacy of theories and revisions of these theories predicated on a historical determinism. For Laclau, the “the history of Marxism . . . [becomes] the process of a progressive incorporation of the various areas of the social into the operative articulatory logics of hegemony and as the consequent withdrawal of the field of ‘historical necessity’” (New Reflections on the Revo­ lution of Our Time, 27–­28). Laclau argues that multiple events have demonstrated that theories grounded in historical laws considered as necessary fail both as explanations and as predictions. Above all, such theories fail to account for the role of contingency in human affairs. Laclau, in contrast, makes contingency the guiding principle of his critique of Marxism.

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  45

Laclau and Mouffe start from what they consider to be a crisis in leftist political thinking, which, they argue, has led paradoxically to the elimination of the political as an aspect of revolutionary change: What is now in crisis is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of Revolution, with a capital ‘r,’ as the founding moment in the transition from one type of society to another, and upon the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics. (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2)

Laclau and Mouffe chart a series of efforts to use hegemony and related concepts to reconcile the dissonance between Marxist theory and historical events. Their concern is not to provide a full history of the rise and complication of hegemony, from its origins as a strategic or tactical response intended to explain the dynamics of historical events that seem to contravene the Marxist narrative to it being the foundational concept in a radical and innovative reworking of Marxism by Gramsci. Rather, they intend to show how “a new logic of the social begins to insinuate itself, one that will only manage to think itself by questioning the very literality of the terms it articulates” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 8). At the heart of this “new logic of the social” is an increasing dissatisfaction with the concept of class and with the core principle that the working class will or must be the privileged agent of social and political change. For Laclau and Mouffe, the crucial paradigm shift in theories of social and political change originates with Gramsci. Gramsci’s important theoretical advance was to move beyond the traditional understanding of class and make room for “class alliances” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 66). Laclau and Mouffe understand this movement beyond class as the privileged subject of political change as being at the heart of the “radical novelty of his [Gramsci’s] concept of hegemony” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 70). They see Gramsci’s originality in his development of a more complex model of historical change, one in which “the field of historical contingency has penetrated social relations more thoroughly than in any of the previous discourses” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 68). For Gramsci, the presence of contingency meant the changes that occurred were no longer solely dependent on an underlying economic base. Contingency meant that new meaning was created in the dynamic exchanges and interchanges of a multitude of discourses by a multitude of actors, as these various actors sought to articulate a vision of justice that addressed the ills that beset people. In

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Laclau’s reading of Gramsci, various social actors contended for moral and intellectual leadership. Political leadership, which could be assigned on the basis of class rooted in a fixed identity, was superseded by a different model of leadership, one in which a new identity emerged as a result of exchanges and interactions that crossed the boundaries of various and heterogeneous social groups. The model of base and superstructure was complicated by a model that acknowledged the force of ideas in effecting change. These ideas were no longer conceived as being determined by a foundational set of relations in an economic base but were now seen as a critical component in the shaping of political understanding. No longer the exclusive possession of a particular class, these ideas led to the discovery or invention of a commonality that cut across a variety of diverse groups. For Laclau and Mouffe, this discovery of a new commonality was captured in Gramsci’s notion of “historical blocs,” which recognized the fact that the identities of these new and emerging social subjects were contingent. These subjects acquired identities as they negotiated their social relations. These identities did not exist in advance but came into being as a consequence of particular groups acquiring moral and intellectual leadership. These groups were not destined to lead, but because of the particular coincidence of ideas and “institutions and apparatuses,” they assumed a position of leadership (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 67). Since this leadership was created and not simply the consequence of any necessity, it was contingent. Such contingency should have meant that any orthodox version of Marxism was no longer viable. If Gramsci was led farther than any other thinker in the direction of hegemony as a principle of social change, Laclau and Mouffe believed that he nonetheless balked at the implications that followed. As they put it: “All the conditions would seem to be present for what we have called the democratic practice of hegemony. Nonetheless, the entire construction rests upon an ultimately incoherent conception, which is unable fully to overcome the dualism of classical Marxism” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 69). Gramsci’s compromise was to think in terms of a class hegemony, which for Laclau and Mouffe is conceptually incoherent. Theories of a particular class as the ultimate source of revolutionary change are logically incompatible with contingency, which privileges no class and which argues that historical actors are created and not a product of necessity. Laclau and Mouffe argue that Gramsci’s commitment to class as an explanatory concept reveals “the inner essentialist core which continues to be present in Gramsci’s thought” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 69).

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  47

Still, Laclau and Mouffe consider Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a major and innovative advance. Even if Gramsci could not finally break free of explanations that ultimately turned to class as a foundational concept, he recognized the important role of social complexity. In recognizing this complexity and the resulting contest for moral and political leadership, he laid the ground for a practice of politics that could be democratic—­he helped define what a democratic practice of politics entailed. Further, Laclau and Mouffe argue, in Gramsci’s account of hegemony, “history is regarded not as an ascendant continuum of democratic reforms, but as a discontinuous series of hegemonic formations or historical blocks” (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 71). This movement from a history that was inevitable and continuous to one that was neither necessary nor continuous was, for Laclau and Mouffe, a decisive movement toward an understanding of what a political life is and why it represents a distinct ontology. To appreciate this ontology fully—­and the deconstructive logic that is an essential part of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony—­Laclau argued that the unique nature of the political needed to be grasped, so agency could be recovered.

The Role of Negativity in the Constitution of the Political If Hegemony and Socialist Strategy presents Laclau and Mouffe’s deconstructive reading of Marxism, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, part introduction and part manifesto, undertakes a more positive argument and makes the case for the auspiciousness of the contemporary moment for important political change. Laclau sees the current state of a ‘disorganized capitalism’ (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 58) as providing an important opening for serious political change. He argues that the “novelty of the present situation, then, lies in the fact that the nodal point around which the intelligibility of the social is articulated does not now tend to be displaced from one instance to another in society but to dissolve” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 59). There are multiple places in which, to use Laclau’s vocabulary, dislocations occur. He treats the growing social and political fragmentation as a “source for a new militancy and a new optimism” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 82). There is a history to be written and a new political order to be constituted. In Laclau’s reading of the contemporary situation, the absence of a single, privileged agent of social change creates the possibility for a political response rooted in a hegemonic operation in which a new revolutionary horizon will create a context that allows contemporary political life to be meaningful, as a new

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and radical vision, of democratic possibility is constituted: “Our basic thesis is that the possibility of a radical democracy is directly linked to the level and extension of structural dislocations operating in contemporary capitalism” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 45). The logic behind the new democratic possibility is grounded in Laclau’s account of history as the temporal development of a political ontology. Laclau’s argument begins with a consideration of what is entailed in negativity. For him, the negative is at the core of all antagonism, and it is antagonism, as the challenge from a position external to a currently existing social and historical structure, that undermines the ability of that structure to constitute itself fully as an enclosed and self-­regulating order. If a society’s current self-­understanding is a consequence of the structure that established its existing social relations, antagonism represents the moment of subversion of that structure, not by opposing it but by revealing the suture that attempted to close its incompleteness. The historical and the political exist because no single social structure can be total or encompass all human relationships. For Laclau, this impossibility, which he characterizes as the impossibility of a stable spatial organization, follows from the temporal dimension of human existence, a dimension which is registered in disruptions or dislocations that cannot be determined by the current social structure and that become the source for the reconstitution of that structure. Intimately connected to this temporality is the possibility of a freedom in which the future exceeds the apparent limits and givens of the present. This freedom enables the constitution of something new, and this newness is not an abstract or ungrounded novelty but a creative response to the injustices and inequities of the present. Consequently, for Laclau, the political is an ongoing reconstitution of human possibility in response to the world that humans inherit. And, as he is at pains to emphasize, this reconstitution is a historical and not an abstract response. Antagonism makes this historical reconstitution possible. Because an act of antagonism originates outside a particular social or political structure and escapes determination by that structure, its occurrence calls into question the completeness and totality of the structure. In Laclau’s terms, it exposes the suture that was intended to repair and cover over the structure’s failure to produce a self-­contained system of explanation. Antagonisms are revelatory, and what they reveal are the historical forces responsible for the present structure and which have been rendered invisible by explanations that seek an objective account of social relations. In response to the era­ sure of this historical origin, an antagonism challenges the legitimacy of the social order and the adequacy of theoretical explanations offered for the

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  49

particular and necessary order of the political structure. For Laclau, this challenge undermines the objectivity of historical and political explanation. He argues further that objective accounts of history fundamentally misunderstand historical change. Antagonism undermines (in Laclau’s terms, subverts) the purported identity of a political structure. For him, antagonism “is an ‘outside’ which blocks the identity of the ‘inside’ (and is, nonetheless, the prerequisite for its constitution at the same time). With antagonism, denial does not originate from the ‘inside’ of identity itself, but, in its more radical sense, from outside; it is thus pure facticity which cannot be referred back to any underlying rationality” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 17). Antagonism imagines a new set of social arrangements, not simply a modification of existing relations, and in this imagining, it represents essentially what a political act is. Politics is the exercise of freedom to determine new social orders that fundamentally alter both the current order and the identity of the subjects of that order. Politics is inherently the exercise of freedom. Laclau argues this point through a contrast between change in nature and change in politics, with political change being an instance of historical change. In nature, there is no outside. “In a world of ‘real’ objects, there are continual processes of transformation, but not negativity” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 17). He uses the example of a stone. A stone’s identity either persists or it changes when other elements of nature act on it and possibly cause it to break. Such a change would not be called a “denial of the stone’s identity; rather this transformation is a wholly positive process that explains itself in terms of the identity of its constituent elements” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 17–­18). In nature, change, however dramatic, is nonetheless not disruptive but can be explained fully by the laws that govern natural processes. Consequently, any change in nature has an objective explanation. Put differently, a stone cannot reject its identity because it experiences the current state of affairs as an unjust arrangement. In this inability, the stone differs from a human being who can oppose a current political order and imagine an alternative not available in it. This stance of opposition is an antagonism. In subverting objectivity, antagonism reveals the place of the contingent in political life. The historical and temporal nature of political life means that human beings as subjects are also historical. Given the current situation of a “disorganized capitalism,” “the problem of who the subjects of historical transformations are—­or, more fundamentally, what being a subject entails” becomes a central concern for Laclau (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 59). If the nature and possibility of the subject arises from the

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inability of a social structure to constitute the totality of the social relations that it seeks to encompass into a unified and objective organization, then the gaps or dislocations in the structure create the possibilities for there being subjects. Subjects emerge “as the result of the collapse of objectivity” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 61). Subjects have no essential identity but are constituted or reconstituted through acts of identification. Subjective identity is always provisional or historical. It changes as new social relations are formed in response to those places in the social structure that become the nodal points around which a variety of actors organize to challenge current operations of power. Subjectivity represents the continuing reinvention of the human in response to injustice. Subjectivity is inherently political: “‘Politics’ is an ontological category: there is politics because there is subversion and dislocation of the social” (New Reflections on the Rev­ olution of Our Time, 61). For Laclau, the subject is essentially an absence—­the subject has no identity and comes into being only through acts of identification. These acts of identification are one of the ways in which hegemony operates. In the articulation of new social relations, new subjects come into being. As these subjects and social relations stabilize, the subjects lose their status as beings whose identity is provisional and historical; they are transformed into subject positions. These subject positions then become places that actors can occupy within a given set of social relations. Eventually, these social relations will no longer adequately provide an interpretive horizon for a community, the suture that holds the set of relations will become apparent, and there will be pressure for a new articulation of this set of social relations. Since this pressure arises from the failure of the current set of social relations to explain the dislocations felt by some members of the community, the source of the new articulation must arise from the fact of contingency. Laclau sees this dynamic of political reinvention as a reason for optimism. This optimism is especially warranted because he believes that the current state of capitalism and the increasing fragmentation of social relationships do not necessarily have to be understood as unfortunate. Instead, he sees the proliferation of such issues as “the rallying point for the various social struggles,” struggles which “acquire greater autonomy and face the political system with growing demands” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 82). The plurality and diversity of groups and demands then furthers a movement toward a “radical democracy,” one in which a compelling political vision is produced through the interaction of various communal segments as they seek to articulate a new order (myth) that represents a new, more inclusive understanding of justice. The plurality of subjects

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  51

thus serves the larger project of freedom and inclusiveness as it makes an imposed domination by one sector more difficult. But however promising such a vision of an increasingly democratically organized society is, there remains a serious problem, and Laclau is aware of that difficulty. He explicitly addresses the question: “Why prefer one future over another?” (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 83). He argues that “if the agent who must choose is someone who already has certain beliefs and values, then the criteria for choice—­with all the intrinsic ambiguities that a choice involves—­can be formulated” (New Reflections on the Revo­ lution of Our Time, 83). If potential subjects are not fully determined, they do come with current values and commitments. These values and commitments provide possible directions for a political change that speaks to those who have been excluded and now seek to reorder current political structures. But such an answer is simply inadequate if it is to provide confidence that the hegemonic operation will necessarily or even more likely lead to a radical democracy, one that is more just and whose operation will constitute more just subject positions. The answer downplays contingency by putting its thumb on the scales and suggesting that although the situation is marked by contingency it is also partly determined. To take this position is to argue that the situation is not as fully contingent as it appears. If such an answer potentially rescues democratic values, it does so at the cost of maintaining the central role of contingency in political life. That tradeoff would seem to create a theoretical impasse for Laclau, for one of the major consequences of contingency is that there should be no confidence that any particular future direction is more likely or more justified than any other. In making the case for the emergence of a radical democracy, Laclau has seemed inadvertently to have done away with the political as a distinct concept. Laclau’s answer is even more disappointing because he recognized earlier that the response to the failure of a structure to achieve its promised fullness can produce an anxiety that makes the promise of a new order attractive to a community. Contingency would seem to create situations that make Fascism appealing to many. Laclau is quite explicit about this possibility: . . . since there is no common measure between the dislocation and the forms of discursive ‘spatialization’—­then the mere fact it presents itself as the embodiment of fulness is enough to ensure its acceptance. The discourse of a ‘new order’ is often accepted by several sectors, not because they particularly like its content but because it is the discourse of an order, of something that is presented as a credible alternative to a crisis and a generalized dislocation. (New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, 66)

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What Laclau seems to be acknowledging is that in times of crisis or dislocation, order itself has a strong appeal—­it allays the anxiety that disorder provokes. Such anxiety would seem to be one factor—­and a significant one at that—­that can lead to the rise of an authoritarian regime. Above all else, such regimes promote themselves as the protector of order. Their appeal acquires strength and even a certain apparent legitimacy because the anxiety is experienced as an existential threat. Recent events argue that this reaction to disorder is not simply an abstract danger to democracy but a danger that is growing stronger. The global rise of white nationalism and the use of what Laclau designates as empty signifiers, such as race, argue that any current crisis need not lead to a consolidation around a set of economic and social injustices. They can produce, instead, a reaction in which the new equivalential chain employs race or immigration or ethnic otherness or simply the threat of difference as the signifier to provide a coherent linguistic chain that sees these factors as the cause of the current crisis. Political and social regress is as likely as progress. If Laclau’s optimistic argument is that the present moment is auspicious for the development of a radical democracy, he needs to provide a fuller account offering a stronger justification for optimism about the prospects for a radical democracy. This need for an argument justifying optimism creates a genuine impasse in his thought, for his strong commitment to the essential role of contingency makes it an open question whether a political discourse grounded in hegemony necessarily supports a movement toward greater democracy. To address this impasse, Laclau turns to a post-­structural theory of rhetoric. He claims that the foundations of a political community are rhetorical, and this claim would seem to be an acknowledgment that he needs to offer a more detailed account of how political subjects constitute new political orders by creating new identities that more adequately address the issues of justice at the heart of an expanding conception of democracy. Unfortunately, his framing of rhetoric as a theory of tropes works against his developing an account of agency.

The Rhetorical Foundations of Society Post-­structural rhetoric provides Laclau with a theoretical framework to explain the operation of hegemony: “all the main categories of Gramscian theory—­war of position, collective will, organic intellectuals, integral state, historical bloc, hegemony—­could be read rhetorically, as circumscribing the space or tropological movements that bring about a new strategic flexibility in political analysis” (The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 99). For Laclau,

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  53

rhetoric’s theorizing of tropological movement as an inherent aspect of language explains how revolutionary political change is possible in the absence of a privileged agent. In this explicit turn to a post-­structural theory of rhetoric, hegemony and all the other Gramscian categories are considered as designating linguistic operations. These categories are to be understood not so much in terms of the actions of social agents as much as they are in the circulation of a set of signifiers. For Laclau, hegemony as a theory argues that social life and its basis in political acts derive from a rhetoricity that both grounds any social signifying practice and, at the same time, recognizes that no symbol system can be either total or stable. This rhetoricity is exemplified in three crucial figures: metonymy, metaphor, and catachresis. These figures explain the operation of an association of elements that does not proceed in a fixed or predetermined path or reflect any necessary relation among its constituents but is radically open. These three figures encompass the logic at the heart of hegemony, and that logic, as understood in post-­structural theory, redefines these figures from designating particular occurrences in language and instead considers them as fundamental aspects of any system of signification. They are still grounded in a logic of association, but that logic now becomes the basis of a political ontology. The logic of metonym is one of contingency; the logic of metaphor is one of provisional totalities (totalities that are incapable of realizing a full and self-­sufficient system of meaning); the logic of catachresis is that of a structural heterogeneity (it is the figure founded on misrepresentation). Hegemony acts rhetorically because it embodies the processes in which a variety of social issues that have no necessary relation other than their shared opposition to a central political authority coalesce into a new temporary political group or agent that becomes representative of an alternative position to the central authority. There is no necessity determining which group or position emerges as the leading opposition that represents a larger argument for systematic or revolutionary social change. Contingency alone explains the emergence of any particular group. As such, politics is grounded in a provisional essentialism, as one group now embodies and speaks for the whole collectively, organizing it into a coherent opposition and alternative political vision. A set of concepts provided by post-­structural rhetoric—­empty signifiers, floating signifiers, equivalential chains—­allows Laclau to explain this hegemonic operation by showing how meaning is possible in systems of signification, and how the conditions of possibility are also the conditions of impossibility. “An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified” (Emancipation(s), 36). For Laclau, the function of the empty

54 / Chapter Two

signifier is to arrest the infinite expansion of a system of differences. It registers the pressure of an outside that cannot be articulated within the internal system of differences. The empty signifier, in its essential emptiness, arrests the infinite play of difference, and thereby constitutes a particular system of difference. There is now an endpoint to the infinite expansion of difference, one which represents a radical form of difference that cannot be incorporated into the system. The empty signifier demonstrates that the system cannot be total. Further, since the place of the empty signifier is necessarily empty, it cannot be determined by the logic of the system but is inherently outside the system. The empty signifier is an instance of antagonism. Laclau uses empty signifiers and the constitution of chains of equivalence that arise out of instances of antagonism to account for the operation of hegemony (Emancipation(s), 43). Hegemony becomes a theory of political discursive systems. In particular, the hegemonic constitution or reconstitution of a political order begins when those aspects of a society that have been excluded from the social whole form into an antagonistic relation to that whole. These elements exist outside the logic of that political system, a system that claims it can provide a total order (and hence a meaning) to political life. Claims of injustice operate as points of difference from the existing political order. At first, they are simply uncoordinated and unrelated instances of the system failing different groups. At some point the grievances of different groups begin to coalesce. This process proceeds through pure contingency. The process is the action of metonymy. As part of this coalescence one group acquires the position of representative for all instances of injustice and becomes the social agent whose identity comes to stand for opposition to injustice—­which is now considered as a structural feature of the political order. Metonymy becomes metaphor. The movement of these different groups to a common and unifying identity is the movement from a logic of difference to a logic of equivalence in which the equivalential chain that has developed now represents a coherent and unified opposition that challenges an existing order in the name of justice. The emergence of the particular group who assumes the identity of the leading social agent for change is purely contingent; there is no way of predicting which of the particular instances of injustice is elevated to the central and definitive instance. There is no necessity governing this process. This is catachresis. For Laclau, these equivalential chains that support the hegemonic constitution of a social order are made possible by the ability of a particular group to both maintain its individual identity and, at the same time, become a representative for the whole collection of dissenting groups. In this capacity, it both retains its individuality and acquires a

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  55

kind of universality—­a universality that is provisional. History is the ever-­ changing narrative of this process of hegemonic political constitution and reconstitution. History provides the narratives of how a collection of social groups become a people. History is the story of populism. Then again, the question becomes: given this account of hegemony and its grounding in contingency, why should this process lead to radical democratic change rather than to a more regressive form of political order? While Laclau is aware that populist movements need not foster democracy and that they possess a potential for a politics that is regressive and not progressive, he nonetheless still believes that the recognition of the fact of hegemony allows an understanding of the political that will make it more available to democratic aspirations: As society changes over time this process of identification will be always precarious and reversible and, as the identification is no longer automatic, different projects or wills will try to hegemonize the empty signifiers of the absent community. The recognition of the constitutive nature of this gap and its political institutionalization is the starting point of modern democracy. (Emancipation(s), 46)

But as global capitalism expands there are at least two other possibilities: one, a world that is more homogenous and hence less democratic; or, contrariwise, one in which a variety of communities see the homogenization and disruption caused by global capitalism and retreat to narrower and more exclusionary forms of populism. A hegemonic approach to politics seen in terms of a post-­structural rhetoric is incapable of grounding an argument for the superiority or desirability of any particular option. Which option emerges as the result of hegemony would be a consequence of contingency, so it would be impossible to establish the ethical superiority of democracy without importing a universal or necessary value to which a group could appeal. But such a foundational value is exactly what hegemony, as understood by Laclau, showed to be impossible, and to be counter to political existence. The question that confronts Laclau’s belief in a particular theory of hegemony and his commitment to radical democracy is this: Is it possible to ground an argument in the absence of a value that is recognized as existing independently of particular argumentative positions, and that can be used as the basis to determine which one is superior? Slavoj Žižek argues that Laclau’s account of hegemony does not and cannot provide grounds for a justification of radical democracy. For Žižek, the gap between hegemony as

56 / Chapter Two

a theory and a commitment to radical democracy can only be addressed by a Marxist theory that both acknowledges the insights of post-­structuralism and maintains the need for a materialist and historically grounded theory of production. Žižek believes that Laclau’s theory of hegemony cannot reconcile post-­structuralism and the necessity for democratic change: My point, however, is precisely that it is Laclau’s theory of hegemony itself which relies on an unreflected gap between the descriptive and the normative, in so far as it functions as a neutral conceptual tool for accounting for every ideological formation, including Fascist populism (one of Laclau’s favourite examples). . . . I do not see in what specifically inherent way the very notion of “hegemony” is linked to a particular ethico-­political choice. (229–­30; italics original)

Simon Critchley shares Žižek’s concern that Laclau’s account of hegemony cannot perform the political work that Laclau seeks. Critchley believes that this “unreflected gap between the descriptive and normative” creates a theoretical impasse for Laclau that can only be resolved by Laclau choosing one of two paths, each of which is problematic for Laclau’s project: Laclau’s and Mouffe’s work famously and rightly also invokes notions of “the democratic revolution” and “radical democracy” as the consequences of the genealogical critique of Marxism. That is, the recognition of contingency, antagonism, and power do not lead to political pessimism or to the collapse of the public-­private distinction, but is, rather, as Laclau puts it, the condition for a “new militancy and new optimism.” But if all decisions are political, then in virtue of what is there a difference between democratizing and non-­ democratizing forms of decisions? (Ethics-­Politics-­Subjectivity, 111–­12)

At the center of both Žižek’s and Critchley’s criticisms is a question whether Laclau’s postmodernity can be reconciled with his commitment to radical democracy. Can Laclau’s concept of hegemony provide a convincing argument in defense of a program for a radical democracy? There is a second and equally significant problem in Laclau’s account of hegemony and the forming of equivalential chains. Laclau writes as if it is inevitable that one group will eventually assume the empty position and become the leading and defining agent for social change. But it can be reasonably asked whether such a consolidation and formation of a new, coherent political identity is a necessary outcome. Laclau does not address an important possible alternative: instead of there being a coalescence of social antagonism into a single new equivalential chain, it is equally possible

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  57

that several competing chains might form without coalescing into one. Both pluralism and fragmentation would seem to be logical possibilities, and both seem far more likely than the formation of the new synthetic political identity that Laclau envisions. Because Laclau’s post-­structural rhetoric ignores the active and determinative role of particular and diverse agents in forming political identities, his account of the formation of equivalential chains runs counter to his fundamental point that political life is shaped by contingency. If new political identities emerge that redefine claims for justice, such identities don’t just happen. Political change cannot be reduced to linguistic change. The creation or discovery of new political identities requires a combination of luck and concerted action on the parts of individuals and groups. Such an understanding seems essential to any hegemonic analysis. What an understanding of hegemony based in contingency demonstrates is that the role of particular agents and groups is essential in effecting change. Further, if that change is not simply imposed on other individuals and groups, then persuasion is essential to the formation of individual and political identities. If such identities can be understood as the consequence of tropological operations, the tropes do not simply create the identities. They may explain how the identities are formed, but the forming of the identities—­the effective tropological action—­is a consequence of the efforts of particular agents. Such efforts are the action of persuasion.

A Reconsideration of Persuasion Is it possible to develop an account of political subjectivity in which the identity of the social agent is neither fixed nor infinitely open? In a longer passage, Laclau moves in that direction, although he does not frame his argument in terms of persuasion: . . . what happens if the structure I am determined by does not manage to constitute itself, if a radical outside—­which does not share a common measure or foundation with the inside of the structure—­dislocates it? The structure will obviously not be able to determine me, not because I have an essence independent from the structure, but because the structure has failed to constitute itself fully and thus to constitute me as a subject as well. There is nothing in me which was oppressed by the structure or is freed by its dislocation; I am simply thrown up in my condition as a subject because I have not achieved constitution as an object. The freedom thus won in relation to the structure is therefore traumatic initially: I am condemned to be free, not because I have

58 / Chapter Two no structural identity as the existentialists assert, but because I have a failed structural identity. This means that the subject is partially self-­determined. However, as this self-­determination is the not expression of what the subject already is but the result of its lack of being instead, self-­determination can only proceed through the process of identification. As can be gathered, the greater the structural indetermination, the freer a society will be. (New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, 43–­44)

If the subject is partially self-­determined, how does that partial self-­ determination become a resource for political understanding? Further, if this subject, as determined by the logic of hegemony, can never achieve a final and total identity, how does partial self-­determination proceed and how is it grounded? If choices, political and otherwise, are the consequence of various crises, what is required to respond to that crisis that enables the subject to negotiate the crisis? If part of that answer is that a new identity will be formed, then how does a subject reconstitute itself; how does a new understanding acquire authority? How does such an authority become persuasive? Can a retheorized persuasion explain how an empty signifier acquires content that is neither necessary nor simply contingent? If persuasion is possible only when subjects voluntarily impose beliefs on themselves, this state of affairs suggests that a post-­structural theory of rhetoric, one that is principally an account of tropes, cannot by itself account for changes in subjectivity. Humans as creatures who are shaped, in part, by their desires are simply absent in Laclau’s account. But it is in desire, as the place where the contingent and the necessary meet, that the reason and the cause come together. When one is persuaded, one desires differently. Laclau offers a universe of tropological movements, one in which discourses are constituted and reconstituted by the play of tropes and figures; what such an account neglects or minimizes is attention to the ways in which individuals and groups are oriented both intellectually and affectively in a particular universe. Laclau’s universe is one in which Eros is absent. But it is by shaping and reshaping desire in a complex dialectic of response that persuasion plays an essential role in the constitution of a political subjectivity. Laclau’s failure to perceive the role of Eros in the constitution of subjectivity has one further unfortunate consequence. It leads him to underestimate how and why the pursuit of a new political order that seeks to do justice to diversity can create a serious threat, a threat that arises not from reaction to any particular historical circumstance but is rooted in how Eros contributes to the development of subjectivity. If Eros creates the possibility for growth and transformation, it also establishes the conditions for

Persuasion, Liberal Alienation, and Hegemony  /  59

regression and for a peculiar form of aggression that responds to difference as a threat. To understand the complicated relationship of the erotic to the political and the specific role of persuasion in that relationship, it is necessary both to look at the aggressive responses that arise from the threat of difference and to develop a fuller account of the relationship between the transformation of the individual through persuasion and the ways in which such persuasion is essential to political existence.

three

The Eros of Sameness and the Rhetoric of Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus

Garsten, in his defense of persuasion, noted the rise of a new form of intol­ erance that threatened democracy, and Laclau, in his formulation of hege­ mony, remarked on the crisis in the contemporary global liberal order. Both thinkers sought ways to address current political challenges. What their two perceived challenges share is a concern with creating new and more just orders. Such orders would need to be more inclusive, and this need may, in ways that neither Garsten nor Laclau consider, pose a major challenge. The search for a more just political order must address the issue of diversity—­ and diversity, as a political value, seems to be under attack. The rise of na­ tionalist politics founded on suspicion of those who—­for reasons of place of birth, religion, or race are viewed as not true citizens of a particular coun­ try—­is frequently accompanied by an anger or rage stoked by its most stri­ dent advocates. Implicitly or explicitly these advocates appeal to perceived threats to a common but endangered culture. Garsten seems attuned to this threat in his recognition of an emerging intolerance that draws some of its force by tapping into and redirecting some of the deep and important ap­ peals of religion. For him, this threat has a specific history. The appeals to a mythic past of a world now lost or in danger of being lost speak to the desire to be a part of community. As Garsten notes, this desire is healthy and laudatory. But when perverted it can be destructive, and it becomes particu­ larly problematic when, to borrow from Laclau, its equivalential chains are formed around ideas of an identity being threatened by the rise of popula­ tions perceived not to be part of a community’s traditional ethnic and racial composition. In periods marked by rapid change, diversity can be felt as an existential threat by those made uncomfortable by the change. But if this perception of diversity as threat seems to have arisen as a re­ sponse to certain contemporary developments, one line of psychoanalytic

62 / Chapter Three

interpretation argues that the threat is grounded more deeply and originates in how the ego is formed. For this interpretive line, the origin of this threat is not so much a response to any set of events but more a manifestation of anxiety about difference itself. This psychoanalytic interpretation locates that anxiety about difference in the nature of our erotic relationships. In Intimacies, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips argue that anxiety about difference cannot be explained away or dismissed primarily as a problem of cultural or political bias. For them, aggression is a structural feature in the development of the ego. According to Bersani and Phillips, Freud’s account of the consti­ tution of the ego supports a view that humans are, at their core, predisposed to intolerance and threatened by that which is different. If Bersani and Phil­ lips are right, it is not clear that resistance to diversity can be ameliorated, at least not as long as we remain under the sway of certain views of erotic at­ tachment. On this account, resistance to diversity is structural and calls into question assumptions that ground modern notions of romantic love, the nuclear family, and some of the principal values of liberal democracies. As Phillips makes clear in the preface to Intimacies, he and Bersani believe that the uncritical valuing of difference is problematic because, rather than sup­ porting tolerance, the promotion of difference actually encourages violence: Psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy, the sabo­ teur, of this personal intimacy considered to be the source and medium of personal development. Psychoanalysis tells us, in short, that our lives depend on our recognition that other people—­those vital others that we love and desire—­are separate from us, “beyond our control” as we say: despite the fact that this very acknowledgment is itself productive of so much violence. Dif­ ference is the one thing that we cannot bear. (vii–­viii)

Their version of psychoanalysis seems to have discovered a distressing irony: the valuing of difference has the unintended consequence of fueling intoler­ ance. From a different direction, they have come to a conclusion similar to Garsten’s: the pursuit of tolerance can strengthen the appeal of intolerance. But for Bersani and Phillips, the type of reforms Garsten champions must necessarily be inadequate to address a problem rooted in the very nature of the ego’s development. Bersani and Phillips turn to psychoanalysis for its subversive potential to rethink radically the nature of relationality. For Bersani, an injurious and domesticated version of psychoanalysis privileges adjustment and eschews

Sameness and Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus / 63

Freud’s darker and more challenging insights that call for a reimagining of what is taken to be the norm. This quest for the normative life, with its as­ sumption that a psychologically healthy individual is one who seeks and can participate in relationships defined by personal intimacy and usually reserved for couples, is, for Bersani, a willed blindness to the forces that move individuals: “While it has certainly served those orders in its emphasis on normative sexuality, psychoanalysis has from the beginning been subver­ sive of the dogmas thanks to which it became, in a relatively short period of time, a respectable social institution” (Is the Rectum a Grave?, 51). Equally, for Bersani, this “emphasis on normative sexuality” is a refusal to take re­ sponsibility for the evil that such forces can promote. Phillips complains: “Most psychoanalytic theory now is a contemporary version of the etiquette book; improving our internal manners, advising us on our best sexual be­ havior (usually called maturity, or mental health, or a decentered self )” (Terrors and Experts, 87). Still, he holds out the possibility that “psychoanalysis can be recruited either to consolidate our prejudices or to show what our prejudices are for” (Terrors and Experts, 92). Intimacies is firmly in the camp of exposing prejudices and developing the subversive potential of psycho­ analysis in the interest of a radically new but more humane understanding of what is possible in human relationships. It is an effort to rethink the form that love can take.

The Hyperbolic Ego and Aggressivity To evade the aggressivity that they argue Freud saw as an ineradicable part of the ego’s developing independence, Bersani and Phillips speculate about and advocate for a new form of love. They challenge standard and pervasive accounts of personal love as an experience of expansiveness and apprecia­ tion for an Other and for what is unique and different in that Other. As Phillips puts it, “things and people are loved, that is, taken and kept in; they can only be loved because they are not other; that is, outside and alien. To love what is other is to love what cannot be loved; it is like being force fed, and like being force fed it could only unleash an extreme violence, or the extreme stifling of violent energies called depression” (Intimacies, 101–­02). Bersani, in particular, is concerned with the ego’s inherent aggressivity. He sees in the ego’s inability to tolerate that which is different the wellspring of actions intended to annihilate the Other and that, if successful, would lead equally to the ego’s own self-­destruction. He labels an ego moved by a fear of an imminent threat from an Other as a “hyperbolic ego,” and he is led to search for alternative forms of human relationships that promote

64 / Chapter Three

nondestructive interactions between people. If such relationships are to be even a theoretical possibility for Bersani, what is needed is a way to allow the ego to escape from a “hyperbolic rhetoric” (Intimacies, 68) that is a prod­ uct of both a personal and a political aggression driven to abolish otherness. To rethink current erotic possibilities and develop a new theory of love, Bersani seeks a new and nonhyperbolic rhetoric. If there is to be a new rhetoric that does not foster violence in reaction to the anxiety occasioned by difference, then the standard understanding of intimacy needs to be re­ considered. Such a reconsideration would involve a revolutionary shift in the ways in which we conceive intimacy. It would, among other things, raise the possibility of what must seem counterintuitive, namely, an intimacy not based in personal affection but grounded in an impersonal response. The imperative for such a reconsideration is evident in Bersani’s argu­ ment that we choose to blind ourselves to the ways in which violence is a threat inhering in the ordinary development of the ego and not an aberra­ tion departing from a more civilized norm. For Bersani, our unexamined commitment to and our mythologizing of personal intimacy serve as an effective defense against the troubling thought that personal relationships are not built on a generous embrace of an Other cherished for his or her individuality. This defense hides the fact that people are made anxious by such difference and respond aggressively to eliminate it. The harm extends beyond the violence always lurking in personal relationships. Possibly even more troubling are the political consequences that can be traced back to the self-­deception involved in idealizing personal intimacy. Bersani contends that a sexualized aggression, rooted in an embrace of a conventional under­ standing of romantic love, can foster in individuals a receptivity to a politi­ cal rhetoric that feeds aggression because of the sexual pleasure attached to that aggression. Bersani argues that the ego’s inherent aggression provides support for an imperialist politics: “Thus the imperialist project of invad­ ing and appropriating foreign territories corresponds to what Freud calls nonsexual sadism in the 1915 essay ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,’ which he defines as ‘the exercise of violence or power upon some other person or object,’ the attempted mastery over the world” (Intimacies, 65–­66). This sexualized aggression lends an intensifying energy to a communal goal of eradicating difference. Given his belief in the danger of a romanticized notion of love, Bersani seeks alternatives to this unreflective valuing of personal intimacy. He praises the novel/memoir Dans ma Chambre for opening the possibility of moving “from our heterosexual culture’s reserving the highest relational value for the couple to a communal model of impersonal intimacy” (Intimacies, 42).

Sameness and Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus / 65

He goes on to offer the odd pairing of the dangerous unprotected sexual practice of barebacking and the “officially condemned form of Catholic mysticism articulated by Quietism and the proponents of what was known as ‘pure love’” (Intimacies, 51). These two approaches to intimacy offer pos­ sible alternative imaginings of human relationships in which the personal self is given over for a self that has been emptied of individual content and marked by a receptive openness to the Other. For Bersani, these practices suggest the possibility of a new spiritual ascesis in which the aggressive as­ sertion of a threatened ego responding to difference is replaced by an emp­ tying out of the ego, making it available to a new receptivity. These two prac­ tices raise the possibility that things might be different. Finally, however, Bersani turns from them and asks, “Might there be forms of self-­divestiture not grounded in a teleology (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego, and ultimately, the sacrifice of the self ? Perhaps self-­divestiture itself has to be rethought in terms of a certain form of self-­expansiveness, of something like ego-­dissemination rather than ego-­annihilation” (Intimacies, 55–­56).

Eros and Sameness To discover this viable alternative to ego-­suppressing relationships, Bersani turns to Plato. In the Phaedrus, he finds a form of love arising from a narcis­ sism that values sameness over the difference of individuality. In its depic­ tion of Eros, the dialogue provides Bersani with a new basis for the constitu­ tion of a self, one that does not promote those destructive impulses arising from the perceived threat of difference. As Bersani reads the dialogue, Plato theorizes the possibility of a relationship in which the ego is not suppressed but rather develops through a form of self-­expansion nourished by the ex­ perience of sameness. Socrates claims that Eros does not so much lead the lover to value the beloved in his idiosyncratic personality but rather to rec­ ognize a deep sharing between the lover and the beloved (Intimacies, 84–­ 85). This relationship is grounded firmly in narcissism and sameness. The developing erotic bond is not nourished by an appreciation of the beloved in the uniqueness of his personal self, which is viewed as both accidental and inessential, but because the lover sees in the beloved a version of him­ self. The lover loves the beloved because the beloved recalls the lover to whom he really is and, even more, to whom he can become. The lover and beloved participate in a sameness that is constitutive for each of them. The lover, moved by narcissism, sees a version of himself in the beloved. The desire that moves the lover is not an instigation to incor­ porate something different and outside the self into the self; rather, it is an

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urging to promote the growth in the Other of that which is shared, of that which is same. Since the beloved is not perceived as other, he is not seen as a threat to which the ego needs to respond aggressively. Most importantly, what draws the lover to the beloved are not the accidents of the beloved’s personal history but the sameness that the lover perceives. In love as so imag­ ined, the personal falls by the side, and the relationship is defined by an impersonal narcissism. When someone falls in love, the experience and cul­ tivation of a narcissistic feeling open up the possibility of making progress in understanding who one is, which is, in turn, an open-­ended understand­ ing of what one can become. Socrates characterizes the initial erotic attraction as the lover recognizing that the beloved dances in the chorus of the same god, and that as members of this chorus their lives are ordered by the same divine powers. In this recog­ nition, the lover glimpses a sameness in the beloved and sees a potential in the beloved of which the beloved is ignorant. Since the lover and the beloved share a sameness, this recognition is also the beginning of the lover becoming aware of possibilities that are his but of which he too was ignorant. In Ber­ sani’s reading of the dialogue, love of this Other is, thus, a form of narcissism, one that discloses possibilities that cannot be exhausted by knowledge. This Socratic love allows lover and beloved access to an unconscious that exceeds that which can be known. Earlier in his argument, Bersani sought to recon­ ceive the unconscious not as “the hiding place of the repressed; rather, the unconscious It, lodged within a subject that it vastly exceeds, is the reservoir of possibility, of all that might be but is not” (Intimacies, 24–­25). He argues that “the unconscious . . . [is] before conscious—­in the sense of ontological rather than a temporal anteriority. The It in the I transforms subjecthood from psy­ chic density into pure potentiality” (Intimacies, 25). As an unlimited reservoir of potentiality, the unconscious is oriented toward the future and not shaped by the past. It exceeds the lived historical reality of an individual and exists as a virtual being that can never be exhausted or reduced to knowledge. To fall in love is to open oneself up to a potential that one has but that can never fully know—­one is always able to exceed oneself.

Erotic Rhetoric Eros leads the lover to become rhetorical—­the erotic relationship is con­ ducted through conversation. Earlier, Bersani mentioned that one of the important contributions of psychoanalysis was its discovery of modes of exchange that could be conducted outside an analytic setting (Intimacies, 4). It appears as if this erotic conversation imagined by Socrates is one such

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mode of exchange. This erotic form of Socratic rhetoric would share with psychoanalysis a concern with fostering a conversation shaped, in part, by desire but precluding sexual intimacy between the partners. Socratic rhetoric would function as the de-­medicalized cousin of psychoanalysis that Bersani was seeking. Indeed, Bersani’s reading of the dialogue can explain why, in the erotic relationship most valued by Socrates, the couple should refrain from sexual contact. The strict boundaries to the conversation preclude the type of contact that would inevitably distort the shared movement toward self-­knowledge that animates the conversation. This Socratic conversation between lovers, like a psychoanalytic conversation, would offer a rare open­ ness that, through its impersonality, promotes personal growth. As Marina McCoy makes clear, this Socratic erotic rhetoric discloses a source of motiva­ tion operative within both the lover and the beloved but of which they had been unaware; it does so by “connect[ing] those current desires with the person’s still hidden desires for the forms” (McCoy, 136). Phillips, for his part, suggests what a Socratic conversation as a de-­ medicalized version of psychoanalysis might look like. Phillips invokes Freud’s idea of psychoanalysis as an “after-­education”: “Just as Freud referred on several occasions to psychoanalytic treatment as an ‘after-­education’ (see, for example, An Outline of Psychoanalysis), the education of psychoanalysis coming after the education in love that is parenting, so the Platonic edu­ cation comes after the boy’s parenting and before his manhood” (Intimacies, 95). Since this after-­education is conducted through a conversation in­ tended to allow the beloved to grasp the divinity (potential) that he shares with the lover, Plato seems to be offering a new understanding of rhetoric, one that issues in a new form of human meeting based on an appreciation of sameness. This Eros-­based rhetoric would be a nonhyperbolic rhetoric that moves the pair beyond the idiosyncrasy of their individual personalities to a new type of sharing, one committed to an ongoing exploration of an unknowable and potentially infinite sameness. If this is so, then rhetoric’s lack of grounding in a preexisting and authorizing knowledge would no longer be something that its theorists and practitioners need to apologize for or seek to ameliorate by arguing for the practicality of rhetoric; it would, in fact, be a recognition that rhetoric operates in the service of being and of realizing the potential that inheres within being.

The Unavoidability of Difference If Bersani and Phillips’s conversation on Eros opens up the possibility of un­ derstanding the complex and unsettling nature of love, it leaves unaddressed

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the issue of how to mitigate in exchanges other than those of erotic intimacy the threat posed by difference. Put in its simplest terms, there need to be ways to talk with those with whom we do not share a significant sameness but with whom we differ. That is a basic requirement for a viable politics. Difference locates a limit to the possibility of association, and, as Diane Davis points out, it is dissociation (the absence of sameness) that para­ doxically makes society possible by becoming the foundation of ethical un­ derstanding (144). Arlene Saxonhouse adds further that it is diversity that calls the political into being: “The political art is to understand the need for diversity within the city and not to fear it, to acknowledge that it is diversity that, while building the city, can never bring about a city that has escaped the conflicts of political claims. To be human is to be part of a city that is neither whole nor stable” (232). If there is to be a viable politics, there is an imperative to develop a rhetoric that can speak adequately to difference. Given this imperative to speak to difference, Socrates’s discussion of love is best read as a necessary preliminary discussion for a revolutionary and nondestructive political rhetoric, one founded on a new understanding of the soul, of human subjectivity. If, as Socrates claims, the soul is defined by motion, Bersani’s reading of Freud argues that what motivates that motion is the search for a lost sameness. I am going to complicate Bersani’s inter­ pretation by arguing that difference is an inescapable part of this experience because the personal is determined, in part, by the cultural and because sameness and difference exist in a necessary dialectical relationship. At is­ sue is the shaping of desire and its consequences for the constitution of a subjectivity that is inherently personal and cultural, private and political. What begins in Eros is completed in rhetoric. Platonic rhetoric provides a way to move beyond surface and defensive understandings of a culture and locate and advocate for the deeper samenesses and the equally important differences that need to be engaged as a political community reconstitutes itself in its ongoing effort to understand better what it can be in a world that does not have a fixed and final form. Such an inquiry is a recognition of the unconscious as a potential source for political critique, as humans search after ever-­expanding possibilities. However exhilarating the vision of an ever-­expanding relationship grounded in the perception of sameness may be, things are more compli­ cated than Bersani and Phillips seem to acknowledge. Without denying that the erotic relationship sketched by Socrates is based in sameness, it is important to understand that it is equally structured by difference. The inescapable connection of sameness and difference is manifested in at least three different ways: in the nature of the soul; in the necessary dialectical

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pairing of the two concepts; and finally, in the erotic relationship itself. To begin with, the soul in the Phaedrus, as a tripartite structure, is constituted by difference. The psyche is composed of three different parts, and, in the hu­ man soul, these parts do not necessarily exist in harmony. Two of the parts are markedly different. At the heart of psychic life is a discursive conflict be­ tween honor, figured as a white horse, and appetite, figured as a black horse (Ferrari, 102; Nightingale, 142–­43). The internal structure of the psyche is not one of sameness as a common pursuit but rather a relationship marked by the inevitable haggling of parts pursuing quite different and possibly irreconcilable ends. Even if harmony is achieved, the result is not a thor­ oughgoing psychic sameness but a unity that is a differentiated hierarchy. The necessary connection of sameness and difference is not confined to the internal structure of the soul; the necessity of the connection is con­ ceptual. Sameness and difference form a dialectical pair—­they define and limit each other. Neither sameness nor difference can be perceived or under­ stood in isolation. One can only recognize something as the same if there is already a concept of difference. Mere sameness is inconceivable. Even an experience of sameness that may seem natural and spontaneous can only have the form it does because of a logically prior conceptual pairing with difference. There is no unmediated experience of sameness. If this is so, then in the experience of sameness there must lurk, however well-­disguised, the presence of difference. Finally, the erotic relationship, as imagined by Socrates, is not possible without difference. Difference in age is essential to the relationship between lover and beloved, and this difference is not incidental but required for the relationship to begin (Foucault, 193–­97; Dover, 81–­84). The younger part­ ner, the beloved, is not initially capable of seeing the erotic potential in the lover. The erotic relationship, as represented by Socrates, is possible only because the older member can both see and see past a difference in age—­it is difference that defines the relationship.

Eros and Subjectivity If age is a defining difference in this relationship, the relationship is charac­ terized equally by a sameness in gender. The issue of gender is particularly relevant to Bersani and Phillips’s discussion of the sameness at the heart of erotic experience. Their discussion of sameness pays little attention to the culturally embedded male-­male relationship and simply treats the dia­ logue as characterizing erotic relationships in general. But the relationship explored in the dialogue is a culturally sanctioned or, at least, practiced form

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of political education for a society and is restricted to a male-­male relation­ ship belonging to a certain cultural or political class. These relationships were an integral part of aristocratic cultural transmission. In key aspects, the Athenian erotic relationship is not identical with but differs from its mod­ ern counterparts. Foucault is helpful in explaining the difference: The attention and concern was concentrated on relations in which one could tell that much was at stake: relations that could be established between and older male who had finished his education—­and who was expected to play the socially, morally, and sexually active role—­and a younger one, who had not yet achieved his definitive status and who was in need of assistance, ad­ vice, and support. The disparity was at the heart of the relationship; in fact, it was what made it valuable and conceivable. (195)

Contemporary erotic relationships are not understood or necessarily in­ tended to function as explicit instruction into the values and practices of a political culture, nor are they limited to male-­male relationships. Despite these significant differences between ancient and modern un­ derstandings of love, Bersani argues that there is a “profound continuity” in that, for both, “love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of nar­ cissistic fascination” (Intimacies, 80). In both cases the erotic relationship begins in a connection that feels singular and special. In each something is disclosed about the lover and the beloved. Anne Carson appears to agree and characterizes the experience of Eros as one that allows the lover to un­ derstand something about himself: “When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, com­ pounded of his own being and that of his beloved” (35). Despite the dis­ parity between the ancient and modern experiences of Eros, a continuity is apparent. Even if erotic relationships assume very different particular forms in different historical periods, their common feature is that the experience of desire plays a central role in the constitution of subjectivity. However much humans may vary, they are shaped in part by desire.

The Insufficiency of Sameness If Socrates can articulate a theory of love recovering sameness as the ground for love, Plato realizes that such erotic couples live in a larger world and that a relationship grounded in sameness cannot be the whole story of hu­ man relationship. Erotic engagement alone provides no education in how to speak to those with whom one is not in love but who are, nonetheless, a

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significant factor in the relation of lovers to the larger world in which they live. Charles Griswold Jr. has argued through a pair of pointed questions that erotic conversations, however compelling, have significant limitations: And after having heard so much in the palinode about a divine banquet and the food that truly nourishes the soul, we must wonder: did Socrates’ songs, however beautiful, somehow fall short of nourishing the soul? Are they, in other words, somehow lacking in knowledge and truth (recall the nourishing “plain of truth” at 248b5-­c2, causing us to “die” without noticing it)? (167)

Griswold’s questions suggest that focusing only on the palinode with its articulation of a new erotic relationship is the equivalent to being lulled to sleep by the cicadas (Ferrari 25–­26). That articulation can have a narcotic effect—­it can seem to argue that a love based in sameness conquers all. The antidote to this drug is to engage in conversation about rhetoric and, by extension, explore an area of human concern that joins the private and the public, the erotic and the political. If Bersani is right that this new subjectivity constituted in an erotic same­ ness has the potential to mitigate a political imperialism supported by an aggressivity arising from the threat of difference, this observation raises the question of how a shift in the understanding of a private relationship can have political consequences. Bersani concedes: “The political consequences of any such ‘friendly accord’ would be enormous, but it would be dishon­ est to claim that we know how, exactly, they might be effected” (Intimacies, 124). If the fostering of political aggression and the sexual gratification at­ tached to such aggression are major worries prompting Bersani to look for new forms of human meetings, then the question of expanding the conse­ quences of a relationship discovered in the Socratic erotic couple becomes a pressing concern. As important and necessary as a reformed understanding of the erotic relationship grounded in sameness is, it is not, by itself, an adequate response to the threat of political aggression. Something else is needed. What makes the Phaedrus truly revolutionary is that it theorizes a new understanding of rhetoric as a resource to address the threat of differ­ ence and provide a way of responding that is more viable psychologically and politically. The dialogue’s end explicitly invites this larger political engagement. Socrates says that, given what he and Phaedrus have learned in their conver­ sation, they need to return and explain to rhetors (in the person of Lysias), poets (in the person of Homer), and politicians (in the person of Solon) the limits of writing or any form of discourse composed in the absence of

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knowledge of truth and in the absence of the capacity to defend itself when challenged (278c). Given what has been learned about Eros and discourse, the three major forms of cultural discourse and production need to be re­ thought. Since all three of these discursive genres contribute to the fostering of a particular culture, the task of Socrates, Phaedrus, and the readers of the dialogue is to address these politically consequential cultural modes of production.

The Limits of Erotic Rhetoric In the poetry and high rhetoric of the palinode, Socrates provides an ex­ ample of an eroticizing discourse that contributes to the development of a nondestructive eroticized ego (McCoy, 190). Socrates’s speech, both playful and serious, functions as a discursive artifact that should enable its audience to experience a dizzying transport into the richness and beauty of erotic madness (Yunis, 111–­12). Even here, however, an erotic rhetoric alone proves to be insufficient to move an audience to a new appreciation of the revolutionary potential of Eros. Phaedrus, for one, is not erotically reformed by the speech; rather, he sees it primarily in terms of competition. His disappointing response testifies to the resilience of a cultural narrative. Phaedrus neither hears nor comprehends the ways in which Socrates’s argu­ ment about Eros is culturally revolutionary. Struck by the rhetorical splen­ dor of the speech, he applauds Socrates for having bested Lysias, but is not moved by its argument. The speech fails as persuasion. If he experienced any erotic transport, it has not been transformative. He has, in fact, learned the wrong lesson. He continues to view rhetoric primarily in terms of craft, craft in terms of competition, and competition in terms of a stylized form of aggression. Rather than mitigating aggression, the erotic rhetoric has re­ located aggression. If the promise of an Eros of sameness was to support a constitution of the ego in which tolerance replaced aggression, Socrates’s rhetoric did not achieve its promise. Phaedrus’s failure to be reconstituted by the speech points to the limits of an erotic rhetoric. These limits make rhetoric itself an issue. Socrates now needs to be able to speak to Phaedrus and educate him about the ways in which rhetoric has a foundational role to play in the constitution of a soul. Without dismissing the genuine value of an Eros of sameness, the ex­ plicit turn to rhetoric suggests that love by itself cannot be the whole story. The question is how to move from the insights gained through a revolu­ tionary theorizing of desire to a politics not fueled by the threat of other­ ness, one that understands the role of difference, so that the anxiety fostered

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by difference is no longer an overwhelming threat. It is the constitution of such an ego that Bersani argues is necessary to combat an imperialism energized by a sexual aggressivity: “For the ego is not only the agency of an ultimately self-­destructive will to master the world; it is also the agent of the subject’s self-­preservation. As such, it cultivates a critical faculty that allows it to evaluate the benefits and dangers of the messages sent to it by the world” (Intimacies, 69). If this legitimate ego is to be preserved and its critical faculty supported, then there must be a way to speak to difference as well as to discover the essential healthiness of sameness.

Speaking to Difference The dialogue provides two examples of how to speak to difference and how to engage in conversation with those to whom one is not drawn erotically. The first, as mentioned, is Socrates’s discussion of rhetoric with Phaedrus, who is not his beloved. In that conversation, Socrates is attentive and re­ spectful to Phaedrus, seeking to guide him rather than refute him. In the second example, Socrates imagines himself and Phaedrus being corrected by either Adrastus or Pericles for the harshness of their criticism of those who are confused about the difference between rhetoric as an art and the pre­ liminaries necessary for the art (Plato, Phaedrus, 269a–­b). In both examples, rhetoric is understood not as an art of contention seeking victory but as art that, in its gentleness, creates space for its interlocutors to be open to recon­ ceiving positions. This gentleness seeks to mitigate the threat of difference. Not directly challenging a particular understanding or identity, this rhetoric is intended to guide the interlocutor in an exploration that is mutual. It is an offer of friendship, and as Phaedrus’s ending comments make clear, “friends have everything in common” (Plato, Phaedrus, 279c). Sameness in rhetoric, unlike the sameness of erotic experience, is not rooted in the expe­ riential origin of a relationship but emerges as a goal, as a relational aspira­ tion. Sameness is something that rhetoric seeks to achieve—­it represents an earned and shared understanding. It creates the conditions for community in a world in which there are a multiplicity of understandings and identities.

Persuasion and Political Subjectivity If political thought is conceived principally in terms of legislative or judicial concerns, then Phaedrus does not appear to be a political dialogue. Graeme Nicholson is correct when he comments: “it is just that he [Plato] has noth­ ing to say about it [government] in the Phaedrus” (217). But Socrates’s interest

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in political discourse is not focused on the reform of government. The dia­ logue’s form argues that before issues of political structure or policy can be addressed, the central role of desire in the constitution of human subjectiv­ ity must be understood. One of the contributions of Bersani and Phillips is their recognition of the political consequences of the ways in which desire is incorporated in the developing constitution of subjects. In the absence of well-­constituted souls, politics is doomed to undermine those values that are foundational to any viable political life, regardless of whatever particular policies are advocated. The question that the second half of the dialogue prompts is: what role does rhetoric, conceived as an inherently open-­ended conversation, play in the ongoing constitution of political subjects? In an­ swering this question, Plato challenges the efficacy of conventional political discourse. Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates remarks: “That if Lysias or anybody else ever did or ever does write—­privately or for the public, in the course of proposing some law—­a political document which he believes to embody clear knowledge of lasting importance, then this writer deserves reproach, whether anyone says so or not” (Plato, Phaedrus, 277d). This type of political discourse is suspect because it assumes that knowledge can be discovered and communicated in a form that is certain and unchanging. It fails to understand the influence of desire on discourse. Since the soul is defined by motion, and psychic motion is shaped by desire, then the discourse of a soul moved appropriately by desire cannot be static. As Mc­ Coy points out: “Socrates emphasizes throughout the Palinode that human beings are always in an erotic state, that is, always in a state of moving to­ ward or away from the ultimate objects of their love (the forms). Human knowledge of the forms and human self-­knowledge are never complete” (175). In his defense of Eros, Socrates discovered that desire, by its very nature, is neither certain nor unchanging. For that reason, he is not focused on particular political policies, but on the ways in which subjectivities can be constituted and remain vital and open to growth. Private conversations become crucial to the constitution of subjectivity and are understood to be an important location for the development of desires essential to a healthy political community.

Persuasion The need for openness makes persuasion philosophically important, for persuasion is the means through which desire is given form. As Harvey Yu­ nis comments, persuasion, for Plato, is “the creation of desire in the audi­ tor’s soul” (115). Socrates’s interest in persuasion arises from the dynamics

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of the constitution of subjectivity and its consequences for political life. Preliminary to participation in political life there must be an education that creates a character for the individual that enables a noninjurious (nonag­ gressive) participation in politics. Socrates broached this issue in the Gorgias when he made the extraordinary and provocative claim that he was “one of the few Athenians (not to say the only one) who has attempted the true art of politics, and the only one alive to put it in to practice” (521e). In the Phaedrus, this true art of politics is articulated as the artistic effecting of persuasion that shapes or reshapes the constitution of the soul. Persuasion directs the motion of desire. In the Phaedrus, political discourse is subsumed under the category of rhetorical discourse. Plato’s intention is to demonstrate that the dialecti­ cal ambiguity rooted in the mixture of sameness and difference defines the principal and ongoing challenge for any responsible rhetoric, including po­ litical rhetoric. Socrates preliminarily defines rhetoric as “a way of directing the soul by means of speech, not only in lawcourts and on other public oc­ casions but also in private” (Plato, Phaedrus, 261a). Phaedrus objects to this conception of rhetoric, which he views as peculiar, and offers instead the commonly accepted understanding of rhetoric as political speech: “Artful speaking and writing is found mainly in the lawcourts; also perhaps in the Assembly” (Plato, Phaedrus, 261b). Socrates challenges this commonplace, arguing that political discourse, like all discourse, proceeds by deploying sameness and difference: . . . it seems that one single art—­if, of course, it is an art in the first place—­ governs all speaking. By means of it one can make out as similar anything that can be so assimilated, to everything to which it can be made similar, and expose anyone who tries to hide the fact that this is what he is doing. (Plato, Phaedrus, 261e)

What interests Socrates about political discourse is what it shares with all discourse concerned with value: namely, the construction and contest of sameness and the misrepresentation that is an inherent element in this pro­ cess. Discourses about value are distinguished by their capacity to create division or difference, both internally and between people: “But what hap­ pens when we say ‘just’ or ‘good’? Doesn’t each one of us go in a different di­ rection? Don’t we differ with one another and even with ourselves?” (Plato, Phaedrus, 263a). Cultural and political vocabularies of value are confused and as a consequence of that confusion, they foster division—­this is one source of the threat that difference poses. The ambiguity in the inherited

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cultural vocabularies of value begets misunderstanding that, in turn leads to a potentially destructive division. This conflict can be both within the individual and within the culture. It is a form of ignorance that follows from an unreflective acceptance of a cultural inheritance. Humans are deeply con­ fused about what is the same and what is different. They do not understand what they value, and this confusion causes both internal division and politi­ cal strife.

Deception and Misrepresentation For Socrates, deception and misrepresentation are inescapable features of discourse. He begins his discussion of rhetoric with the example of misrepresentation: And so, when a rhetorician who does not know good from bad addresses a city which knows no better and attempts to sway it, not praising a miserable donkey as if were a horse, but bad as if it were good, and having studied what the people believe, persuade them to do something bad instead of good—­ with that as its seed, what sort of crop do you think rhetoric can harvest? (Plato, Phaedrus, 260c–­d)

In Socrates’s example, deception and misrepresentation do not arise from the ethical or epistemological lapses of individuals; rather, they inhere in the language with which those individuals and cultures think and commu­ nicate about value. Apparently, in praising the donkey, the rhetor is appeal­ ing to a received understanding that donkeys and horses are basically the same animal, and the unfortunate misrepresentation is unintended. What enables persuasion in this instance is the fact that both rhetor and audi­ ence share a misperception, and neither is aware of it. The sharing, based in a misperception of sameness, disguises the ignorance. Even if Socrates’s example is intended, in part, to be ironic and to ridicule sophistic rhetors, still this situation is paradigmatic, and it acquires particular relevance when discussions about values are at issue, for the misunderstanding of axiologi­ cal terms comes about through the operation of sameness: “Clearly, there­ fore, the state of being deceived and holding beliefs contrary to what is the case comes upon people by reason of certain similarities” (Plato, Phaedrus, 262b). This state of affairs makes difference essential as a corrective. The inescapable occurrence of deception and misrepresentation is what makes rhetoric a philosophical and not a technical issue. In this recognition that deception is an inherent challenge, Socrates agrees with Gorgias’s claim

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in the Encomium. However, unlike Gorgias, he does not seek agency through the use of deception but explores the philosophical implications of decep­ tion. Deception does not have to be intentional, although it often is. Also, deception and misrepresentation can take the form of self-­deception as well as deception by others. This fact has consequences for Socrates’s account of erotic attachment. In his recovery of the value of healthy erotic attachment, Socrates, and Bersani and Phillips as well, assumed that the perception of sameness was spontaneous, and, at least among more philosophical souls, veridical. That assumption needs to be examined. To the extent that even best natures cannot escape a fallen and partial grasp of the truth, any human perception is potentially subject to deception. One can be mistaken about the character of one’s beloved. The issue of whether one’s initial percep­ tion was true must always be open. Although Socrates does not consider that one could be mistaken about the nature of the Other to whom one is erotically drawn, such misapprehension must be possible. The dialogue attests to this possibility, for Socrates and Phaedrus group love with those terms which are essentially contested and hence internalize the ambiguity between sameness and difference (Plato, Phaedrus, 263c). If humans do not/ cannot have full access to divine vision, then their vision is inescapably par­ tial, and whether an initial perceived sameness will prove to be sustainable and generative must remain an open question.

Dialectic The lover as lover would appear to have a limited need for dialectic. In Socrates’s account, erotic attraction begins in perception, when the lover sees the beloved as a figured vision of the god in whose chorus they both dance. That is a moment of discovering (even if not yet understanding) potential sameness, but that moment can be deceptive. The reason that a lover—­or any other citizen for that matter—­needs dialectic is that all dis­ course about value requires the ability to discern both sameness and dif­ ference. This fact can be disguised in erotic relationships that seem to be grounded in immediate perception or experience. However, even this ap­ parently immediate perception is mediated through the figure of a god, and such a figure is shaped by culture. So that which seems to be the most pri­ vate and most revealing moment of an individual subjectivity needs to be understood as being determined, in part, by a particular political culture. The choice turns out not to be between a private subjectivity and a political one, but rather between a subjectivity that is aware of the role of culture in shaping the desirability of a beloved and one that assumes erotic attraction

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is simply a natural and spontaneous occurrence. The latter is an example of a fundamental misrepresentation. If desire is the medium and source of psychic movement, that desire is itself partly determined by culture. For this reason, a reformation of political culture must begin with a rethinking of desire, for once desire is freed from an inherited misrepresentation in which a particular form of Eros has been naturalized, the experience of desire can become a resource for cultural critique. If erotic engagement begins in a moment of ecstasy, political vision re­ quires intellectual work; one needs to work reflectively through apparent similarities and differences to discover more genuine differences or possibly a deeper sameness. Deception, either by oneself or by others, is a structural feature of political life, and its inescapable presence necessitates the particu­ lar political contribution of rhetoric. Sameness and difference are ambigu­ ous, and people are often not aware of the ways in which they participate in this ambiguity and are determined by it. The dialogue’s form—­in which a discussion of desire is followed by a discussion of rhetoric—­can be seen as dramatizing a movement from a confused surface understanding of same­ ness and difference to a reflectively held understanding of them. However important sameness is, it appears, for Socrates, that we are defined by dif­ ference: “But what happens when we say ‘just’ or ‘good’? Doesn’t each one of us go in a different direction? Don’t we differ with one another and even with ourselves?” (Plato, Phaedrus, 263a). To address this fundamental issue, rhetoric needs to confront and undo current, often unarticulated, cultural understandings. It needs to engage an unreflectively held sameness through a dialectical engagement with difference. Having established that dialectic is necessary to distinguish sameness and difference and to counter deceptive representations of sameness—­decep­ tions that can be a product of internal confusion or external imposition—­ Socrates, at Phaedrus’s urging, admits that rhetoric cannot be equated with dialectic. As Bersani argued, rational demonstration, by itself, is inadequate to counter the ego’s defensive perception of difference as threat (Intimacies, 71–­72). Dialectic, by itself, cannot be the source of persuasion (Mc­ Coy, 190). A successful persuasion doesn’t merely convince a subject of the correctness of a particular assertion, it changes the motion of the soul. As Socrates’s earlier definition made clear, persuasion guides souls, so a theory of rhetoric needs a psychology sufficiently capacious that it can instruct its practitioners on how to tailor discourse to address souls in their differences. Rhetoric needs to respond to the psychological difference embodied in the diverse population of any social collectivity.

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The largest difference is between simple and complex souls, but as Nightingale points out, there are no purely simple souls—­simplicity and complexity are always a matter of degree (147). The more telling point is that rhetoric is required precisely because of an irreducible diversity among audiences. An artful rhetoric needs to be able to move or guide a diverse col­ lection of souls because it understands how these souls perceive sameness and difference and how this understanding can either further or restrict the human possibility that, according to Bersani, inheres in the unconscious. Such an art has a major role to play in any polis in which diversity assumes a central position. Platonic political discourse is aimed at freeing up the unconscious that Bersani characterized as an unlimited future.

Platonic Rhetoric and Democracy Graeme Nicholson contends that “it is not actually Lysias who concerns Plato, but the whole of the rhetorical movement and the moral effect it had on the city” (43). As Andrea Nightingale points out, “His [Plato’s] target, moreover, is never simply an individual author or text. For, when he incor­ porates a particular work of poetry or rhetoric into a dialogue, he invariably treats it synecdochically—­i.e. as the representative of the genre” (5). This insight needs to be pursued further. If the historical Lysias is representative of a democratic rhetor, then the criticism of rhetoric offered in the Phaedrus should be read as an effort to define not merely a reformed or artis­ tic rhetoric in general but one that would be appropriate for a democracy with its particular challenges. Nightingale is clear about Plato’s focus on the challenges and issues that confront democracy: “Plato is always aware of a genre’s context of performance and the ways in which it is implicated in the social and political institutions of the Athenian democracy” (9). Although Plato has traditionally been read as an opponent of democracy, several re­ cent scholars have challenged that reading and argued for a more nuanced view of Plato as a critic of democracy (see Allen, Why Plato Wrote; Monoson, Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Democracy; and Wallach, The Platonic Political Art: A Study of Critical Reason and Democracy). Socrates’s focus on the particular challenges that democracy presents to rhetoric explains, in part, the short shrift that Socrates gives to the other rhetors in the dialogue. His casual dismissal of previous thought on rhetoric—­from Theodorus to Protagoras—­as merely focusing on the preliminaries and missing the central concerns of rhetoric (Plato, Phaedrus, 269b–­c) argues that these rhetors are not the target of his refutation: they

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are preoccupied with technical aspects that Socrates treats as trivial. Lysias, on the other hand, is Plato’s focus because his misrepresentation of Eros represents a genuine danger to a democratic Athens. (For an argument that sees Plato as concerned about the dangers endemic to a democratic Athens, see Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophic Problem of Persuasion.) In the Republic, Socrates identified the democratically organized city as the paradigm of an essentially diverse polis—­one constituted in difference (557c–­d). This identification of difference as a defining feature of a democ­ racy gives a particular urgency to a rhetoric revised in response to the demo­ cratic rhetoric represented by Lysias. This urgency can be put in the form of a question: in what way does the transformation of the operation of desire in private relationships affect democratic political life in which difference is an inescapable feature? The Phaedrus’s ending, which focuses on the inter­ locutors’ return to Athens and their new responsibility to educate their lov­ ers and their beloveds, underlines the centrality of this question. However much Socrates and Phaedrus, in the idyllic seclusion of the countryside, delight in a conversation about the Eros of sameness, they need to return to a democratic Athens. That is the location where the problem of Eros resides. In his advocacy for the non-­lover, Lysias exemplifies a rhetoric that would reform the way in which political subjectivity was constituted in a democracy. (Yunis provides a good discussion of the state of rhetoric in Athens in the fourth century BCE, 106–­08.) Lysias’s proposed replacement of the traditional aristocratic form of political education as a practice based on personal affection and loyalty with a professionalized education must be understood, in part, as an effort at political intervention. An erotic aris­ tocracy would now be conceived not in terms of inherited social position but as a consequence of personal merit. The political education proposed by Lysias would function as instruction in the pursuit of self-­interest in a world defined by an intractable and injurious aggression. His education is not interested in reforming a political and cultural practice but in mini­ mizing its damage. Unfortunately, this new rhetoric, founded on a cyni­ cal understanding of the possibility of serious political reform, leaves the underlying situation of erotic aggression in place. His proposed nonerotic relationships instruct young men who are potential beloveds in ways to both protect themselves and exploit the practice for their own benefit. Lys­ ias’s solution to a culture of aggressive erotic relationships is to make more calculating and less aggressive egos. By de-­eroticizing the traditional older/ younger male relationship, Lysias puts self-­interest in the place of passion and proposes a political culture that is less aggressive but also one based in

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the calculation of personal advantage. His speech, if successful, would cre­ ate a new political subjectivity, but those educated by Lysias would become clever, not wise. As a consequence, democratic Athens would become a pol­ ity ruled by a surface sameness.

Transforming Threat to Risk There is historical precedent for the anxiety occasioned by difference and by the threat that difference poses. Anne Carson, in her study of Eros, ar­ gues that the ancient Greek lyric tradition displays precisely the anxiety that Bersani and Phillips contend is part of the development of the ego. She, however, sees Plato as providing a response to this anxiety that does not have recourse to sameness but offers a revolutionary justification for value of difference. For her, “Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved, and the difference between them interact” (168). If Carson is right, difference is what prevents the collapse of two distinct egos/selves/subjects into one. As such, it is essential to the maintenance of sameness. It allows distinct individuals to maintain a generative relationship even as they participate in and are shaped by the sustained encounter of their underlying sameness. As Carson puts it: “A power to see the difference between what is known and what is unknown constitutes Sokrates’ wisdom and motivated his search­ ing life. The activity of reaching out for that difference is one with which he admits he is in love” (172). However much sameness may counter the threat of difference, it is the fact of difference that prevents the collapse of sameness into an undifferentiated homogeneity. In frustrating the erotic wish for two distinct subjects (in Bersani’s terms, two “hyperbolic egos”) to obliterate those distinct identities in an undifferentiated wholeness whose consequence would be to destroy that subjectivity, difference makes the on­ going pursuit of sameness possible and generative. Sameness is not a qual­ ity shared so much as it is the promise of a future whose possibilities are not limited—­this promise is what ties sameness to Bersani’s conception of the unconscious. Socrates is committed to incompletion: desire vanishes as soon as it achieves its purported end. The supposed object of desire, ac­ cording to Carson, is always a ruse. Desire may appear to have a specific and achievable goal, but its true motivating force is to promote a sense of vital­ ity and to encourage someone to put himself or herself at risk. Should Eros achieve its apparent goal, the subject would be destroyed—­as it would have reverted to a condition that predated the emergence of subjectivity. Same­ ness achieved is the death of the ego; difference preserves life. But it also registers a fundamental uncertainty because it is a continual reminder that

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things could be otherwise and that inescapable contingency structures any life. It is important not to minimize this risk and the anxiety that difference causes. That anxiety manifests the felt threat that one might not encounter a safe sameness but rather stumble onto an unsettling difference. The necessary incompleteness first encountered in Eros is encountered a second time in dialectic. For Plato, it is neither possible nor desirable to achieve a stable and certain self-­knowledge. If the pursuit of self-­knowledge motivates the Socratic soul, it also shapes the motion that defines that soul, and in an important way it instantiates the difference between gods and humans. Carson gets at this aspect of self-­knowledge as a goal both invit­ ing and impossible in her discussion of dialectic as an effort at reaching. Dialectic, like desire, would undo itself and destroy its reason for being if it achieved its goal (Carson, 171). This paradox is at the heart of both dialectic and desire. In a parallel fashion to the object of desire, knowledge may seem to be and be offered as if it were the end of dialectic, but that appearance is a ruse to provoke and sustain dialectic. The important thing is to maintain difference. The ruse at the heart of dialectic functions very much like Ber­ sani’s notion of the unconscious does—­it is an always-­receding goal that en­ courages the pursuit of human possibility. If there were a static world devoid of difference and grounded exclusively in sameness, it would no longer be a world amenable to human beings. It may be that the divine world is defined in part by an immediate and unchanging vision of sameness and difference, but the best that humans can do is to get a glimpse of such a universe. Plato’s rhetoric is necessarily provisional in its approach to how it un­ derstands an audience, and it focuses on sustained individual conversations that are open-­ended and hence not subject to explicit technical rules. Plato realizes that what is needed is not a technical reform of rhetoric but an un­ derstanding of how rhetoric shapes human subjectivity. As Yunis has argued: “For Plato, rhetoric was not a morally neutral set of skills in language and speaking, but part and parcel of the entire set of conventional ethical and political values that needed to be uprooted and replaced with better ones” (101; see also McCoy, 183). Like Bersani, Plato seeks a way for people to be open to pursuing potential and to be receptive to the possibilities arising from an unconscious that is not repressed by a knowledge serving to defend an existing understanding of identity. Unlike Bersani, Plato realizes that the problem of aggression cannot be addressed simply by a reconception of pri­ vate erotic relationships. If the experience of sameness can nourish less ag­ gressive selves through ongoing private erotic relationships, this experience is possible only because the dialectic of sameness and difference makes it possible to recognize sameness. An experience of sameness, however much

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it may suggest an ultimate merger into an undifferentiated wholeness, can only be sustained by a difference that challenges such a merger and thus prevents what would be the eradication of the ego. As Phillips recognizes: “desire depends on difference” (Terrors and Experts, 82). Above all else, Socrates opposes that which fixes discourse—­hence his notorious critique of writing. A discursive exchange, which is inherently open, is his commitment to human potential; it is what makes his reform of political rhetoric ethical and not technical. A political rhetoric shaped by a revolutionary understanding of Eros as a force for the fostering of im­ personal and nonaggressive relationships would be able, through dialectic, to engage in an ongoing investigation of the mixture of sameness and dif­ ference that can encourage a nonviolent resolution of difference and sup­ port a collaborative pursuit of human potential. This new political rhetoric would take the reinvention of the human as its ongoing task. It would take the threat of the suppression of difference to be rooted not simply in a particular set of historical circumstances but in an ongoing challenge to any political discourse, one that requires an understanding of persuasion as a resource to counter an aggression and anxiety that are structural com­ ponents of human subjectivity. A philosophically adequate theory of per­ suasion must explain the role of persuasion in the constitution of human subjectivity—­it must explain how this constitution develops in response to a fundamental human need.

four

Responsiveness Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Subjectivity

Although we may wish it otherwise, citizens can negotiate loss and generate trust only on the shifting ground of subjectivity. —Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 151

One might have expected that the development of post-­structural theories of rhetoric, focused on the tropes not as individual stylistic devices but as defining features of semiological systems, would have led to a reconsideration of the role of persuasion in the constitution of human subjectivity. For the most part, this reconsideration has not happened. De Man moved in that direction when he argued that Nietzsche’s distinction between performative and constative language proves to be unstable: [Nietzsche’s] critique of metaphysics can be described as the deconstruction of the illusion that the language of truth (episteme) could be replaced by the language of persuasion (doxa). What seems to lead to an established priority of “setzen” over “erkennen,” of language as action over language as truth, never quite reaches its mark. It under or overshoots it, and, in so doing, it reveals that the target which one long since assumed to have been eliminated has barely been displaced. The episteme has hardly been restored intact to its former glory, but it has not been definitely eliminated either. The differentiation between performative and constative language (which Nietzsche anticipates) is undecidable. (130)

Despite the impossibility of establishing a stable hierarchy between persuasion and trope, Nietzsche’s argument for the figurativeness of language did not lead, according to de Man, to his embracing a view of language as action

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and thus rethinking the nature of persuasion. In the absence of an external referent that could ground a truth claim, it might have seemed reasonable, given Nietzsche’s understanding of the metaphoricity at the core of language, to gravitate to a notion of language as action and to understanding this action in terms of persuasion. This gravitation did not happen. Rather, de Man argues that rhetoric became 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. The aporia between performative and constative language is merely a version of the aporia between trope and persuasion that both generates and paralyzes rhetoric and thus gives it the appearance of a history” (De Man, 131). In this account, persuasion, apparently understood as a deliberate and intended action done by an individual rhetor, is of little interest and not worth discussion. To the extent that persuasion continues to be viewed in its traditional formulation in which the individual rhetor seeks to persuade an audience, it contributes little, if anything, to the post-­structural reconsideration of rhetoric. De Man’s formulation of rhetoric as a theory of tropological semiology is important to a reconsideration of persuasion because of its centrality to Laclau’s own hegemonic analysis of political discourse. For Laclau, de Man’s theory of rhetoric becomes foundational for political analysis: As for the second reason for a political theorist to be interested in de Man’s work, it has to do with something related to the political field itself. Gone are the times when the transparency of social actors, of processes of representation, even of the presumed underlying logics of the social fabric, could be accepted unproblematically. On the contrary, each political institution shows itself today as the locus of undecidable language games. The overdetermined nature of political difference or identity opens the space for a generalized tropological movement, and thus reveals the fruitfulness of de Man’s intellectual project for ideological and political analysis. In my work, this generalized politico-­tropological movement has been called “hegemony.” (The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 80)

But if Laclau’s account of equivalential chains, which is derived from post-­ structural rhetoric, provides an interpretation of political or ideological change in terms of a “generalized politico-­tropological” shift, why should one assume that persuasion should still be viewed in terms of the deliberate actions of rhetors on audiences? If this understanding of rhetorical action as the embodiment of a collection of undecidable language games is right, then that should raise a further question: why, at particular times, do

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certain instances of these language games prevail? Why and how do these moments of decision occur in a process that is inherently undecidable? Certainly, the conscious and deliberate intentions of an individual rhetor seem inadequate to explain the change—­such an explanation harks back to a model of political change that considers this change as uncomplicated. If one acknowledges the fluidity and overdetermination involved in political change, then an account of persuasion principally in terms of the voluntary actions of individuals fails to recognize the multiple forces in operation when such changes occur. Laclau’s answer to the question of what prompts change in political understanding is that contingency authorizes the operating logic that underpins hegemonic change. Change is to be understood as occurring in an alteration or reconstitution of a linguistic chain. But if this account can describe the change, it cannot explain it and, in particular, it cannot explain why the change has happened the way it did. Further, as I argued earlier, it provides no standard by which to evaluate the change. Such a failure would seem to gut hegemony as a theoretical understanding of the explanatory power necessary to guide political life, rendering it unhelpful for individuals and groups who want to understand how to effect change. Laclau cannot provide a standard by which to judge whether a generalized tropological change represents an advance toward a more just society or the regressive embrace of an unjust political order. The difficulties that Žižek and Critchley identified in Laclau’s account of hegemony arise, in part, from this inadequate theorization of change. Given these difficulties, it would seem crucial to understand how a nonteleological change that furthers justice is possible. If so, rethinking what persuasion is might provide a way to reconcile hegemony’s commitment to contingency with democracy’s aspiration for a more just, equitable, and representative political order. Thinking about persuasion in terms of the action of the audience and not the action of the rhetor would redirect attention from the attempt to influence another person to the type of change that occurs in an audience undergoing persuasion. At the center of such a redefinition of persuasion would be the recognition that persuasion is simultaneously both an action and event, or, if we prefer, an action and a passion, in which freedom and some sort of necessity are reconciled. To effect this reconciliation, what is needed is a theory of persuasion sufficiently complex and agile that can explain change and, without importing norms grounded in a teleology, argue for the superiority of democracy as a political organization that best serves freedom and justice because it is grounded in the action/ event of persuasion.

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From Gorgias’s “Encomium for Helen” onwards, one challenge for rhetorical theory has been to reconcile freedom and necessity in an account of persuasion that does justice to both the voluntary assent necessary for persuasion and the feeling that a persuasion which is compelling makes a demand on an audience that it cannot ignore without violating the beliefs and values that form the core of its identity. What is needed for rhetorical theory to meet this challenge is a theory of persuasion that provides an account of subjectivity. Such an account must explain the ways in which a subject is constituted and the ways in which it can reconstitute itself in light of new understandings or changes in the world. A theory of rhetorical subjectivity must begin by acknowledging the diverse, complex, and overdetermined paths along which persuasion proceeds as it contributes to the subject’s reconstitution of itself. This theory must explain the peculiar nature of persuasion as something both done and undergone by the subject. Such an account would acknowledge a role for deliberation but would not reduce persuasion to deliberation. This theory of rhetorical subjectivity would not ignore the role of inferential reasoning but would recognize that a more capacious account of mind is needed to capture the fluidity of thought and the nature of understanding. It would not empty out the rich and complex set of factors that operate in the continual processes of adjustment that comprise a human life. It would, instead, deal with the complex set of factors that contribute to a genuine persuasion, recognizing that an adequate account of mind needs to credit the legitimate ways in which valued attachments do and should impact judgment. It would distinguish persuasion from mere agreement or assent. This account of subjectivity would be able to explain why and how reasons and emotions acquire a certain force, and why and how they can both require and enable subjective change that allows the subject to realign itself with the world in which it lives. This realignment would not simply be reactive adjustment but could become a creative response that sought to change that world or make it a world in which the individual was more truly at home. At the core of such an account of subjectivity would be an understanding of humans as creatures defined by the capacity for a responsiveness that, under the right circumstances, is capable of increasing nuance and sophistication. It is just such an account of responsiveness that Jonathan Lear’s philosophical interpretation of Freud provides. Lear argues that “one can view his [Freud’s] entire psychoanalytic journey as an attempt to work out in detail what this responsiveness is” (7). At its core, this responsiveness enables the mind to transform itself as it seeks to understand its own activity. What such responsiveness can then explain is the way in which the achievement of

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understanding is transformative for the subject. It is precisely this capacity for transformation that gives a point to an effort at persuasion. Responsiveness, as a defining feature of human subjectivity, allows us to understand how and why persuasion figures as a key element in the shaping and reshaping of identity. The importance of responsiveness emerges as part of Lear’s philosophical interpretation of Freud’s evolving understanding of love as a developmental force in nature. But as much as Lear’s reading of Freud’s developing understanding of the role of love is an interpretation of Freud, it is also a philosophical argument in its own right. Lear’s argument allows us to account for the ways in which concepts acquire meaning and the ways in which individuals constitute or reconstitute themselves as they integrate these concepts into their understanding of themselves and their worlds. Although Lear’s intention is to provide a philosophical interpretation of Freud’s psychoanalytic thought, the account of responsiveness that he discovers in Freud can also ground a theory of rhetorical subjectivity, without reducing rhetoric to a form of psychoanalysis. This theory of rhetorical subjectivity will enable us to understand persuasion as an activity in which a subject’s current beliefs and affections are developed in such a way as to reorganize that subjectivity. Lear’s interpretation of Freud will provide a foundation from which we can theorize how persuasion operates and why persuasion is essential to individual and political well-­being. In particular, Lear’s account of love will allow us to infuse the concept of persuasion with a vitality that can enable us to distinguish it from manipulation and pandering and that can reconcile the freedom necessary for persuasion with the necessity that arises from a successful persuasion. Ultimately, it will provide a standard, in ways Laclau’s interpretation of hegemony cannot, one that supports the superiority of a genuine democracy over alternative forms of government. This theory of persuasion, grounded in an understanding of love as a developmental force in nature, will return the discussion of the relation of persuasion and desire to its mythic beginning.

Eros and Persuasion In its depiction of the goddess Peitho, antiquity recognized a deep connection between the operation of Eros and the operation of persuasion. As Joel Altman notes: “Peitho was a figure affiliated with Aphrodite in fifth-­and sixth-­century Greek thought, sometimes as her daughter, sometimes as her handmaiden. She is associated with Eros in Aeschylus and Pindar, and in her accession to political persuasion she never loses her older connotation

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as goddess of amorous seduction” (227). Eros and persuasion share powerful, almost magical, forces that impact people and change them—­Eros operating principally in the relationships between individuals; persuasion occurring between individuals but also in larger social and political units. As Anne Carson has argued, the Greek lyric poets experienced the power of Eros to be unnerving and as a threat to the autonomy of a subject: To control boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-­ possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most important information that a person receives. When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. (44–­45)

Eros threatens the individual with loss of control and so, for all the exhilaration involved in falling in love, there is also a danger that one will no longer be in charge of one’s own life. Judith Shklar’s liberalism exhibits a similar wariness toward persuasion. As I noted earlier, she equates persuasion with other coercive operations of power by the state that deprive individuals of freedom and autonomy. In her view, persuasion represents a threat to the individual. Like Eros, persuasion challenges the ability of the self to maintain its autonomy solely as an act of will. Persuasion is, as Gorgias argued, a power to be contended with. Acknowledging this power of Eros, Carson recognizes that erotic experience can be either the cause for celebration of a personal expansion or the source of dread at a loss of control and a recognition of one’s vulnerability. Erotic experience has the peculiar and arresting property of coming unbidden yet somehow seeming uncannily to disclose an aspect of the self that seems essential. Putting self-­understanding at risk, erotic experience can disclose a truth that cannot be accessed by other means. Affective responses are revealing, and they sometimes, maybe often, reveal aspects of the self of which the self was either ignorant or trying to deny. While the understanding about the self that arises from such an experience is not infallible and can be mistaken, the dynamics of the experience argue that the emotion that is an essential part of erotic experience can be a potential source of understanding, one that reveals what is important to a particular individual. Who you fall in love with can tell you something about yourself. Further, this understanding is not accessible by the ordinary operations of a reason that is located in consciousness. The fact that erotic responses can be a source of understanding suggests

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that responsiveness is a core quality for animate beings. To see human beings as creatures who develop and acquire form through a process of responsiveness in which their ongoing relationship with their environments shapes and influences their identity is to realize that the capacity and potential for response is what enables human beings to develop in complexity or, in the absence of a supportive environment, to fail to develop. Like erotic experience, the action/event we call persuasion is constituted in response. As rhetorical theorists have noted for centuries, a well-­crafted speech or written text that fails to generate a serious response is, despite its artistry, a failed rhetorical effort. In the absence of intellectual and affective change, there is no persuasion. What makes persuasion possible is the audience’s capacity to respond to acts of language, and in their responses, the members of the audience are reconstituted. Like erotic experience, persuasion can both come from an external source and, at the same time, appear to reveal an understanding that we at least potentially possess, even if we are not fully aware of it. For persuasion to occur—­as distinct from manipulation, pandering, or coercion—­the individual persuaded needs to feel the rightness of the interpretation and feel that that interpretation in its rightness makes a claim on the individual so that the acceptance of the interpretation is both voluntary and necessary. The emotional rightness of a persuasion is essential to that persuasion. Persuasion has the paradoxical quality that a change in understanding cannot be accomplished through force and yet, in a genuine persuasion, one feels compelled to accept it. Indeed, it is not so much that one is compelled to accept the persuasion (as if this involved an act of conscious assent); one simply is persuaded, and that persuasion occurs independently of the individual’s will. The persuasion registers the change in understanding. But what allows persuasion to be this peculiar action that involves both voluntary assent and equally a sense of necessity as a response that demands we accept it or be false to who we are? How is such an action/event possible?

Human Responsiveness and the Development of Subjectivity Lear argues that Freud’s revolutionary inquiries into the nature of subjectivity consisted in his attempting to develop a “science of subjectivity; [in] the discovery of an archaic form of mental functioning; [and in] the positing of Love as a basic force in nature” (3). Lear argues further that Freud, like any true revolutionary, did not and could not understand fully the implications of his discoveries. Consequently, these discoveries stand in need of an interpretation that can disclose insights that Freud only partially understood or

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resisted because his insights outstripped, in part, his capacity to think beyond some of the received understanding of his time. Lear develops Freud’s thought further to understand more fully the revolution he began. As Lear argues, a good interpretation does not recover a meaning that already existed but allows that meaning to develop into a more fully realized thought. As we will see, this understanding of interpretation will provide a developmental model of subjectivity that accounts for the act of conceptualization that underlies the transformation effected through persuasion. Freud’s significant advance in the understanding of subjectivity was limited by his conception of science as an objective pursuit of truths that existed independently of the observer. Lear attempts to carry Freud’s revolution forward by moving beyond a nineteenth-­century view of science and asking instead what a science of subjectivity would entail. Central to Lear’s enterprise is the claim that a science of subjectivity does not recover preexisting truths independent of the observer but rather pursues interpretations that develop understandings residing in incipient states in which development was arrested by either internal or external factors. Lear’s interpretation demonstrates the ways in which a developmental theory of human subjectivity as a form of psychological organization represents an ongoing process of exploring the richness of concepts that are seeking a more complete expression. While Lear’s concern is with the nature and efficacy of a particular form of psychoanalytic interpretation, his developmental account of the self is generative for a theory of persuasion. A developmental model of subjectivity provides insight into the way in which the mind transforms itself in response to a good-­enough world. This responsiveness, because of its role in the constitution and reconstitution of the soul, becomes foundational for a revised theory of persuasion. The operation of responsiveness can explain both the freedom and the necessity that are at the core of a successful persuasion. I will argue that persuasion assumes the particular form that it does because, as human responsiveness develops, the mind grows and becomes a more disciplined, nuanced, and creative agent with which humans can negotiate their worlds. This growth of mind is the action/event that is persuasion. Through persuasion, subjectivity transforms itself so that it aligns more closely with an external world that affirms the value of this subjectivity.

A Developmental Theory of Subjectivity For Lear, individual subjectivity arises out of and within a core responsiveness and acquires structure through its interaction with a world that can either affirm or frustrate that responsiveness. As Lear comments:

Responsiveness: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Subjectivity  /  93 Being an individual, psychoanalysis discovered is a psychological achievement; for the ability to distinguish oneself from the environment is not present at the beginning of biological or psychic life. Precisely because the individual is a psychological achievement, it is not a given and cannot be taken for granted. (23)

The psychological achievement by which a proto-­individual becomes a distinct individual is intimately connected to the emergence of a psychologically distinct world that is external to the individual. This process of development does not have an endpoint and is dependent, in part, on a world cooperating with and supporting the emergence of the individual. That, of course, means that the developing responsiveness is also subject to a world not cooperating with it or supporting it. Psychological illness is as much a reality, if not more so, than psychological health. If developing responsiveness is a potentiality that can be realized within an individual life, that realization is a contingent matter. The development of this responsiveness cannot be equated with the simple unfolding of a potential that emerges naturally and unproblematically under the best circumstances. For this development to proceed, it needs both the cooperation and the resistance of an external world. Frustration is not only part of life—­it plays an essential role in development. For Lear, it is impossible to understand the structure of mind or soul independently of investigating how that structure develops (186). He believes that one limitation of modern philosophy is that it begins its study of mind too late. It takes the developed mind, as manifested in the reasoning of a mature individual, in isolation from its development in that individual. This then leads to a false notion of rationality. Implicit in the approach of modern philosophy is a view of reason as static and atemporal—­reason as a process of inference is outside the operation of history, personal and social. This limitation is not simply confined to philosophy. Rhetorical theories that see persuasion principally as an act of deliberation have the same overcommitment to a particular version of reason—­one in which reason is considered in its mature form and isolated from any sense of it as a capacity derived from a responsiveness whose developmental history has influenced the nature of that mature reason. This view of persuasion as a product of deliberation prevents theorists from seeing mind as a more complex and evolving capacity for responsiveness. Since mind is not understood in its relationship to responsiveness, the possibility of the growth of mind as a consequence of an increasingly complex responsiveness is not considered. In particular, these theories of mind, seen in terms of a mature reason in its later developed form, misunderstand and misvalue the role of emotion

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in persuasion. When persuasion is reduced to deliberation, emotion is seen as either a distorting factor or, at best, an ancillary and supporting factor. In either case, emotion is not considered as essential to persuasion. Such a view of persuasion as a consequence of deliberation has persisted, even though Aristotle, in book 2 of his Rhetoric, recognized that emotional orientation can shape perception and hence influence judgment. In contrast to rhetorical theories that emphasize deliberation as the source of persuasion, an account of the soul that sees mind as developing in response to a supportive universe understands emotion as a key element in that development. In a developmental account, mind is not simply the abstract operation of reason but is a complex and developing affective responsiveness of a creature to its environment. Mind is inherently social, cultural, and historical. Mind grows in response to demands made on it by a world in which it has some sort of investment. Rather than seeing mind as ideally the operation of reason unencumbered by the accidents of history or the peculiarity of particular individuals—­as a capacity emptied of experiential content—­a developmental account sees mind as an increasing capacity for responsiveness to a supportive world. For an individual to come into being, there needs to be a world that meets that individual’s needs, and, as it meets those needs, the world discloses to the emerging individual sets of values that affirm that individual’s worth. Through this dialectic of need, demand, and response, individuals begin to constitute themselves as beings who are inherently social. They become beings who can respond to the world and who are constituted so as to make demands on the world to respond to them and affirm their worth in ever more complex and rich ways. What develops in a developmental account is responsiveness. In such an account, mind is understood as a developed and developing capacity to respond to the world. Mind has a history; human responsiveness is receptive to and is shaped by the world that it encounters. Depending upon the quality of support it meets in the world, this responsiveness—­this mind—­can develop in complexity and sophistication. It can become capable of more “realistic” assessments of the world to which it responds, and it can become creative—­making new demands on that world. Residing in the erotic nature of a subject, responsiveness can develop into a source of recognition and affirmation of an always-­emerging subjectivity. Given the developmental nature of mind, no attempt to understand this emerging subjectivity can ever be an effort to recover a preexisting structure; instead, it must be an interpretation that transforms wishes, fantasies, perception, and proto-­emotions in a less differentiated psychic field into a

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structure that embodies the impulse that had been seeking expression in that field. Not an act of recovery of a preexisting truth, this interpretation is the end product of an effort to articulate meanings, not yet formulated, that were seeking expression. Neither an abstract exercise nor a matter of will, understanding must be a response to a human need that presses on an individual with a certain urgency. As Lear emphasizes, a psychoanalytic interpretation is effective only if it is directed at the right object and at the right time. These meanings (or, more correctly, proto-­meanings) in the archaic mind are seeking not only expression but also genuine understanding. For Lear, a psychoanalytic interpretation transforms the operations it is investigating, and only because they are transformed can they be understood: A good interpretation represents the end of a developmental process which begins with archaic attempts “to say the same thing.” The interpretation allows the mind to understand, at the level of conceptualized judgment, what it has been trying to say all along, in more primitive ways. (8)

In this answering to a need for articulation, the psychoanalytic interpretation offers a model for persuasion. In this model, persuasion would be a response to a need—­sometimes felt before the act of persuasion, sometimes recognized only after persuasion has occurred—­rooted in a subject’s currently inadequate understanding of itself or its world. One could be conscious of that need or unaware of it until after the persuasion was accomplished. A persuasion would be the register of the developed articulation of a matter that was pressing for the subject but which, for some reason or reasons, the subject could not accomplish without the assistance of the act of persuasion. Persuasion would not be an intellectual activity detached from lived experience but rather the attempt to put that experience into a form that made it available to the subject. Persuasion would be a way for a life to evolve meaningfully in a world that both supported the subject’s core values and equally frustrated their full realization. As such, persuasion would not entail the imposition of a meaning on a subject, but it would represent a genuine discovery, a discovery that would disclose something about the subject or the external world that the subject could not previously access. In this model, the source of persuasion can be either the subject itself or an external agent. What is important is that persuasion effects a transformation in the constitution of the subject because concepts either already possessed or newly acquired have become meaningful. Persuasion happens because the meaning discovered or developed feels right to the subject. This rightness consists in revealing something about the subject or the external

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world that the subject acknowledges speaks to their concerns but that they could not recognize prior to the persuasion. This rightness is a consequence of an emotional reorientation that is an essential part of the subject’s understanding and acceptance of the new meaning. This feeling of rightness is not infallible, and one can be persuaded of things that are not true in the sense of this newly acquired understanding representing accurately commitments and desires. Persuasion can be abused. But to the extent that persuasion is understood as contributing to the development of a mind, persuasions will often be revised and complicated as further acts disclose or express emerging and more complex relationships. This understanding accords with the experience that persuasion is rarely the result of a single, directed speech, but often takes place over time, frequently involving a growth of understanding that is neither deliberate nor conscious, although it can be the result of deliberation and conscious effort. Persuasion is an inherently open-­ended process. Similar to Lear’s account of a psychoanalytic interpretation, this model represents persuasion as an act not of recovery but of transformation.

Emotion, Orientation, and Justification A successful psychoanalytic interpretation enables analysands to transform their emotional relationships to central concerns in their lives. To understand emotional transformation, Lear looks to Aristotle’s account of the civic emotions in book 2 of his Rhetoric. As Lear points out, Aristotle understood that emotions were not just feelings but rather that they represented orientations. Emotions, as orientations, are ways of locating an individual in the world (Lear, 48). But the emotions are not only orientations: “an emotion does more than orient the individual to the world: it comes packaged with its own justification” (Lear, 49). That is, there are reasons why particular emotions occur. The emotions are responses to the way a subject perceives the world. Emotions register responsiveness. As such, emotions are not irrational; they are, in many cases, proto-­rational. They are responses that are provoked for a reason, even if the individual cannot consciously say what that reason is. As Lear and Aristotle comment, once the reason is known, then the justification for the emotion is understood and the emotion has moved to completion. Implicit if underdeveloped in Aristotle’s and Lear’s discussion of emotion is an understanding of human beings as fundamentally shaped by responsiveness. To the extent that an emotion can arise immediately before there is time to formulate a conscious assessment of a situation reveals that humans are capable of complex and often accurate responses to a situation

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before they have explicitly understood at a conscious, rational level why they are responding the way that they are. Further, these responses to events, even if not yet conscious, are reactions that arise because an individual is constituted in a certain way. Emotional responses reveal and represent an individual’s understanding of a particular circumstance even before the individual may be aware of the values, beliefs, and desires that are the source of the response. It seems inaccurate to reduce responsiveness to mere activity of the unconscious, because it does not spring from a reservoir of unformulated thoughts, emotions, and desires; rather, it reflects a capacity to react to the world in a manner that expresses the individual’s stake in a situation. If, as Lear claims, in the transition from primary-­process thinking to secondary-­process thinking “the mind is not just gathering facts; it is learning how to think” (85), then the development of mind would seem to be the evolution of a more disciplined responsiveness. This disciplined responsiveness would not replace innate and spontaneous responsiveness, which would always persist, but it would represent a specific way to respond. What emotions reveal is that humans are continually negotiating both their understanding of the world and themselves and the way that they are staked in this understanding. At its core, our understanding of ourselves and our worlds is an affective understanding. This affective understanding is what should be expected from a creature who is fundamentally erotic. To understand what it means to be an erotic creature, it is necessary to understand the nature of archaic mind.

Archaic Mind In Lear’s interpretation, Freud’s developing insight into the emerging structure of human subjectivity can be traced back to his coming to understand the nature of the archaic mind. What Freud discovered is that mind begins not as an agency that operates in terms of formulated concepts and modes of inference but rather as an undifferentiated psychic field. At the beginning of mental life, there is no conception of a distinct and individual self, as there is no recognition of a separate external world: Now, if primary narcissism is, for the infant, an undifferentiated psychic field from which the I and a distinct world of objects emerge, then this original “emotional tie with another person” cannot, for the infant, be an emotional tie with another person. The original identification is rather an initial differentiation by which some of the loving mother, the loving world, are taken to exist on this side of the emerging boundary. (Lear, 161)

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For Freud, individual subject and external world emerge simultaneously in a process of greater and greater differentiation. At this early stage of psychological development, archaic mind is an assemblage of wishes, fantasies, proto-­emotions, and proto-­beliefs. These various elements are the ancestors of desires, theories, emotions, beliefs, and concepts that form the content of secondary-­process thinking (Lear, 92). Secondary-­process mind works through the forming and testing of concepts, in the formulation and pursuit of desires, and in emotional reactions to an external world. In contrast, the primary-­process thinking of the archaic mind is associational and imagistic. But, as Lear notes, despite the radical difference between the two modes of thought, there must be also some sort of significant connection. This connection must exist if secondary-­process thinking develops out of primary-­ process thinking. Lear points to Freud’s initial postulation and subsequent abandonment of the pleasure principle as a recognition that the archaic mind, for all its strangeness, is nonetheless oriented toward reality. In this orientation toward reality, archaic mind displays the potential that can, under the right circumstances, be realized in a more mature mind that is characterized by secondary-­process thought. Further, the efforts of archaic mind to make sense of the world suggest that there is a responsiveness at the core of human subjectivity, and that this responsiveness develops into what we recognize as mind. If one assumes, as Lear’s interpretation of Freud argues, that the initial psychic state of an individual human subject is an undifferentiated psychic field in which that potential individual cannot distinguish between themself and their mother, then the original situation of the infant is one in which the world does not have a status separate from the infant. When the infant’s parents meet the infant’s needs as they arise, the infant’s experience is one in which there is not a significant gap between wish and fulfillment of wish. Although not yet separate from the infant, this proto-­world is experienced as a responsiveness to and meeting of needs. This responsiveness will become a defining feature of the individual’s life, as that individual both seeks a responsiveness from the world and, in turn, responds to that responsiveness. If the infant is to develop into a distinct subject, this world has to both support and frustrate the infant, sufficiently meeting need but not being always available at all times. The character of this responsiveness will impact the character of the developing individual. The realization of the potential embodied in this responsiveness allows the individual to differentiate himself from the external while maintaining an essential connection to it. In their need for response and capacity to respond, humans develop and transform themselves into individuals who, under the right circumstances,

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are capable of making lives for themselves that reflect who they are and what they value. The support and frustration of need are crucial for emotional growth. When there is the right balance of gratification and frustration, the process of individuation is supported and furthered. For Lear, this process of individuation is the central drama in a human life. Indeed, Lear claims: “Psychoanalysis is at its core committed to the process of individuation; and it will flourish or wither depending on the value we place on the individual and the development of individuals in society” (22). As Lear further claims, individuals do not automatically populate the world; their existence is a contingent fact. Although there is a propensity starting at birth toward individuation, its achievement is often hard-­won and by no means certain. One becomes an individual by conceiving of oneself as an individual: “An individual is, among other things, constituted by the pursuit of the meanings by which he does or might live” (Lear, 22). This movement of individuation can culminate in the development of a subject who is autonomous. We become individuals because we persuade ourselves that we are individuals. We come to be through an act of persuasion.

Love as a Developmental Force in Nature For Lear, Freud’s truly revolutionary discovery took place over his career and led him increasingly to a more radical understanding of the ways in which humans are creatures engaged in lives shaped by the force of Eros. Eros fuels human development, but to put it that way is itself partly distorting. As Lear argues, it is not so much that love causes development as that development is love in action. Love is responsiveness. Humans develop and increase in complexity because, in their self-­understandings and in their interactions with the world, they become the medium through which love operates. Love is the manifestation of responsiveness. To be an erotic being is to be someone whose life acquires a (potentially) ever-­evolving form that enables love to express itself in ever richer ways. Love as a natural force is inherently transformative, striving for ever more loving interactions. The engine that drives love in humans is, of course, for Freud, libido—­ the energy emitted from human sexual drive. As Lear reads Freud, “sexual activity consists in the psychological incorporation of the sexual object” (129). The original sexual incorporation occurs simultaneously with the physical incorporation of the mother’s milk as the infant feeds at the breast. As the infant physically takes in the mother’s milk, its needs are met, and as a consequence, the infant experiences a world that is comforting, one

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that acknowledges, validates, and responds to its needs. The ur-­experience is one of responsiveness. And as Lear is quick to point out, in these initial encounters there is not yet an infant or an external world. There is an undifferentiated psychic field out of which, in the right circumstances, an infant and a world will begin to emerge as related but separate entities. This is the drama of responsiveness. The emergence of the infant’s sense of itself as separate from the external world occurs simultaneously, and necessarily so, with its recognition that there is a world separate from it. This realization develops as the infant experiences situations in which its wishes are not automatically met. This initial frustration of satisfaction is a necessary moment for the infant’s developing sense of itself as distinct from the world. This frustration begins the process of individuation from which mature individuals can arise. At the core of every human being is a drama of support and frustration from which psychic structure results. Human nature is fundamentally developmental, and it is deeply dependent on appropriate and sustained interactions with a world that, on the one hand, comforts and supports it, while, on the other hand, frustrating the infant by not being always and immediately there to meet needs and supply comfort and support. The complex relation between infant and world is characterized by what Lear, borrowing from Winnicott, labels the good-­enough mother or the good-­enough parents. In interactions with such parents, an infant develops in independence and acquires a self-­confidence and self-­affection that supports the process of individuation. This developing individuation does not just happen; rather, for Lear, a psychological individual is distinguished from a biological being by its ability to have a representation of itself as an individual. Although Lear does not put it this way, an act of persuasion is at the core of the individual’s self-­constitution. Individuals come into being because they have persuaded themselves that they are individuals. The acquisition of this self-­ representation is an achievement, and it is through this achievement that the subjectivity of the psychological individual is brought into being. As Lear puts it, “What Freud is beginning to realize [in his recognition that the self can be the object of its own libidinal investment] is that part of what it is to be an I is to have a self-­representation, which is itself invested with one’s own libido” (135). The I’s investment of its libido in itself begins as the infant is led to discover or create or realize that the undifferentiated psychic field the infant had initially experienced as simply a given is not in fact unified and homogeneous. In determining what parts or aspects or qualities of this experienced field belong to or are a part of the infant’s emerging

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identity, the infant takes in and walls off its fantasies, perceptions, proto-­ beliefs, and wishes, along with some loving and affirming qualities of its mother. Through this process, the infant begins to establish the boundaries that mark off self from world. Lear emphasizes that this process is active and “not merely a neurophysiological process by which I passively come to resemble my environment, as though I were a piece of film exposed to the light of the external world” (161). The world that is internalized is not simply some empirical external world but rather is the loving world as it has been experienced by the infant. It is a world experienced as a responsiveness that affirms the emerging subject. This loving world is the world that has welcomed the infant and has been made the object of the infant’s libidinal investment. In the act of drawing the boundary between the infant’s sense of self and its sense of an external world, the infant gives birth to itself, and the self that it has ushered into existence is shaped by Eros: When I take in the world, and thereby constitute myself, I do not simply mistake myself for the world. I am claiming, in a sense reclaiming, my libidinal investment as mine. I am taking back my own love, transfigured by its interaction with the loving mother. In this sense, the I is an interpretation: I become what I take the world to be. (Lear, 162)

This constitution of the self is dependent on the world being a certain way for the infant. Lear claims: “Psychic structure, Freud realizes, is created by a dialectic of love and loss. The structure of the mind is an inner recreation of the structure of the loved world” (160). Both the infant and the world that the infant recognizes are a consequence of and manifestation of Eros. For Lear, this process by which the self begins to realize that it is a distinct self argues that the world itself must be supportive of erotic attachment and facilitate the process through which such attachment can take place. If it is a necessary feature of individuation that both a self and a world of distinct objects emerge, and if that world as a proto-­world existing in an undifferentiated psychic field was an object of libidinal attraction, then it is reasonable to ask what made that proto-­world an object of sexual investment. Lear’s answer is that this world had to be experienced as lovable by the infant. And for the infant to find a world lovable, that world had to be loving. Love grows and develops in response to love. An erotic responsiveness is at the heart of any subject who develops into an individual. The particular path of this development is through an erotic dialectic in which the infant takes in the more organized love of its parents and incorporates that love into its own emerging constitution or psychological structure. Having taken in this

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more organized love, the infant itself becomes more erotically organized and becomes capable of demanding even more erotically organized love from its parents. What is disclosed by this increasing exchange of erotic relationships is that humans are creatures who, under the right circumstances, are formed in response to the force of Eros. That human nature is to some extent a consequence of erotic development means that there is an inherent responsiveness in humans that can be nurtured and, in this nurturing, grow into ever more sophisticated ways of understanding and loving the world: “Love is not just a feeling or a discharge of energy, but an emotional orientation to the world. . . . Whatever its regressive tendencies, love is also a force within us for development into an ever more complex and higher unity” (Lear, 153). For this development to take place, the infant with its developing sense of a distinct self must encounter a world that is good enough. If human development as a process fueled by Eros is not arbitrary, it is nonetheless contingent. For the infant to develop and partake in the process of individuation, the world must both support and frustrate that developing individual. Individuals develop only to the extent that they are persuaded that the world loves and affirms them. Development is a paradigmatic instance of persuasion. Development proceeds through love seeking more organized instances of love and then incorporating these more organized instances of love into an evolving psychological structure: the more the world supports a human being, the more the human being will seek from the world in terms of loving possibilities. Because the world will always exceed in loving organization the emerging individual, there is no endpoint to this growth. Human beings are human becomings, discovering new possibilities—­possibilities that are both genuinely new and speak to some aspect of the self able to respond to those possibilities. But even as individuals can develop greater appreciation and understanding of the implications of the wishes and erotic drives that continue to fuel their engagement with the world, these selves cannot be objects of knowledge because they do not have fixed or determined identities. While subjectivity is, as Socrates understood, a legitimate object of investigation, it is not something that we can definitively know. Humans are fated to pursue a journey of self-­understanding that has no endpoint. This fate reveals the paradoxical quality in which human responsiveness can lead to the discovery of new and unanticipated insights into what one loves, while also feeling like these same insights disclose some core aspect of the self. The process entails simultaneous discovery and affirmation. What is acquired is not knowledge; rather, one is persuaded and hence transformed.

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This dynamic of discovery and affirmation plays out in what Lear labels as “accepting responsibility” for oneself. Such an act of acceptance is not the discovery of a preexisting truth about the self but is the paradigmatic activity by which the self comes to be a distinct individual. For Lear, the paradigmatic instance of accepting responsibility occurs in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King: Oedipus, in accepting responsibility for his acts, is claiming that the truth that ultimately matters is, as he says of his blinding, that “I have done it with my own hand.” Whatever the gods ordained, Oedipus says, the fact is that I did it. Oedipus is in effect claiming a part of nature for himself. He treats himself as a locus of activity and in that way demands to be distinguished from the rest of nature. (Lear, 170–­71)

The acceptance of responsibility cannot be willed by an individual. As implied in the very nature of acceptance, such an understanding involves a recognition and acknowledgment of a truth that reveals something about the individual that exceeds what can be deliberately determined. It also suggests that coming to know oneself requires an openness to those experiences that reveal aspects of ourselves that we either did not know or did not want to know. This understanding harkens back to why some of the Greek lyric poets saw Eros as a threat, for Eros showed those individuals something about themselves that they did not know and that challenged the way each individual had drawn the boundaries of the self to protect an understanding of it. To see the self as shaped by and responsive to Eros is to see the constitution or reconstitution of the self as a lifelong task. If part of this task involves what Lear calls “making one’s It one’s own”—­ and what Freud captured in his claim that the task of psychoanalysis is to support the process in which “where it was, there I shall become”—­the complementary part of this process is one in which individuals takes ownership of the culture into which they have been born and whose values have been inculcated into them. Taking this ownership is the challenge presented by the ideal-­I or the super-­I. For in the acts by which the infant takes in the love of the good-­enough parents or good-­enough world, the infant also takes in the values of those parents or that world. If an individual is to succeed in the task of individuation, then that individual cannot unreflectively take over their cultural values. Accepting responsibility for who one is does not mean that a developing individual must simply adhere to or grant unquestioned authority to the cultural values they absorbed in responding to the world

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in which they were born. Rather, the individual needs to make those values their own, so that the values also speak to the wishes, drives, and other archaic psychic elements at the individual’s core. And to do so also means that the individual may need to reject some of those values as inconsistent with the person the individual aspires to be. That is, the individual needs to integrate their culture’s values into their understanding and experience of the world as an erotic partner in their ongoing constitution of self. This integration is not simply an additive operation; it transforms the constitution of the self as the values that help shape the self acquire new valence. But if Lear’s philosophical interpretation of Freud’s understanding of the centrality of Eros to this reconstitution of the subject elucidates how such transformations occur both in ordinary life and through the intervention of psychoanalysis, it is not intended to explain the operation of persuasion—­ either why it is needed or how it operates. So the question for a theory of persuasion is: how is a transformation of human subjectivity accomplished apart from the practice of Freudian psychoanalysis? In what ways are Eros and persuasion kindred forces and in what ways do they differ?

five

Persuasion, Conceptualization, and Emotion Reconstituting Subjectivity

The meanings, emotions and desires alive in a person’s soul play a crucial role in determining who that person is. There cannot, then, be a science of human life without its including subjectivity within its scope. For, as Freud realized, the deeper meanings which shape a person’s soul and structure his outlook are not immediately available to his awareness. A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity. —Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature, 4

If the guiding purpose of the action/event we call persuasion is the reconstitution of the subject, this purpose raises an immediate question: why do subjects need reconstitution? For psychoanalysis, the need is clear: patients are suffering, and that suffering needs to be addressed by a specific and supportive therapeutic practice. In Lear’s psychoanalytic model, subjectivity is formed and transformed in the action that is known as love. This development occurs or is blocked depending on the relationship that a subject has to a good-­enough world. In those cases in which the blocking of the development interferes with the ongoing interaction of subject and world, psychoanalysis, through an interpretation developed in a loving interaction between analyst and analysand, can intervene and help analysands regain some control over their life. The purpose of persuasion is different. Efforts at persuasion, like the interpretations of psychoanalysts, are a response to a need for change; however, the situations addressed through persuasion are not necessarily occasioned by a blocking of erotic development. Rhetoric is not psychoanalysis. But if not emotional dysfunction, what are the needs of the audience that make persuasion an essential practice for the reconstitution of selves and communities? Where or how do these needs arise, and how

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does persuasion meet those needs? To pose these questions is to invert the way in which persuasion, defined as the action of a rhetor directed at an audience, has been addressed in the history of rhetoric. To see persuasion in light of audience needs is to resituate inquiries into the nature and importance of persuasion. From the time of Aristotle, rhetorical theory has treated persuasion as part of everyday life. Aristotle famously begins his technical reform of rhetoric by stating that dialectic and rhetoric are actions that people take naturally: Rhetoric is an antistrophos to dialectic; for both are concerned with such things as are, to a certain extent, within the knowledge of all people and belong to no separately defined science. A result is that all people, in some way, share in both; for all, to some extent, try both to test and maintain an argument [as in dialectic] and to defend themselves and attack [others, as in rhetoric]. Now among the general public, some do these things randomly and others through an ability acquired by habit, but since both ways are possible, it is clear that it would also be possible to do the same thing by [following] a path; for it is possible to observe the cause of why some succeed by habit and others accidentally, and all would at once agree that such observation is the activity of an art [tekhne]. (On Rhetoric, 1354a, 1–­2)

Aristotle grounded his reform of rhetoric by analyzing the types of judgments audiences made and the types of political situations that called for these judgments. He then formulated his practice of rhetoric by systematizing the ways in which a rhetor could determine, or at least influence, the audience’s judgment. By basing his rhetoric in an appreciation of the ways in which the audience made judgments, Aristotle was able to distill a set of practices that he made into an art that provided a disciplined way to discover effective arguments. But if Aristotle understood rhetoric in terms of the judgments made by the audience, he did not investigate why the audience stood in need of persuasion. In systematizing an art of persuasion, Aristotle’s concern was focused on the ways in which a rhetor can assist an audience when making certain kinds of judgments. For him, the assistance or guidance provided by the rhetor consisted in presenting the audience with a particular mode of inferential reasoning. A skillful rhetoric required the rhetor mastering the practice of inferential reasoning and then communicating that inferential process to the audience in a way enabling the audience to take that process over and render a judgment in a particular situation. Rhetoric, through the actions of the rhetor, provided an audience

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access to a process of inference or improved an audience’s ability to make inferences advancing its own interests and understanding. While any audience possessed the capacity for inferential reasoning, it would be benefited by a skilled rhetor making that reasoning available to it in a form embodying the operation of practical reason. What rhetoric offered the audience was assistance in drawing inferences. The question, then, is: why does an audience stand in need of such assistance? Do its members lack the discipline or capacity to make legitimate inferences on their own? Are the audience’s ordinary perceptions, beliefs, and emotions, if left unassisted by the art of rhetoric, unreliable sources for judgment? Again, Aristotle is helpful, for he has a more complicated view of the audience. He begins from an assumption that, more often than not, people are able to come to the right decision. As he puts it, “the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites” (1355a, 12). There are several factors, however, that can intervene and prevent that which is true or just from prevailing. One such factor, of course, would be the deceptive practice of rhetoric by rhetors who either intentionally or unintentionally deceive the audience. Second, the everyday audience is not necessarily able to follow a complicated and rigorous argument. This is a human limit. Most listeners are not trained in or skilled at following an intricate demonstration. They need the argument presented in a form, possibly abbreviated, that makes it more available. Third, the practice of rhetoric trains individuals to argue both sides of an issue and hence enables them to see beyond the boundaries of their position. This practice allows them both to understand other possible ways of viewing an issue and to develop stronger and more nuanced defenses for their own positions. Finally, one needs rhetoric because at times one must be able to defend oneself and one’s positions. The audience needs the assistance of a principled rhetoric to prevent the triumph of that which is false or unjust over that which is true and just. Aristotle addresses this last situation especially, for he believes that the possible defeat of that which is true or just is exacerbated by a rhetorical practice which has reduced persuasion to emotional manipulation: As things are now, those who have composed Arts of Speech, have worked on a small part of the subject; for only pisteis are artistic (other things are supplementary), and the writers say nothing about enthymemes, which is the “body” of persuasion, while they give most of their attention to matters external to the subject; 4. for verbal attack and pity and anger and such emotions of the soul do not relate to fact but are appeals to the juryman. . . . [But] it is wrong to warp the jury by leading them into anger or envy or pity; that

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Emotions, when not appropriate, distort judgment, and thus they create a point of vulnerability for the audience and provide a limited agency for the inartistic rhetor. Because Aristotle believes that the audience will, by and large, respond appropriately to the world it perceives, the problem, then, resides not in the response but in the perception. An inartistic rhetor uses emotional manipulation to distort the audience’s perception. But if the audience can be emotionally manipulated, this vulnerability suggests that the members of the audience do not have a firm hold on their emotions. Because they unreflectively inhabit their lives and their feelings about the world, audience members are subject to the consequent loss of control over their lives. This loss of control opens them up to manipulation that distorts their decisions. Their decisions are problematic because they do not accurately embody how the audience members do—­or, given their values and beliefs, should—­feel about a situation. When the audience is manipulated, its freedom and authority are clandestinely usurped by the rhetor’s ability to create powerful, if distorting, emotions. The danger of this rhetoric—­its corrupting influence—­is that it usurps the possibility of the audience’s making decisions that truly reflect its members’ understanding and interests. A corrupt rhetoric does not simply put ignorance in the place of a possible self-­understanding but actively fosters such ignorance. Such rhetoric is pursued for the benefit of the rhetor and not the audience; its intent is to serve the rhetor’s interest and to enhance his power. Consequently, the audience’s subjectivity is reconstituted to assist the ends the rhetor imposes on the audience. For the sophistic practice of rhetoric, the audience is not an end in itself but a means to further the rhetor’s power. Aristotle’s criticism of this practice is not directed at its ethics; rather, he sees the failure of sophistic rhetoric as rooted in an ignorance as to what is actually involved in judgment. He charges sophistic rhetoric with being technically infelicitous; this rhetoric is problematic because it is inartistic. In contrast to such corrupt rhetoric, which is shaped by the interests of the rhetor rather than the audience, an artistic rhetoric has legitimacy as an art because it serves an end integral to the practice: it assists an audience in making a judgment. To borrow from a standard Socratic line, an artistic pursuit differs from an inartistic pursuit because the guiding purpose of an artistic rhetoric is to promote an end other than the advantage of the individual rhetor (in the standard example, an artistic practice of medicine, grounded in knowledge of the body’s constitution, serves the interests of the patient and

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not those of the physician). Aristotle’s concern was to reform rhetoric so that the art would have artistic or technical integrity and be, therefore, effective. As Jonathan Lear puts it: “The Rhetoric is a handbook for orators: its aim is to teach public speakers how to sway a crowd. And that is precisely why he [Aristotle] discusses the emotions. If the orator can manipulate the frame through which his audience interprets the world, the battle of persuasion is virtually won: the audience will then ‘see the facts’ in a particular light” (47–­48). So even if Aristotle bases his rhetoric on the particular judgments an audience needs to make, his rhetoric sees the operation of persuasion in terms of the activity of the rhetor. If the rhetor’s purpose is guided by an appreciation of the technical demands of an artistic rhetoric that assists an audience in making the right judgment, persuasion is still approached as action done by the rhetor on the audience. Such a view of rhetoric, even though it is developed to counter manipulation, continues to see persuasion in terms of the purposes of the rhetor. That framing is a continuing sore point for the critics of persuasion. For them, even a technically reformed persuasion is still understood as an action by someone on someone else—­i.e., as the action of a rhetor on an audience. This understanding of persuasion is reflected in the persistent suspicion that efforts at persuasion, however they are presented, are really efforts by a rhetor to get an audience to do what the rhetor wants. Persuasion is seen as inherently manipulative and aggressive. However much a reformed rhetoric seeks to address the needs of the audience, its practice is still defined in terms of how the audience can be led or influenced. Further, for Aristotle, the audience’s needs are assumed to be limited to assistance in making particular kinds of inferential judgments. This assumption makes the audience’s need primarily a need for technical assistance. But what if the need for persuasion arises not only from the challenges of making valid inferences but from certain challenges inherent in the nature of subjectivity? Aristotle’s account of pathos in book 2 of the Rhetoric raises just such a possibility: an audience can, for a variety of reasons, be out of emotional alignment with its environment. In such cases, which may represent the ordinary state of the audience, the audience’s problem is not that the inferential process is being short-­circuited or obstructed but that the audience members, in their emotional confusion or dissonance, have lost sense of who they are. What the audience members need is guidance in helping them affectively reorient themselves. If this understanding is so, we can ask a new question: How does persuasion look different if we invert the traditional model and ask not how can a rhetor persuade an audience, but why an audience, other than for help in making valid inferences, stands in need of persuasion—­in what way is an audience confused about who it is?

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To answer that question, it is helpful to turn to a claim made by Lear: “A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity” (4). Our lack of self-­knowledge does not arise simply from an inability to make valid inferences; rather, there is something about subjectivity that makes understanding one’s own subjectivity not immediately or easily available. This lack of understanding cannot be traced back to a deficiency in information about ourselves. The issue is more complicated, and our lack of self-­ knowledge may be an important part of who we are. Further, that lack may not represent a failure on our part but rather indicate a direction for how we should pursue our lives. Plato certainly thought that this was the case. In the Phaedrus, he has Socrates acknowledge that he is in part a mystery to himself, so much so that the focus of his inquiries is directed primarily at understanding better his own subjectivity: “I conduct my researches not into them [the myths], but into myself. Am I perhaps a creature more involved, more puffed with passion than Typhon? Or am I a gentler, more straightforward animal, to whom the goods have given a modest nature?” (230a). Socrates’s quest for self-­understanding cannot be solved by his acquiring some fact that he currently does not possess, or by his becoming more skillful at making valid inferences. As the dialogue develops, it becomes clear that this quest for self-­ understanding does not have an endpoint. Rather than some truth about the self that proves final, what Socrates seeks and what Plato offers as the purpose that should structure a life is a conversation that operates as an erotic dialectic. The partners in a Socratic conversation are trying to understand the desires that move them, and then to understand better who they can become. In the conversational partners’ collaborative pursuit of the divinity within themselves, they discover what is possible when a life is conducted through human interactions fueled by an ever-­expanding love. In Lear’s terms, these erotic conversations provide the means by which subjectivities develop through interaction with organized love. They are paradigmatic instances of responsiveness. In its concern with both Eros and persuasion, the Phaedrus prompts the question that we are pursuing: what is the role of persuasion in the erotically grounded development and transformation of subjectivity? Does the need for persuasion arise because humans, by their very nature, do not understand who they are, and they are trying to negotiate lives whose relation to the world is fluid and incapable of a final formulation? Is persuasion needed because the nature of the self is to develop in ways that seek to be adequate to the potential embodied in its values, desires, and beliefs?

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If the development of the self is an ongoing project and if it proceeds, in part, by the growth of a more nuanced understanding of the self ’s negotiation of its core values with the world in which it lives, then persuasion speaks to the ways in which subjects can conceive or reconceive either or both themselves and their worlds. In exploring these potential meanings as the self develops, persuasion would ground the effort at reconstitution by providing the self with ways to better understand its situation. At the heart of persuasion is conceptualization. Persuasion provides either new concepts or reinterpretations of already held concepts so that subjects can appreciate better their position in the worlds in which they live.

Conceptualization Lear notes that the “concrete images of primary process may be preconceptual, but they are also proto-­conceptual. They are that from which concepts emerge” (85). If images, wishes, and fantasies move through a process of association in primary-­process thinking, this association proceeds on a basis of a “primitive sense of similarity and relevance” (Lear, 85). As the mind develops, it begins to move from this primitive sense of similarity to groupings that reflect not merely connection but shared traits or properties. Association is being disciplined into conceptualization: “The mind is not just gathering facts; it is learning how to think” (85). The mind is not merely responding to its experience; it is beginning to separate itself from the immediacy of that experience and gain some control over that experience. This control becomes possible because mind, through its ability to form concepts, becomes more able to discriminate between similarities that are the accidental consequence of association and those that disclose relations and allow mind to support actions in which wishes can be transformed into desires. If conceptualization is an ability that develops, then it is reasonable to assume that as individuals grow and mature, they will be capable of more sophisticated and nuanced conceptualization. Put simply, as individuals grow, they will under the right circumstances be able to think better and develop a more complex and rich understanding of themselves and their worlds. As they develop in their capacity to respond, they are able to conceptualize both their selves and their worlds in ways that generate possibilities that are both new and that speak to cares central to those individuals. Growth is a function of a developing responsiveness. Under the right supportive circumstances, responsiveness increases and mind grows.

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This developing ability to think in terms of ever more sophisticated concepts is especially important in the action/event of persuasion. If persuasion is not simply an instance of agreement but involves understanding things differently, then presumably the subject has either acquired new concepts or reinterpreted its previously held concepts in ways that speak more richly and fully to its core interests. Only when understanding is reorganized or reconstituted does persuasion occur. The reason persuasion can occur is because the concepts through which the subject understands itself and its world have changed. This change is both an action (because it involves the subject acknowledging and validating the transformation) and an event (because it cannot be simply willed by the subject). The new concept must speak genuinely in some way to who the subject is, how the world is understood, and what the subject’s relationship is to that world. Through the acquisition of these concepts, the subject is transformed and reconstituted in the action/event of persuasion. Concepts, as they function in the action/event of persuasion, cannot be equated with abstract ideas. If a concept is to be meaningful to a subject, it needs to help the subject make sense of their life. Lear’s description of a successful psychoanalytic interpretation brings out this feature in the way that a concept must operate if it is to be meaningful to a subject: If we remain within the vocabulary of concepts and objects, we might say that concepts on their own are not items with which the mind can understand its own activities. That is why the bare statement of, say, the Oedipus complex is so unenlightening: the mind is not yet in possession of that with which it could understand itself. A good interpretation, then, is not just a conceptualized judgment that explicates psychological phenomena, it is a unity composed of the judgment and the phenomena it rationalizes. (11–­12)

The issue is not what a particular concept means but what a particular concept means for a particular subject. How has the subject integrated or failed to integrate a particular concept into their complex intellectual, ethical, and emotional constitution? How does the concept allow the subject to make sense of their own complex subjectivity and the relation of that subjectivity to the world? If one assumes for a moment that concepts are not static but can be reinterpreted in light of new experience or changes in other concepts that already inform subjectivity, then a change in a concept should lead to a transformation of subjectivity. Concepts, so conceived, would be crucial to the contribution that persuasion makes to subjects’ ability to adjust to and

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realign themselves to changes in the world or changes in their understandings of either themselves or their worlds. To understand how such realignment occurs, it is helpful to look at a comment by Danielle S. Allen on how we acquire our democratic inheri­ tance: “We all share, and take in as unselfconsciously as we do air, our political institutions, and a network of words, names, metaphors, and tropes for describing them and their work. These terms establish the contours of our collective political imagination” (Talking to Strangers, 53). We take in the ethical and political concepts of the cultures into which we, as individuals, are born, and this taking-­in is done unselfconsciously. Through the action/ event of persuasion, we are able to move from this unselfconscious understanding of our political vocabularies to an understanding in which these basic terms are examined and their implications better understood. Allen argues that this process of coming to understand more fully our beliefs and values can be seen in the importance that Americans now give to tolerance as a political value. She sees this coming to understand democratic values in a new way as part of a reconstitution that originates in the civil rights struggles that arose in the 1950s: “How U.S. citizens think about their citizenship has changed dramatically since 1957; tolerance, for instance, is an ethical norm of ever-­increasing authority” (Talking to Strangers, 3–­4). The value of tolerance is not self-­evident, and one can imagine political orders in which tolerance would be considered an anathema. If Americans have come to value tolerance more than they apparently did in earlier times and to hold themselves accountable to it as an ethical standard, then their appreciation of the importance of tolerance in their assessment of their self-­worth must have undergone change. They must have learned to see tolerance differently and to understand that, as a value, it was central to how they saw themselves as ethical individuals. Their political imagination changed as they began to appreciate how important tolerance was to their understanding of an ethical political life. They were persuaded of the worth of a value whose true import they had not fully considered. Their understanding of the concept of tolerance changed, and because they were persuaded that tolerance was a central value for them, they reconstituted themselves politically. This shift reflected not so much a conscious choice as the register of a change in how a people understood themselves. Persuasion was not principally the result of conscious and deliberate argument, although such argument did contribute to the change in how tolerance was understood; rather, change happened over time because of a capacity that humans have to reconstitute themselves as their understanding of themselves or their worlds changes.

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Responsiveness This reconstitution of subjectivity is rooted in and a consequence of a responsiveness, based in Eros, at the core of human life. As a drive to be in a supportive relationship with a world that responds to one’s need for affirmation, Eros manifests itself in this responsiveness: “But if we consider what it is about the world that the drives love, it would seem to be the parents’ organized, loving responsiveness to the child’s needs. A successful identification in a good-­enough world ought thus to be more than just the taking-­in of a love object. The emerging I ought to embody a loving responsive relation to (the) it’s drives” (Lear, 169). Individuals develop through a loving response to a good-­enough world. Such development requires both an individual and a world that can respond to each other. And the capacity for responsiveness is itself not fixed but develops in complexity as individuals respond to the world’s meeting of their needs by making ever-­greater demands on the world for loving responses. The developing responsiveness shapes the individual’s soul. The structure of the soul—­of the individual’s subjectivity—­is a consequence of the internalization and interpretation of the structure of this good-­enough world. Individuals develop through an interaction of demand/response or, alternatively, of need/met need that transforms psychic energy and the frustration of that energy into a meaningful psychological structure that acquires the generative capacity of a form. This form develops into a more distinct psychological constitution, one shaped by responsiveness and capable of responding to the world and, in turn, demanding even greater responsiveness. In this process of development, the responsiveness that is manifested in the innate human outreach to a supportive world effects a reconstitution of the form in which the contents of the archaic mind and the cultural values as transmitted by good-­enough parents are realigned. This reconstitution allows humans to grow in complexity as they negotiate a world that both supports and frustrates them. Lear identifies this process as love in action: Love is an active force that promotes the development of ever more complex unities. In humans it encourages individuation: a taking up of the drives, on the one hand, a taking over of the super-­I on the other. This process is plausibly conceived as a manifestation of love, not only because individuation is an internalization of a loving environment but also because it is only when we manifest this emotional orientation toward our drives and values that individuation can occur. (212–­13)

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If this process of development proceeds and an individual grows in complexity and maturity, there are also moments when the question of how to respond to a particular situation requires the individual’s deliberate attention. These are moments when the individual reflectively engages the development process. This reflection may arise because, for a variety of reasons, the quality of the world’s responses to the individual’s needs has become problematic. The good-­enough world may be felt to be no longer good enough; it may feel unjust or disrespectful or cruel. Or, in the example from Allen, the world may manifest an intolerance that is at odds with valuing and respecting all citizens. This disjunction may necessitate individuals reassessing what they thought was a just world that responded to human concerns. Or a person may already experience injustice and need a new way to conceptualize it, so that injustice is not simply experienced as an endemic feature of a world of suffering, but as something that can be actively and appropriately addressed. This reassessment may lead to a new understanding of the way in which the world is organized, and it may prompt the individual to act and attempt to transform the world. Or individuals may find that their own responses to the world are inadequate and that they need to reflect on and possibly change their behavior, as they now see the ways in which their beliefs and actions abetted an intolerance. Whatever the case, individuals are prompted to rethink how they understand themselves and their worlds. And in this rethinking, they can be led to reexamine the concepts through which they made sense of themselves and their worlds. This reexamination is not merely an intellectual exercise; rather, it is a more complex reorientation of individuals as they reassess the concepts through which they have organized their perception and understanding of the world. Subjects can find themselves in these situations not because they are suffering from internal contradictions that might be addressed through psychoanalytic intervention but because something is amiss in the world or because their understanding of who they are is no longer satisfactory. In these situations, they do not need psychoanalytic assistance, but they do need persuasion. They need to rethink the concepts through which they understand themselves and their worlds. This reassessment of concepts seeks to resituate individuals in a way that more accurately reflects their relation to the world and that consequently impacts how they understand themselves. When successful, this reconceptualization fosters a transformation of understanding of self and world. Persuasion depends on this possibility of a transformation of the constitution of the soul by a new emotional alignment and/or a reflection on and new stance toward the cultural values

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that the subject has internalized from its good-­enough parents and its larger political and cultural environments. Just as important, when the world is not responsive or responds in destructive ways, persuasion cannot occur. If change should happen in such a situation, it would not be the result of persuasion.

Emotion The conceptualization or reconceptualization through which persuasion proceeds involves the development of new understandings of one’s emotions, beliefs, and values that speak to possibilities that inhered within these emotions, beliefs, and values but had not yet received adequate expression. Such persuasion is at the heart of the Socratic quest to understand oneself better. This quest is open-­ended. As Lear points out on multiple occasions, investigations into subjectivity do not recover already existing meanings that just happen to be not yet known; rather, these investigations complete possible trajectories of emotions or proto-­emotions that arise in the archaic mind. The ultimate authority for a successful persuasion has to be the subject’s acceptance of the persuasion, not simply as an understanding that was agreed to voluntarily but as an understanding that expresses more completely meanings that were seeking expression as more appropriate responses to the external world and the subject’s self-­understanding. There is a paradox at the heart of persuasion. While a successful persuasion cannot be compelled but must be freely assented to, the subject cannot refuse it without violating its integrity. Persuasion requires both freedom and necessity. The power and structure of emotions display the revelatory nature of persuasion and the activity of human responsiveness. Lear argues that emotions cannot be reduced to feelings, but that, following Aristotle’s discussion in the Rhetoric, they need to be seen as orientations. They express a subject’s attitude toward both the external world and the subject’s place in that world. Emotions are not irrational; they are proto-­rational. But if emotions are proto-­rational, they are not usually reasoned consequences of events in the world. They often occur immediately, and conscious thought has to catch up with them. It is as if they occur before an internal censor can prevent their arising. They can certainly be repressed before becoming conscious, or more accurately, their development can be short-­circuited if they pose a threat to a protected identity. But both their expression and repression are revelatory. Whatever subjects may consciously think about themselves—­ whatever self-­knowledge they might seek to evade, the emotions reveal how the subjects truly regard themselves. And in some instances, a subject may

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experience multiple and conflicting emotions, thus creating situations that would predispose a subject to be a candidate for persuasion. In their immediacy, emotions are crucial because they slip by the censor. Aristotle’s discussion of emotions is particularly helpful in this regard. According to Aristotle, anger is a response to belittling. Its occurrence is both an expression of self-­understanding and an alerting of the subject to an event that demands a response. An emotion reveals how a situation is perceived; it records a perception. When individuals become angry, the belittling is not just felt as a slight. Rather it is felt as a slight because it is experienced as an act of injustice. Anger is the response of subjects who feel they have been injured for no reason. Aristotle defines anger as “desire, accompanied by [mental and physical] distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed without justification, against oneself or those near to one” (1378a, 2.1). A significant amount of information is embedded in this emotional response. The slight that provokes the anger must meet three criteria: it must be conspicuous, without justification, and directed either at the subject or those close to the subject. In the absence of any of these criteria, anger does not arise. What makes one angry reveals the subjects’ feelings about themselves—­what kinds of regard they consider themselves entitled to. The issue is one of being treated justly. Also, anger reveals that one believes that oneself and those near one are worthy of regard. The failure to become angry when someone is slighted reveals a lack of self-­worth. Equally, the failure to become angry when others are slighted indicates either that these others are not close to the subject, or, if they are close, that the subject does not consider them to be worth much. Finally, the slight has to be conspicuous or apparent. It has to be of sufficient magnitude that it is worth carrying about. People who get angry over small things reveal either an over-­regard for themselves or a defensiveness that bespeaks a low self-­regard manifesting as an ever-­present irritableness. Just as revealing are the individuals at whom one gets angry. Again, emotional responses establish how one individual views another. Aristotle argues that the same action undertaken by different people produces different responses because of the differing relationships involved. Whom you get angry with and whom you fail to get angry with is a function of how you stand toward a particular individual. If slighted, one is more likely to get angry at a friend or at someone one views as a subordinate than at a person with whom one has little or no relation, or who stands above one in some hierarchy. Our emotions let us know how we understand our relations to others and provide information that allows us to negotiate those relations. Also, what you get angry at is an indication of what you value: “[people

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become angry] at those who speak badly of, and scorn, things they themselves take most seriously, for example, those taking pride in philosophy if someone speaks against philosophy or taking pride in their appearance if someone attacks their appearance and similarly in other cases” (Aristotle, 1378b, 12.13). As Aristotle develops his account, it is clear that emotions are even more fine-­tuned than they might initially appear. If someone values something he possesses and is secure in his knowledge of its worth, that subject may well not get angry at a slight because it does not reach any sore point in his self-­regard. In contrast, Aristotle shrewdly points out that in those situations where we are unsure that we actually possess the quality that is belittled, we are more likely to become angry: “They do this much more if they suspect that they do not really have [what they take pride in], either not at all or not strongly, or do not seem to have it; for whenever they confidently think they excel in the matters in which they are scoffed at, they do not care” (1378–­79, 12.14). That anger is intimately connected to one’s understanding of justice is apparent in the ways in which Aristotle details how anger can be quieted. First, he mentions that since an individual who is angry views the slight as intentional, if that individual comes to see it as involuntary, the anger disappears. The emotional change registers that the individual no longer believes that there was an intent to treat him unjustly. This understanding also explains why a sincere apology works to quell anger while an insincere apology can increase it. The sincere apology recognizes the validity of the emotion and takes responsibility for the injury and acknowledges that it was not just. This acknowledgment is important. If one feels that they have been justly injured, they do not become angry. And if one feels one has justly injured another, one does not apologize for the injury. The immediacy of emotional response speaks to the complex and affective orientation that humans have to their worlds. Emotions make clear that humans are fundamentally responsive creatures. What is remarkable about emotional response is that it is not usually mediated through a deliberative, conscious process. Lear labels emotions as proto-­rational, and that characterization is helpful. They are responses that are striving for understanding and, as Lear points out, are only complete when the subject can produce the right (meaning, both appropriate and actual) reason to justify their occurrence. But if one focuses not on an emotion’s completion but on its genesis, it is impossible not be struck by how often an emotional response accurately embodies the subject’s self-­understanding, even if the subject is not consciously aware of that understanding or is unconsciously trying to avoid acknowledging it.

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The faithfulness of emotions to the desires, beliefs, and values that form the core of one’s subjectivity argues that a capacity for responsiveness plays a key role in the development of human subjectivity. In its expressing and reflecting the desires, beliefs, and values of the subject, this responsiveness cannot be understood simply as the register of a reaction to an external stimulus. Responsiveness cannot be reduced to a matter of stimulus and response. Rather, responsiveness registers a need and a capacity for an affirmative affective relationship. It is the drive to love and to be loved. Responsiveness is what enables and requires a subject to have a qualitative engagement with the world, an engagement rooted in the need for an affirmation of the subject’s value. When the world, initially in the actions of the good-­enough parents, meets the needs and desires of the infant, the world in effect acknowledges the importance of those needs and the legitimate claim of the infant to have those needs met. This acknowledgment, as Lear has demonstrated, is love in action. And if that is the case, then an erotic human responsiveness argues that humans are fundamentally affective creatures. In this understanding, reason itself is an evolved and disciplined form of responsiveness. One reasons because one is trying to understand and in some way catch up with the implications of the desires, beliefs, and values that inform one’s subjectivity. If a more disciplined and mature rationality will come to define a more developed individual, this individual’s subjectivity continues to interact with and be shaped by its affective interactions with the world. To be human is to be engaged in an ongoing, complicated, and open-­ended process of trying to love the world appropriately. Lear’s account of the incorporation of the values of culture—­as they are internalized in the formation of the “ideal-­I”—­provides a basis for theorizing the role of persuasion in these affective interactions in the world. Lear claims that for Freud, “the structure of the mind is an inner recreation of the structure of the loved world” (180). This structure develops initially through the infant’s interactions with its good-­enough parents. The taking over and incorporating of those values that contribute to the structure of the developing subjectivity is neither conscious nor deliberate. Thus, a developing human being is always engaged with catching up and trying to understand the values and concepts that give meaning to a life. To do so is not a simple matter of acquiring a fixed and static understanding of these values and concepts, but also one of coming to terms with implications and possibilities that may exceed current understandings. These values and concepts can be either generative or crippling depending on how they are understood; they can be a source of further development or of debilitating arrest. Beginning in parental responses, the interactions between developing individual

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and world involve both support and frustration. The infant experiences the world as an environment marked by distinct qualitative responses. The world is experienced by the infant as responsiveness. Or, more correctly, psychic life begins in responsiveness; it is its core fact. This initial experience of responsiveness begins to develop as infants evolve from a state of primary narcissism, which exists as an undifferentiated psychic field, into emerging individuals who start to sense the existence of a world apart from them. As infants begin to sort out which elements of the undifferentiated psychic field are part of their identity and which belong to an external world, they take in and claim some of their parents’ values and affections as part of their internal psychological worlds. This process is not conscious but rather guided by an infant’s affective experience. Freud labels this process as identification (Lear, 161). The subject who is coming to be out of the state of primary narcissism is acquiring an identity whose psychological structure is affective and responsive. The subject is formed in response, and this need for and capacity for response then defines both how the subject interacts with the world and how the subject understands or fails to understand those interactions. The subject’s psychological and consequent intellectual growth involves the development or frustration of that development for a more nuanced and sophisticated responsiveness that appreciates more fully both the implications of internalized values and the question whether the world reflects those values back to the subject. “The I is an interpretation: I become what I take the world to be” (Lear, 162). But this interpretation is not simply a passive recording of a world that has been taken over and internalized uncritically. The fact that subjects acknowledge their separateness from the world that formed them puts a subject in a place to inspect that world and to see if either subject or world lives up to the values that form the subject’s core. Lear labels this action “accepting responsibility”—­it is the action through which the I determines and claims itself as an I. This potential—­for the subject’s ability to take a critical stance toward the world and toward their own identity—­is a consequence of how the subject emerges from the state of primary narcissism in which more mature distinctions do not yet exist between what is wished for and what is possible: “in the earliest identifications there is no firm boundary between fantasy and reality, and thus there can be no firm boundary between what I am and what I would love to be. Freud placed the origin of the ideal-­I in these first identifications. The ideal-­I is the intrapsychic manifestation of what I would love to be” (Lear, 166). As part of forming an identity, the subject embraces a set of values that can become a resource to assess whether both

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his own and the world’s actions measure up to these ideals. This ability to judge whether oneself or one’s world meets the ideals that help structure a subject’s identity is rooted in the developments through which the subject emerges as a distinct subject: “for an I to emerge, the I must be able to distinguish fantasy from reality” (Lear, 167). But if an I needs to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy, it can also use its fantasies as to what is possible as a source of norms to evaluate reality. If the I has to acknowledge reality, it does not have to accept it as-­is. It can, guided by a sense of what is possible and what is desirable, seek to change reality. To the extent that such efforts at change need to take seriously into account what in reality is potentially capable of change and what is not, they are not mere flights of fantasy. They are excursions into the possible. The nature of human-­subject formation leads to creatures capable of creative responses to the world they inhabit. Persuasion has a central role to play in facilitating such creative responses. There are at least two ways in which persuasion can operate. On the one hand, when there is a gap between what the world is or how the subject views itself in terms of the cultural ideals it has internalized and that contribute to the form of its identity, a subject is potentially receptive to understandings that identify that gap and offer ways to address it that will bring the subject back into line with their values. On those occasions in which humans feel that they have somehow lost control of their lives or are out of touch with who they are, they can examine themselves and see if they are living up to the values that are important to them. Or they may come to realize that they no longer value certain things as much as they once did and value other things more. For example, people can change their minds as to what constitutes success. They can come to see that what they considered to be success does not bring satisfaction. What they considered to be success cannot be what success is. They can also decide that if they truly value justice, then certain conditions that they were previously willing to tolerate or excuse can no longer be tolerated or excused, and that they must act differently if they are to be true to themselves. Finally, the subject may come to realize that they have misperceived the world and must now look at it differently. When such re-­apprehension happens, what had been considered good or acceptable can be interrogated and then judged differently. On the other hand, there are instances of persuasion in which the subject understands or is open to a reconsideration of the core values themselves. If the values embody ideals, then those ideals are potentially open to investigation as to whether a particular understanding of an ideal is best. A subject can examine their own current understanding of their values in light of implications or possibilities not previously seen. It is possible, for

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example, in light of events in reality, to reflect on one’s understanding of justice and to ask whether that understanding adequately captures what justice is. Progress in our understanding of racial injustice or in other forms of prejudice depends upon a capacity to see the current world as out of line with the principles espoused by the citizens of a country, especially when those principle embody foundational values. Progress in a democracy, for example, requires a diligent reexamination of the concept of equality. Does the current state of affairs adequately reflect what equality means and what it requires of a society? Danielle S. Allen argues that these questions acquired their particular articulation in response to a reconstitution of democracy in the United States that began in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s (3–­8). These movements forced a reconsideration of a concept of citizenship based on the dominance of white America and the acquiescence of Black America and transformed what had been an accepted definition into a moment for choice and responsibility. Could one consider it just to be a citizen of a democracy when that democracy accepted a set of practices that required the denial of full citizenship to some of its members because of their race? Concepts of both equality and racism were subject to redefinition. Racism could no longer be considered simply as a matter of good or bad individual intentions but needed to be seen as a structural component of citizenship. Core values needed to be understood differently and citizens had to either reconstitute themselves by internalizing concepts of race and equality that more adequately responded to the world or to resist such reconstitution and to close themselves to persuasion. Because of their capacity for responsiveness, people can come to terms with what is required by a commitment to equality or justice, and when they do so, their understanding of what democracy demands can expand. As we respond to our worlds, we can reflect upon our understanding of the concepts that we use to make sense of the world, and we can ask whether those concepts need to be reinterpreted—­so that we can see more clearly a reality that we had not previously recognized because our current understanding of our concepts precluded that recognition. We can thus come to new understandings of what constitutes justice and also of where injustices occur. We can then try to bring the reality of our world into alignment with our new understanding of justice. Through persuasion we are led to reconceptualize our world; we are led to expand and refine our understanding of the values that shape who we are. When such reexamination remains only an intellectual exercise, we are not persuaded. Persuasion requires an affective reconstitution so that we feel differently about the world; those feelings

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in turn obligate us to new commitments and actions. Lear’s account of a successful psychoanalytic interpretation is helpful in explaining how this reconstitution is possible. For persuasion to succeed, the individual being persuaded needs to make a libidinal investment in that persuasion. In the absence of such an investment, the persuasion falls flat. If an action/event of persuasion is to succeed, the individual must take back their original libidinal investment as it has been transformed by the interaction with the offered persuasion and then incorporate that new libidinal object back into the I. That is how reconstitution through persuasion works. When we feel differently, we will perceive things differently. To the extent that we are investigating possibilities that we had not realized before, we are engaged in an inquiry into who we might become. Thus, the paradigmatic instance of persuasion is the Socratic quest to pursue the implications of a divinity within, a divinity that manifests itself as an ongoing exploration of the possibilities inhering in those core concepts that inform the expanding dialectic of responsiveness that shapes human subjectivity.

The Individual At its core, persuasion must speak to the experience of the individual: providing affective and intellectual content to the concepts that form identity and determining the embrace of that identity by the individual. Persuasion is something that happens to and within the individual. To understand why persuasion needs to be understood in terms of an action/event located in the individual and why persuasion so understood argues for the ethical worth of democracy as a political order, it is helpful to turn to Plato’s depiction of Socrates. Socrates holds, at best, a qualified view of the democratic citizens of Athens. He certainly is skeptical about discourse that seeks to address large political bodies. In the Gorgias, he makes this point through the examples of flute-­playing and tragedy, which he argues are offered to the public for their gratification and not for their improvement. He labels both these activities as forms of flattery and groups rhetoric with them. He then indicts rhetoric that addresses the public as aiming at a gratification that maintains the public in a state of immaturity. Defining poetry as a species of rhetoric, Socrates asks Callicles a loaded question: Does it seem to you that orators always speak with an eye on what is best and aim at this: that their fellow citizens may receive the maximum improvement through their words? Or do they, like the poets, strive to gratify their fellows and, in seeking their own private interest, do they neglect the common good,

124 / Chapter Five dealing with public assemblies as though the constituents were children, trying only to gratify them, and caring not at all whether this procedure makes them better or makes them worse? (Plato, Gorgias, 502b)

Public discourse seems unsuited for the types of investigations that Socrates sees as essential to self-­understanding. It is not simply that the practice of rhetoric as public discourse is corrupt but that the audience, gathered as a public, are not disposed to pursue serious political questions. What they want is to be flattered. Socrates’s focuses his efforts at persuasion on particular individuals. If we are to accept his claim that he is the one true political actor (Plato, Gorgias, 521d), this acceptance does not require us to assume that he considers the polis as simply a convenient pact by individuals to provide the security and order necessary for them to pursue private pursuits. Socrates, as a character in the dialogues, is an Athenian, and this identity is inescapably political. As is clear in the Crito, Socrates does not recognize a public/private split; he cannot imagine a life apart from Athens. To withdraw from the city in which he was born and nurtured would not be an act of maintaining integrity but a fundamental violation of who he is. His choice to conduct his search for self-­understanding through conversations with particular individuals is a decision as to where he can best meet his political responsibilities. His decision reflects an understanding that while persuasion is an action/event within the individual, such an action/event is not private. The necessarily public aspect of persuasion is clear in Socrates’s articulation of the value of refutation. Socratic refutation takes place in the city, and that location is not an accidental feature. Refutation requires a population with diverse perspectives. Socrates needs to talk to others so that they can allow him to see what he cannot see about himself. This need for refutation harkens back to our understanding that persuasion needs to be an ongoing activity because our understanding of the concepts through which we order our lives is not fixed but can shift in response to changes in either how we view ourselves or how we come to see the world. To get purchase on his individuality, Socrates needs the responsive discourse of another character. Self-­understanding does not come through introspection but through conversational exchange. Although persuasion may have and will have larger political effects, to understand persuasion one must look to how individuals are constituted and can reconstitute themselves when they internalize discourse that demands such reconstitution if individuals are to honor both how they currently understand themselves and how they should understand themselves,

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given the values that are central and informing to them. Further, these values themselves are not fixed but are capable of reassessment when either they conflict with other foundational values, or the subjects come to see their understanding of these values as having been limited by the cultural frames through which they were viewed. Persuasion—­as a register of a transformation of the constitution of the subject—­happens because values have been reconceptualized. This reconceptualization does not represent a simple intellectual change; rather, it is manifested in subjects’ new affective orientations to themselves and their worlds. If, as Lear and Freud contend, we take over the values of our culture as they have been mediated through our loving interactions with our parents; and, furthermore, we take over these values before we are in a position to decide whether they are values for us and before we are able to understand the full implications of these values—­then, if we are to take responsibility for our lives, we need to be able to examine, reflect upon, and possibly reinterpret these values in light of the complex set of beliefs, values, and desires that shape our subjectivity and in light of the conditions in the world that either support or frustrate these values. This ongoing effort at reinterpretation is enacted through the action/event of persuasion. This understanding of the role of persuasion in the reconstitution of individual subjectivity solves a problem at the core of Laclau’s understanding of hegemony in terms of post-­structural rhetoric. Laclau’s account of hegemony argued that a change in political understanding was the result of an adjustment in the equivalential chains that provided the framework with which particular political organizations were viewed: A signifier like “democracy,” for instance, is certainly a floating one: its meaning will be different in liberal, radical anti-­fascist and conservative anti-­ communist discourses. But how is this floating structured? In the first place, for the floating to be possible, the relationship between signifier and signified has already to be a loose one—­if the signifier was strictly attached to one and only one signified, no floating could take place. So, the floating requires a tendential emptiness. But in the second place, the pattern of floating requires, first, that the floating term be differently articulated to discursive chains that oppose each other (otherwise there would be no floating at all), and, second, that, within these discursive chains, the floating term function not only as a differential component but as an equivalential one in relation to all other components of the chain. (The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 20)

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The change in the meaning of the term is explained wholly as a linguistic operation. The particular roles of various actors in shaping the meaning of the term are beside the point. It is this omission of any consideration of how subjectivity might be reconstituted that limits Laclau’s account of hegemony. He wants to open up the possibility that multiple sources might all promote change, and further he wants to argue that it cannot be predicted in advance which of these sources will, in fact, determine the new hegemonic discourse. To avoid a teleological or deterministic account of political history, he posits contingency as the source of this change: What is constitutive of a hegemonic relation is that its component elements and dimensions are articulated by contingent links. A trade union or a peasant organization, for instance, can take up political tasks that are not related by necessary links to their own corporative specificity. The hegemonic links by which those political tasks become the workers’ or peasants’ tasks are metonymic displacements based on relations of contingency. (The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 88–­89)

But if this account of hegemony allows Laclau to chart change, it does not enable him to explain it or to provide an account of the way in which hegemony supports political progress. Without assuming a telos guiding its development, a theory of persuasion can nonetheless provide an account of how individual transformation can support political progress. In the action/event of persuasion, an individual is coming to terms with the complex relationship of the values that can and should direct a life with the social and political world in which the individual is situated. Persuasion is called for when there is a dissonance between how subjects view themselves and their worlds and how, given the beliefs, values, and desires that structure their lives, they should view themselves and their worlds. In the gap between the self and world experienced and the self and world that are an ideal, a need for persuasion arises. Because individuals stand in need of a perspective that brings who they are or should be in line with their current actions and with the organization of the social and political world, persuasion becomes essential for a subject to maintain an identity when threatened by incoherence. Individuals seek persuasion or are receptive to its operation because of this dissonance. This state of affairs accounts for the fact that a genuine persuasion simultaneously feels like something new and like a return to a more authentic understanding. What is occurring is a richer understanding of the values that shape a life. The concepts through which these values are understood

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are being reinterpreted, and the direction of this reinterpretation is, on the one hand, not predetermined, and, on the other, not free to go in any direction—­it must speak to the values in place, even if it is to challenge those values or the current understanding of those values. Further, for persuasion to go forward, a political order must hold freedom as a value. Moreover, its citizens need to honor the understandings that their responsiveness to their worlds discloses. This honoring is only possible if they value justice and have the courage to reconstitute themselves in light of a persuasion. The action/event of persuasion requires certain political values and, in turn, fosters the development of such values. Persuasion requires democracy; democracy requires persuasion. Lear’s account of the “sublimated satisfaction” that validates a good psychoanalytic interpretation provides an account of psychological change that can also ground a theory seeking to explain the dynamic that structures the reconstitution of a subject in the action/event of persuasion: [In a successful psychoanalytic interpretation,] there is the release of the upward pressure toward expression of an instinctual wish. There is relief in taking another step from passivity to activity: from a position in which one’s life is lived by meaning over which one has little understanding or control to a position in which one actively lives according to meanings one has helped to shape. (216)

Although persuasion cannot be equated with psychoanalytic interpretation—­ they operate very differently, what they share is movement from passivity to activity. If persuasion is not manipulation, pandering, indoctrination, or coercion, it is because in the action/event called persuasion, the individual persuaded develops greater control over the meanings that shape that person’s life. One is persuaded because one recognizes and responds to an understanding that makes a demand on one. The action of the individual who is persuaded cannot occur if an understanding is merely assented to but not integrated into a larger understanding. This necessity for the integration of a new understanding that corresponds more adequately to core values that structure an identity is what distinguishes persuasion from manipulation, pandering, or coercion. In manipulation the understanding, even if internalized, is not one that represents or embodies the core values of the individual. Rather, it is imposed. The imposition occurs through deception, so the individual is misled to believe that their new understanding reflects that individual’s core values in a deeper way, when in fact it seeks to displace those values. In pandering,

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the individual is offered a false if attractive image of themself. In indoctrination, the individual’s own understanding is replaced by that of those in power. The subject loses any sense of independence and is merely a means to be used to forward the ends of those in power. In coercion, understanding is beside the point; one is simply forced to comply with a more powerful agent. These four corrupt forms of transformation are corrupt because they deny an individual the freedom of responsiveness necessary to open the individual to any new demand on self-­understanding. They preclude the openness that is a necessary prerequisite for persuasion. If development in the individual takes place through a dialectic in which erotic demands are exchanged between the developing individual and the good-­enough world, then this dialectic depends on the operation of responsiveness. Persuasion fosters this responsiveness by calling into question a current understanding and then offering a new understanding that speaks more fully to the core values, beliefs, and desires that structure the individual’s soul. At heart, persuasion enables and fosters the individual’s constituted responsiveness as a capacity developed through personal and cultural experience. When one is persuaded, one’s responsiveness is expanded or deepened. In persuasion, the potential meanings inherent in one’s life become more available for action and understanding. Responsiveness becomes an owned responsibility, as persuasion leads one to assume responsibility for these new meanings and understandings. Given this process of a developing and enriching responsiveness, it is not surprising that persuasion rarely occurs as a single event. Although it is imaginable that a single sufficiently powerful event could impact and change an understanding that helped structure a constituted identity, it is more often the case that change requires time. If the new understanding is to be truly integrated into the self, not only intellectual movement but also emotional adjustment is necessary. The matter is not one of assent but of the incorporation of a concept that effectively synthesizes beliefs, desire, values, and emotions. Persuasion involves a reorientation; reorientation requires an affect change. As a result of a persuasion, things matter differently. Persuaded individuals see their new understandings as reflecting better what they value and how they see the world. When persuasion occurs, the concepts with which one understands oneself and one’s world acquire new meaning. Persuasion is reconceptualization. While such an action/event clearly involves linguistic and semantic change, it cannot be reduced to a purely linguistic or semantic event. Such changes necessarily have affective content—­when one is persuaded, one feels differently about oneself. When an individual is persuaded, this

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action/event has consequences for the individual’s identity. Persuasion involves transformation. It is the ongoing process through which individuals realign themselves with their worlds. The transformation is not in service of some teleological destination but part of a potentially lifelong effort to be adequate to the worlds in which individuals live. Through persuasion, the concepts through which individuals understand themselves and their worlds get revitalized so that the meanings that shape lives and the lives that shape meaning can be brought into temporary balance. Persuasion, in its reconstitution of subjectivity, is the ethical means by which this order is reconstituted.

six

The Individual and Political Persuasion

The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. —John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 208 We will try our fortune, then, with the supposition that love relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) also constitute the essence of the group mind. —Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 31 Whenever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 3 It is one of the main purposes of the Laws to insist upon the supremacy of law, even over officials of government. What his followers may have done in positions of power, or what Plato himself might have done in such a position, is not part of his teaching. If we can believe his words, his main reliance was upon persuasion. —Glenn Morrow, “Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 234 Yet when we arrive at that final division, between society and individual, we must know that an assertion of belief in either is irrelevant. What has actually happened is a loss of belief in both, and this is our way of saying a loss of belief in the whole experience of life, as men and women can live it. This is certainly the deepest and most characteristic form of tragedy in our century —Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, 138

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If persuasion involves the transformation that occurs within the subjectivity of the individual, this raises the obvious question, which I have touched on in various places, as to the implications of this position for larger political concerns. Socrates’s conduct as an individual whose life was shaped by the pursuit of persuasion and who seemed to disavow normal political activity encapsulates the challenge of connecting persuasion as the action/event in which an individual subject undergoes transformation with its consequences, if any, for politics. But surely any theory of persuasion that cannot speak meaningfully to political life is inadequate. So how does a theory of persuasion as the transformation of the individual’s subjectivity clarify the contribution of persuasion not only to politics but to a democratic politics? It is important to this discussion to begin with an essential distinction. To argue that persuasion is an action/event that should be located within an individual and seen as the operation of responsiveness within that individual does not commit one to supporting political philosophies that champion some version of individualism in distinction to those that analyze the political in terms of class, race, gender, environment, or some other transindividual category. Lear cautions that much of our discussion of the value of individualism displays similarities to the discourse of an analysand suffering from an obsessive-­compulsive disorder. This discussion of the individual hides the underlying issue of whether we know or seek a genuine individuality. The cultural valuing of the individual can look very much like an evasion of a topic that is potentially threatening. This hysteria colors our stance, positive or negative, toward the value of the individual. John Dewey is helpful on this point. He argues that “all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work of single human beings” (21). He goes on to argue: “In short, under the influence of the prime fallacy that the problem of the state concerns causal forces, individualism, as an ism, as a philosophy has been generated” (22). For Dewey, this understanding of individualism arises from efforts to define the state in terms of some causality, and “by still thinking in terms of causal forces, the conclusion has been drawn from this fact that the state, the public, is a fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position. Not only the state but society itself has been pulverized into an aggregate of unrelated wants and wills” (21). In effect, individualism is problematic as a political philosophy not only because it eliminates the political as a category, but also because it treats politics as, at best, some sort of epiphenomenon whose influence needs to be minimized. But if individualism as a political philosophy is problematic for Dewey, he is firmly committed to the individual as essential to political existence. Yet political choices

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are not simply the cumulative effect of individual choices—­the situation is considerably more complicated than that, as it is through the choices of individuals, either acting on their own or as representatives for a particular public, that the political is constituted as a distinct order. What marks the political as political is that it is an order created and directed by humans, ostensibly for human benefit. Further, if the choices of individuals are the foundation of the political order as a humanly created order, the political order in turn provides an important context in which individuals come to understand themselves as individuals. To locate persuasion in the individual, then, is to attempt to understand how discourse, broadly conceived, can transform subjectivity, and then to explore the impact of that transformed subjectivity as it is translated into action in the world. Persuasion is not an effort at some private cultivation of subjectivity; rather, it is an ongoing effort to be responsible to the world into which one is born and the world that one imagines as a possibility. Persuasion is both the activity and the consequence of a responsiveness engaged with the world the subject inhabits and seeks affirmation from—­an affirmation that in turn promotes further responsiveness. In the action/event of persuasion, subjects determine themselves by the incorporation of new concepts or the revision of previously held concepts, and through this incorporation they are reconstituted—­they reconstitute themselves. Through persuasion, subjects reorient themselves to both their self-­understandings and their understandings of the world. In this reorientation, they exercise a freedom that is essential for political existence. In being self-­determined, they become capable of making choices and assuming responsibility for making choices as to the worlds in which they choose or would like to live. This capacity for free choice makes an order possible that is distinctly political. Understanding persuasion in this way helps explain why persuasion, which occurs within the individual, has force in the political realm, and why persuasion may in fact be an action/event essential to a vital political community seeking to be adequate to demands that it promote a just social order.

Persuasion and Homo Politicus Neta C. Crawford offers a compelling argument for the role of persuasion in political life. For Crawford, persuasion goes to the heart of how one understands what it means for humans to be considered as political actors. She raises the question whether homo politicus should be defined in terms of the pursuit of power or in terms of a commitment to persuasion:

134 / Chapter Six A perennial question in the study of politics is just exactly who we are as political animals, and what we characteristically do when we interact. Is homo politicus essentially driven by power and primarily constrained by force, or are we creatures of a more social inclination, potentially persuaded by good arguments and constrained by norms and a sense of justice? (“Homo Politicus and Argument (Nearly) All the Way Down,” 103).

Her answer to that question is that political activity is shaped by both a drive for power and the persuasive force of argument. While many political theorists, especially those of the realist camp, wish to restrict analyses of politics in general and of international politics in particular to the operation of power as motivated primarily or exclusively by rational self-­interest, Crawford makes a strong case for the role of argument and persuasion in political life. She is especially concerned with showing how ethical argument does not function as a cover or mask for a more fundamental assertion of rational self-­interest. In making this claim about ethical argument, Crawford is moving in the direction of seeing persuasion in terms of the ways in which audiences are constituted by discourse, but as we shall see, she still views persuasion primarily from the viewpoint of the speaker. Although Crawford allows that persuasion can result from a variety of types of argument, ethical argument is a special case for her because it represents a choice that has been shaped primarily through the operation of persuasion and that owes little, if anything, to the operation of rational self-­interest. The importance that Crawford attaches to persuasion becomes clear in her claim that ethical argument has played a crucial role in the transformation of the global political order. If this is so, then persuasion not only transforms individuals but has a central role to play in political life. Crawford’s analyses of Britain’s evolving attitude toward the morality of the slave trade in the nineteenth century and of the movement to decolonize in the mid-­twentieth century provide strong evidence that argument, and in particular ethical argument, has contributed significantly to international politics and helped advance choices that were not motivated by rational self-­interest. She argues that political actors, both individuals and groups, respond to ethical argument, and that such argument, by producing persuasion, can effect change, sometimes in opposition to rational self-­interest. When people are persuaded, they understand things differently and act in accordance with this new understanding. The values and self-­ understanding of actors can be a major influence on how they decide to act. People can even go against self-­interest if that interest is in opposition to values that form the core foundation of the actor’s identity. Persuasion is,

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thus, an important source of political innovation and creativity—­it fosters change that does not merely react to events in the material environment but, more importantly, transforms how political actors see themselves. As such, persuasion is essential to a politics that seeks to be adequate to the demands of justice. Crawford’s argument is particularly important because her focus is on international politics, and as she concedes, “international politics is the hard case for establishing the role of argument” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 103). If it can be shown that persuasion operates in this arena, then the role of persuasion in political life becomes substantial. For Crawford, argument and persuasion define the political as a distinct sphere of human activity. She frames the two as part of a continuous process—­argument embodying action; persuasion being the result—­and treats them as a single action or event in which the conclusion of a successful argument is the achievement of a persuasion. She contrasts political argumentation with the action of war and reserves the title of politics for the former: “To the extent that war displaces dialogue between antagonists, the logic of war is opposite that of politics understood as political argumentation in an attempt to persuade others with reasons” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 113). Politics, understood in terms of the particular type of action undertaken by various parties, leads Crawford to frame persuasion in traditional terms as the action of the individual making the argument—­ argument is an action directed at an Other; it is an effort to change the mind of that Other. The opposition between war and argumentation is between methods by which one party influences the behavior of a second party. Crawford recognizes that this influence operates over a continuum, with violence and physical coercion on one end and uncoerced, reasoned assent on the other—­this uncoerced reasoned assent being the accomplishment of change through persuasion. But if persuasion is the result of argument, argument itself—­as the action opposite to war or physical coercion—­is what interests Crawford. She defines argument in terms of persuasion and leaves persuasion undefined: Argument, defined as the attempt to persuade, occurs at multiple levels—­in diplomatic negotiations between and within states. Indeed, what might be called public reasoning, is ubiquitous in domestic and international settings and engages not simply rational but also the emotional elements of homo politicus. (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 104)

This choice to understand persuasion as a consequence of argument leads her to focus principally on the various forms of argument and to give scant

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attention to the dynamics of persuasion. She is careful not to reduce persuasion to a simple consequence of the operation of reason, whether inferential or analogical, and she stresses that emotion can and should play a role in argument. Nonetheless, she lacks an account of how persuasion actually happens. For her, persuasion is understood principally as the result of argument. This understanding creates two difficulties, the first of which Crawford recognizes. Seeing persuasion as the consequence of argument can obscure the important possibility that parties can agree to changes even if they are not persuaded of their rightness or utility. Parties can agree because they might not be particularly invested in the proposed change or that change is less important than other changes they seek, and they do not want to endanger these other changes by contesting this particular change. Such changes may indeed be more frequent than changes that are the consequence of persuasion. Crawford concedes as much by acknowledging that while argument may be frequent, “genuine persuasion is rare” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 106). But if “genuine persuasion is rare,” this rarity raises questions of why argument alone does not produce persuasion and of what is required to produce persuasion. These questions suggest that it is important to understand persuasion on its own terms and not simply as a function of argument. Crawford does offer a partial answer to these questions when she analyzes the extrinsic and intrinsic barriers that face an argument in a political situation: Extrinsic barriers are contextual and to overcome them is to allow the argument to be heard within the uneven power-­political playing field of discourse. Intrinsic barriers are those that are posed by the substance of the argument being made in a particular cognitive context. (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 118)

But if these barriers explain why an argument, as a proffered effort at reasoning, can encounter resistance and not succeed, these barriers, especially the extrinsic ones, are still understood in terms of the intentions of the speaker. Intrinsic barriers are understood as posing potential limits created by the ways in which the audience has been shaped by “existing dominant beliefs, actors, and identities, and within existing social structures” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 118). What creates problems for persuasion are past persuasions. But an audience’s resistance to persuasion is not really her concern. She focuses on how “those with power will not hear or even consciously exclude those who do not speak in terms of the dominant discourse” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 118). This focus makes the

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problem of persuasion a problem for a speaker whose intended audience is one with power. But if one inverts this paradigm and focuses not on how a speaker may be successful but on why an audience should open itself to persuasion, then what is required for persuasion looks different. If the audience is conceived not as those who hold power and must be influenced but as those who seek to understand their complex and evolving relationship to the world, then the focus becomes on how concepts and beliefs that are central to the subjects’ identities acquire new meaning as subjects respond to a world with which they seek to be connected in an affirming way. Second, in treating argument and persuasion as part of a single action, Crawford is led to treat persuasion as the consequence of the action of one party on another. This understanding of persuasion establishes a power dynamic that has led persuasion’s critics to treat persuasion simply as another instance in which the will of one party is imposed on another. It was the suspicion of this imposition, which masks itself as an address to a party free to accept or reject it, that grounds the long history that sees persuasion as simply a form of aggression that uses soft power. To understand the political importance of persuasion requires one to analyze how it happens as an action/event within the individual and not in terms of how one party changes the way in which another party views a situation. Notwithstanding her reduction of persuasion to the result of argument, Crawford’s analyses of argument are valuable in pointing to what may make persuasion so important politically. Crawford recognizes that persuasion, when it occurs, represents a significant ethical transformation of a political understanding. Her recognition of the political role of argument and persuasion is founded on a “re-­reading of human nature” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 105). She offers a richer understanding of human reason, one that seeks to be adequate to the various factors that shape actual choices. Central to this rereading is Crawford’s argument that reason in either the domestic or international arena cannot be reduced simply to the operation of rationality by actors in pursuit of power. Such a view restricts human reason to strategic calculations on how best to advance particular interests. From the perspective of rational self-­interest theory, if discourse or argument is the most effective strategy, a rational actor will use it. If that approach is ineffective, then a rational actor who has power and resources will resort to force or violence, since that is what is needed to achieve the goal. To do otherwise would be, in this view, irrational. Crawford argues that one can only maintain this doctrine of rationality if one disregards how international politics is actually conducted and that “too much of what is interesting in world politics cannot be explained using these assumptions” (“Homo

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Politicus and Argument,” 104). And as she rightly points out, while world politics certainly involves the pursuit of power, it involves much more than that as well. She points to the operation of empathy—­humans, or some humans, care about others, and this caring is an important source of political motivation. Equally, ideas such as justice can shape policy. She locates the authority of these concerns in human emotion, and she stresses that they are not an instance of sentimentality in contrast to a hardheaded or -­hearted pursuit of power. Emotions are strong sources of human motivation because they speak to actors’ understanding of their own identities. To acknowledge that one should not act solely in self-­interest but should in appropriate instances honor one’s sense of justice is not irrational; nor is it irrational to assume that one’s empathy for others will influence a decision. Ethical and emotional reflection, as Crawford maintains, are instances of human reasoning, and human reasoning is larger than rational calculation. Crawford argues that because humans are reasoning creatures, they seek to influence others by the use of reason. That is, they acknowledge that the others are also reasonable and that they can respond to the demand that a reason makes on them to honor their values, beliefs, and feelings. Because humans use and respond to reasons, they are influenced by argument, and Crawford identifies a variety of types of argument. There are practical arguments that seek to promote certain specific actions, given particular understandings of the social world. There are also scientific arguments that are inquiries into the order of the natural world. Of particular interest to persuasion are identity arguments “about who we are and how we should behave based on our identity,” and ethical arguments “about what is good and right to do” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 106). At issue in these last two types of argument are the values, beliefs, and emotional investments that define who we are. They are not arguments primarily about means but are rather investigations of subjectivity. They are attempts to understand how one should act in the world given who one is or wants to be. They are arguments about the adequacy of one’s constitution. For Crawford, the theories of argument or communication that most closely (if imperfectly) theorize this operation of identity—­as well as ethical arguments in which reason and not force, physical or otherwise, takes precedence—­are the theories of discourse ethics and mutual communication. Discourse ethics derives from Habermas and represents a dialectical exchange in which all participants abide by a set of rules that embody an ideal operation of reason. “Actors hope to come to an uncoerced understanding with each other. In discourse ethics, the arguments are logical (coherent), actors’ claims are open to challenge, and if challenged, their claims can be

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supported” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 111). There have been substantial challenges to this version of an ideal communication situation (see, for example Garsten’s objections in chapter 2 of this book), and Crawford acknowledges the criticism that this understanding of argument makes argument apolitical. It certainly does not describe any actual exchanges, and it is at best an ideal against which to measure political discourse in the world. She is also aware that this account of rationality may represent a Western bias and suppress other cultural forms of rationality. I have a further, specific concern with it. The actors in this scenario are emptied of content. They are, in effect, committed to reason and to nothing else. This strikes me as both an impoverished view of humans and one that is fundamentally inadequate to explain how value and emotion do operate and how that operation is not outside of reason but is, as Crawford contends, an important part of reason. If, as I have argued, humans are subjects who are constituted in a responsiveness to the worlds into which they are born and with which they interact, then one cannot understand human reason independently of seeing how this evolving responsiveness shapes that reason. I have a similar problem with “mutual communication.” Crawford cites Sally Miller Gearhart’s five conditions for mutual communication. Again, these conditions do not describe any actual exchanges in the world, and in their ideal form they imagine a situation that is both improbable and ultimately a violation of the integrity of the individual. I will only mention two of the conditions. Condition number 3: “Although there are differences, persons involved feel equal in power to each other” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 112). Equality should not be the defining feature of mutual communication. It should be respect. There are genuinely open communications in which interlocutors can and should acknowledge inequality—­an inequality, for example, of experience. To not acknowledge that one partner might have more experience than the other is to refuse to credit the importance of experience. It would seem the more honest and helpful stance is one of respect. To respect and honor difference in experience is not to denigrate either party but to acknowledge a reality. Such an acknowledgment does not silence the less experienced party nor confer a final authority on the more experienced party. It simply respects a difference and then factors that difference into the conversation. To do otherwise would be to assume that experience is of no consequence in making decisions. Condition number 5 is equally troubling: “each participant is willing on the deepest level to yield her/his position entirely to the other(s)” (“Homo Politicus and Argument,” 112). This emptying out of the self is the creation of an apolitical self. It cedes responsibility for values that are foundational and gives over to

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an abstract process the responsibility for commitments that guide an individual or a political community. Condition 5 seems to deny the historical particularity of the individual and to gut that individual of the particular values that ground their core identity. Once one has yielded that which one holds most deeply, what is left? As Crawford points out, effort at mutual communication is not effort at persuasion. It is simply an effort to create an environment in which parties are sufficiently open that they can entertain and appreciate viewpoints different from their own. Thus, respecting difference requires acknowledging the particular perspectives and values of the parties involved—­so their meeting cannot be the sanitized version that Gearhart puts forward that eliminates participants’ individuality. Gearhart’s suspicion that persuasion cannot be extricated from coercion does not allow her to entertain the possibility that an exchange lacking absolute equality can be anything other than the implementation of force. Crawford suggests that efforts at mutual communication might serve as helpful preliminary moves when parties have reached an impasse and need to develop a more expansive appreciation for each other. In any event, mutual communication is intended as an alternative to persuasion. One of Crawford’s most important advances in explaining the importance of argument is her focus on the role of emotion. And while it is relatively easy to see how emotion can influence political choice (Crawford points out that many rational self-­interest theorists recognize the role of the emotion of fear, for example, in shaping political responses), Crawford charts how difficult it is to find an agreement as to what emotion actually is. In response to this apparently irresolvable disagreement, she adopts an agnostic position and offers a simple working definition: Emotions are the inner states that individual describe to others as feelings, and those feelings may be associated with biological, cognitive, and behavioral states and changes. Thus emotions are first of all subjective experiences that also have physiological, intersubjective, and cultural components. Feelings are internally experienced, but the meaning attached to those feelings, the behaviors associated with them, and the recognition of emotions in others are cognitively and culturally construed and constructed. (“The Passion of World Politics,” 125)

For Crawford, emotions are subjective feelings that are shaped and, through an individual’s interactions with others, acquire meaning in the context of particular cultures. If emotion is, in part, experienced privately (internally), that experience is itself shaped by a public context that makes the feeling

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meaningful. Even though she does not explicitly say so, emotions, for Crawford, are instantiations of a core responsiveness. I want to extend this insight. If emotions are instantiations of a core responsiveness, then they should be seen not as discrete occurrences but rather as registers of how particular subjects understand themselves, their relation to the world, and the nature of the world. As this understanding shifts and changes in response to events in the world or in response to changes in individuals, the individuals reconstitute their subjectivity as their emotional orientation to the world develops. The reason that emotions are important politically is not simply because they are part of a larger picture of elements that influence choice but because they are a register of how one is staked in the world. They are considerably more than feelings. Experienced emotion involves an affective stance toward the world that reflects the ongoing affirmation or denial or endangerment that individuals perceive as the likely response of the world to their actions. When individuals experience an emotion, they are not simply feeling something, they are responding to the anticipated influence of the world on them. As individuals attempt to interpret these responses or simply act on them, they enact or modify concepts through which they interpret the world and this process in turn impacts their understanding of who they are and how they should act. This impact can arise from self-­reflection, from the words of others, or from the perception of events in the world. What is important is that both the experience of emotion and the reflection following its impact are the operation of persuasion. Persuasion is not something done to the individual and is not a simple reaction of an individual to the actions of another person; rather, it is the process of continually realigning self and world. When such realignment is fostered by the discourse of others in a dialectic in which an individual’s values and beliefs become subject to reconsideration or affirmation, the persuasion that results is political. Political persuasion depends upon an individual’s receptivity to difference—­a receptivity that can call the current constitution of the individual’s subjectivity into question. Because political persuasion involves the negotiation of difference, it requires the presence of others. The necessity of diversity means that persuasion as an action/event is possible only in a democracy.

Persuasion and the Possibility of Politics Hannah Arendt recognized the importance of others and the negotiation of difference in her claim that plurality, as the necessary precondition for

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action, is the defining feature of political life. Plurality, in its negotiation of sameness and difference, enables human beings both to share in a common existence and to pursue lives that are individual and particular: “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (8). For Arendt, the individual and the political order are not considered to be in opposition; rather, the integrity of the individual as an individual is essential for political existence. Only within the context of the political does it make any sense to designate a particular being as an individual, and it is the plurality necessitating in and resulting from the interactions of such individuals that gives a point to political existence. The constitution of individuals is what distinguishes an order that is political from competing communal orders that do not recognize the worth of all members of that order. Individuality produces difference and hence plurality, and in the complex task of honoring and also of, at times, transcending difference, the political takes shape. Politics, as a mode of human organization and action, requires a belief in the dignity and authority of the individual. For Arendt, the plurality necessary for politics was manifested in speech and action, the two practices distinctive for political existence. Accordingly, speech became the political activity par excellence: In the experience of the polis, which not without justification has been called the most talkative of all bodies politic, and even more in the political philosophy which sprang from it, action and speech separated and became more independent activities. The emphasis shifted from action to speech, and to speech as a means of persuasion rather than the specifically human way of answering, talking back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done. To be political, to live in the polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. (Arendt, 26)

It was not simply the occurrence of speech that was necessary to political existence; rather, what was crucial was that it be persuasive speech. Persuasion separated political existence from other forms of human organization, forms whose order was dependent on force and violence, and from other forms of speech that, while characteristic of the human, did not entail political existence. These other instances of speech were not attempts to respond to plurality in ways that honored that plurality while also creating viable unities. In contrast, persuasion was the means that a community used to reach decisions that could make a legitimate claim on the members of the

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community (the citizens) to respect and obey. Persuasion was the activity through which the citizens acquired ownership of the city’s decisions. As Aristotle observed, persuasion in Athens took the particular form of judicial decision, legislative deliberation, or epideictic performance. Through persuasion, citizens negotiated difference and established commonly held positions. It was the process through which the community reconstituted itself as a polis. What distinguished it from prepolitical and other types of collective organization was that a commitment to persuasion was a recognition and endorsement of the freedom of those citizens who made the decisions under which they were ruled. Ideally, persuasion was the means by which the collectivity participated in publicly recognized discursive forms in those situations in which certain judgments needed to be made. Precisely because of the centrality of persuasive discourse in public decisions, skill at persuasion was an important and sought-­after source of power for those skilled at deploying various discursive resources to effect persuasion. The exercise of such skill could move the public in ways that these speakers chose. In fifth-­century-­BCE Athens, if one wished to acquire power, one sought to become skillful at public speaking. In this political climate, rhetoric flourished. And if Athens could celebrate freedom of speech as a feature that set it apart from many other cities, this freedom, as with any freedom, was subject to abuse. Because skill at persuasion conferred power on those who sought it, persuasion was subject to being pursued less as a means of attending to the complex issues confronting a plurality of actors, and instead as a means of molding unities in ways that primarily benefited the rhetor and not the community. As Garsten recognized, persuasion could easily become either manipulation or pandering. If persuasion was necessary for political life, it also posed a fundamental threat to it.

Socrates and the True Art of Politics It was to the understanding of rhetoric as intended for purposes of political persuasion—­and of the threat such rhetoric posed—­that Socrates objected. He had several concerns, but one of his most important apprehensions arose precisely because of the plurality of a democratic population. How was it possible to persuade a collectivity in which there was a genuine plurality—­if, as he believed, true persuasion could happen only if individuals engaged in a rigorous examination of the beliefs and values shaping their particular souls? He did not deny the possibility of political discourse or political persuasion; however, he questioned whether such persuasion was possible for large groups or whether it had to be limited to particular

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exchanges between interlocutors. Plurality, per se, was not a problem, for a rhetor might always address this plurality in private conversations with individuals, each of whom might have different beliefs. The problem was how to create a genuinely persuasive discourse, which in Socrates’s understanding needed to engage the beliefs of particular individuals when used in addressing a group of citizens—­provided the audience was composed of individuals with heterogeneous beliefs. This problem was not an ethical one, but to consider it merely technical trivializes how deeply it challenged the feasibility of what we would consider as political speech. It was a problem that went to the heart of rhetoric as a viable form of public address. Given the magnitude of the challenge, Socrates preferred to focus on conversations with either a particular interlocutor or, at best, a relatively small collection of listeners, listeners who were often marked by a shared situation. Socrates’s understanding of persuasion as occurring in the conversation of individuals—­and his consequent limiting of his interactions to such private conversations—­thus seemed to erect an opposition between the concerns of the individual and the dynamics of the political. But Socrates rejected such a straightforward opposition. As I noted earlier, in the Gorgias, he makes the apparently nonironic, if provocative, claim that his various efforts at engaging the citizens of Athens in conversation represent true political activity: In my opinion, I am one of the few Athenians (not to say the only one) who has attempted the true art of politics, and the only one alive to put it into practice. For this reason, then, I never carry on my habitual discussions with a view to gratification, but with my eyes fixed on the highest good, not on that which is merely pleasant. (Plato, Gorgias, 521d)

One of the remarkable aspects of this claim is that Socrates doesn’t simply argue that he practices the true art of politics but that he is the only one who still does so. There is something outlandish in this claim. Socrates immediately acknowledges that he is inept at ordinary political activity. For example, when it was his turn in the assembly to make a certain kind of motion, he was so bad at it as to be laughable. He also acknowledges that his mode of political speech is ineffective in the public venues where rhetoric is practiced—­he is like a physician addressing an audience of children. And that acknowledgment creates further problems. Physicians talk to children on many occasions. They simply tailor their language so that it is understandable to the children. It is not that hard. All of these instances raise the question of what Socrates considers political speech to be. He has to explain

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why everyone but him has misunderstood what political speech is. Why are all the citizens except Socrates suffering from this mass delusion, unable to see that the speech that everyone concedes is political is not political? How can Socrates claim that his interrogations of his fellow citizens, which most often occur outside of occasions recognized as political, are in fact political? For Socrates’s claim to make sense, he must have believed that the political could not be confined to recognized public arenas, but that a more foundational political practice—­one that was necessarily preliminary to any public participation—­took place in conversations that moved citizens from an unreflective set of beliefs to a set of beliefs that were grounded in a critical reflective investigation in which the participants either deliberately accepted, rejected, or modified the values and beliefs that constituted their core identities. If one assumes, borrowing a distinction from Kenneth Burke, that this priority is logical and not temporal, then Socrates’s claim must be that political existence is possible only for those who are willing to undergo a continuous exploration of the values that structure their identity. Politics is possible only for those who are willing to put themselves at fundamental risk. Political speech then becomes the mutual exploration of identities; this speech needs to be plural to preclude the temptation for a too-­easy agreement among citizens who participate in an unreflective sameness. This participation in an unreflective sameness is not exactly parallel to the situation that Freudian psychoanalysis sought to address in the suffering of individuals from various neuroses, but it does present a similar problem of individuals imprisoned in an understanding that does not enable them to question their situation and, through that questioning, enable a freedom that allows them to contribute to the determination of their lives. While this situation is not necessarily painful—­indeed, it can be comfortable to inhabit a fixed understanding in which one approves of oneself—­it does represent a loss or impoverishment, even if citizens are unaware of the loss. For Socrates, politics must be based in a concern for citizen welfare. The art of politics, like that of architecture or any of the other arts, is guided by an interest in the constitution or reconstitution of the object that gives the particular art its identity. For politics, this object is the souls of the citizens. Before attempting more ambitious large-­scale political actions, candidates for political life would need to put their own souls in order and would need to provide evidence that they had been effective in helping particular individuals order their souls. Through these preliminary activities, one would acquire the character and expertise necessary for political life. Politics thus starts in the constitution or reconstitution of individuals.

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For James L. Wiser, Plato’s politics are rooted in a “particular philosophical anthropology which informs the political culture at large” (444). He argues that Plato “appreciates the fact that the existential qualities of the person are central to the formation of correct judgment” (Wiser, 444). He contrasts this appreciation of the person in their individuality with what he identifies as modern critical philosophy which “sought to develop a picture of human reason which could account for the emergence of truth in terms of a universal, repeatable, and reversible method” (Wiser, 428). What distinguished the Platonic approach to politics from the critical philosophy of the modern era—­a philosophy that Wiser traces back to Descartes and Bacon—­is the role of persuasion. For a modern critical philosophy in which there is an ideal human reason capable of apprehending truths that are transindividual, universal, and certain, there is no need for persuasion. In such an approach, the individual has been emptied of historical content, and the concern is with establishing methods whose results are public, repeatable, and not limited or influenced by the particularities of the individual inquirer. But for Plato, the preeminent concern was the condition of the individual’s soul. The individual’s particular history shaped that soul and set the conditions for further growth or stagnation. For Wiser, this commitment to the individual embodies Plato’s recognition of the “plurality of existence” (444), and the conversion occasioned by persuasion leads to “a deepening of insight [that] is tantamount to a transformation of personal existence” (444). Persuasion is transformation and this transformation takes place in the individual. Jonathan Lear argues that “Socrates was guilty of promoting the development of individual conscience, of furthering individualization in Athenian society” (24). Although Lear does not put it this way, the pursuit of individuality is also the pursuit of plurality. Even if the content of the conversations between individuals is not what one might normally consider as having political subject matter, the pursuit of the development of the individual conscience becomes a political and not merely private act because it is essential to furthering a viable plurality. This belief in the essential relationship of the individual and the honoring of plurality stands in contrast to an alternative communal order that, in effect, eliminates the political. For Lear, the important opposition is not between the individual and a larger political order but between that larger political order and an order that by eliminating the individual negates the political. Freud and Lear characterize such a social order as a mass, and Lear sees a society which has devolved into a mass as one in which a political order, such as democracy, is not possible. He argues:

The Individual and Political Persuasion  /  147 For the idea of a society of individuals—­a We that is a group of I’s—­must be inimical to a society that depends on mass psychology for its continued existence. By his death, Socrates showed that Athenian democracy could not sustain its commitment to the idea of democracy. (Lear, 24)

Individuals form a bulwark against the formation of a mass and its destruction of meaningful political existence. But if this recognition of the threat posed by a mass explains Socrates’s commitment to individuality as a political value, it explains neither why that commitment needed to be pursued principally in private conversation nor how such a commitment could be translated into meaningful political activity. However laudable such a commitment is, it would seem to have little possibility of actually impacting political life. Can a rhetor who is committed to the value of individuality impact larger public issues and concerns, or is this rhetor limited to private conversations that can have, at best, a very indirect role in political life? The answer to that question is complicated. In the Apology, Socrates says: “The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone” (Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), 32a). But that is not the course Socrates followed. Instead, he chose, or proceeded as if appointed by a god, to pursue the role of gadfly—­and proclaimed in his defense that “all day long I never cease to settle here, there, and everywhere, rousing and persuading, reproving every one of you” (Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), 30e). Persuasion was, by his own account, an inescapably political activity for Socrates. Rather than assume that Socrates’s understanding of persuasion commits one to seeing persuasive political discourse as possible only between particular individuals, it might be more productive to see Socrates’s point to be that the individual is the venue for persuasion, and hence that the persuasion of individuals is the necessary condition for a society to have a genuine politics. To acknowledge that genuine persuasion occurs only in the individual is a way of directing an inquiry into persuasion as an investigation into the ways in which discourse can transform subjectivity. If persuasion designates an action/event of reconstitution, such an action/event takes place within the individual. If the understanding of a group is altered, that alteration is a consequence of the individuals within that group coming to think differently. With the exception of cases wherein a group has constituted itself as a mass, group persuasion is a function of the persuasion of individuals. Such an understanding of persuasion would argue that a political understanding only acquires force when it is integrated into the understanding of the lives

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of individual citizens. And it would equally, and importantly, argue that the interactions of individuals as they respond to each other is essential to the shaping of a group understanding. Such an understanding is not merely cumulative or additive but can only be an instance of persuasion when individuals talk seriously with each other. Plurality becomes a requirement for such conversations, for it is through plurality that difference emerges, and it is through difference that concepts which have been held unreflectively can become available for reconsideration in conversation. These conversations then reconstitute a public understanding that reflects the ways in which that changed understanding has led to the reinterpretation of the concepts that form the group’s core shared identity. And although politics would certainly not be confined to persuasion as defined here—­there would be many decisions in which citizens accepted the outcome of and abided by legislative deliberations or judicial decisions in which they were not necessarily persuaded but nonetheless agreed to—­persuasion would acquire a particular importance as the activity that grounded or challenged the larger legitimacy of a particular political order. This location of political speech in those occasions when the legitimacy of the political order was affirmed or challenged would also explain Socrates’s contention that most of what is considered as political speech is not fundamental to political life. Also, it helps account for Crawford’s recognition that while argument in political life may be more frequent than is normally credited, persuasion is rare. This recognition then prompts the legitimate concern with whether persuasion, conceived in this way, has such little practical impact as to be irrelevant in political life as most people live it. This concern leads back to a situation that borders on paradox: given Socrates’s understanding of what is as stake in persuasion, truly political speech is most likely to be found outside of formal political settings. But the case is not so much one of politics elsewhere as it is one of politics everywhere. Socrates’s understanding is a recognition, in part, that for most people political activity does not take the form of formal political action. Most are not legislators, judges, or, except for the times when they are selected for service, jury members. That does not mean that political understanding and action do not play significant roles in their lives. For some citizens, the role will be greater than others; and for some citizens, there will be little conscious attention to politics. But the cultural and political values that give identity to a particular individual will still shape basic understandings. What Plato recognizes is that it is in informal conversation that much of political life is lived. This acknowledgment is not to deny the importance of formal political activity but to broaden the understanding of what counts

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as political activity or political speech. Although Socrates never makes a distinction between political and administrative activity, such a distinction seems to be implied by his approach. He acknowledges his ineptness at basic administrative tasks. But if serious political discussion involves a critical examination of the values of a currently existing political order—­and a critical examination of whether that order is genuinely acting in accordance with those values—­then the most likely place for political conversation is not in formal public forums but in conversations that permit a freedom where one can put one’s understanding at risk. Politics is a life that is possible only to those who are open to questioning their own understanding and measuring themselves against their political values. Such questioning and measuring constitute active engagement in the political life. They are essential modes of the practice if politics is to exist as a distinctive way of constituting orders to serve human welfare. Paradoxically, the order designed to serve the interest of one particular individual person, the leader or ruler, is not a political order. The commitment to a politics founded on respect for the individual is a commitment to plurality, and it requires a necessary commitment to democracy. Private conversations can facilitate an openness and receptivity that a public conversation or official meeting can discourage. In such private conversations, interlocutors can seriously explore their values and whether they are acting in accord with those values. These moments of exploration and self-­reflection are crucial to anyone seeking to fulfill their political responsibility to be a committed citizen who assumes ownership for their own beliefs. At issue in theorizing the political importance of persuasion is whether a particular political order is responsive to the core values and beliefs embodied in a subjectivity that arose and was shaped by a world that either responded or failed to respond to the subject’s need for affirmation. In this need for an affirming response, political persuasion would be a response to Eros, as articulated by Lear—­it would be an acknowledgment that the world with which the individual interacted valued and supported that individual. This operation of persuasion as a response to Eros raises a more basic question—­one that Plato sought to address—­of what is involved in the act of persuasion. As Harvey Yunis explains, “Plato has Socrates pursue the question of rhetoric’s status as an art without considering any ends other that those derived from rhetoric itself—­namely, what is it that makes discourse persuasive” (104). He goes on further: “Plato puts at the center of his inquiry the very question that lies at the heart of the rhetoricians’ own enterprise, namely, how discourse persuades and how an understanding of persuasion can be implemented by art” (Yunis, 108). So how does Plato

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believe that Eros promotes and contributes to the responsiveness that is the source of persuasion? Yunis provides a particularly perceptive answer to that question. One of his central insights, one which supports the theory of persuasion for which I am advocating, is that the paradigmatic rhetorical act of the Phaedrus, Socrates’s Great Speech, is distinct from what then-­current rhetorical practice would view as the domain of rhetoric: The adversarial situation and the reasoning based on expediency [that characterized Lysias’s speech and Socrates’s first speech] are entirely conventional: remove the trappings of the imagined circumstances and they could be replicated in an assembly deciding between politicians or a court deciding between litigants. The Great Speech, on the other hand, far from seeking to win a contest of deliberation, does not contemplate deliberation at all. It does not consider expediency and does not present formal reasons leading to a conclusion that divine eros is the better choice. It reduced adversarial rhetoric to a minimum, just a few words framing the speech at the beginning and end. (Yunis, 111)

The purpose of the Great Speech’s recantation is to regain vision and to understand the divinity of Eros. It is a response to a cultural understanding, embodied in Lysias’s claim that erotic relationships as practiced in Athens are abusive, and that this abuse is masked by a surface concern with the welfare of the beloved. Eros, as presented by Lysias, is inherently aggressive. It fosters a culture and politics of abuse. Lysias’s proposal for nonerotic but self-­interested relationships does not reform but rather destroys the political. It would transform private relationships into negotiations on behalf of self-­interested actors. Socrates’s response in the Palinode does not so much seek to refute this argument directly as to present Eros in such a way as to infuse the concept of love with an alternative content, one that was occluded by the available cultural understanding of the concept but recoverable when the experience of Eros was rendered in such a way that it spoke more faithfully to the actual experience (or to what the experience could be if it were not corrupted by the current understanding of Eros). The speech relied on the power of the artistic presentation of Eros to engage its audience and to trust its audience’s capacity to respond to erotic language to recover an understanding of Eros that affirmed better the audience’s sense of itself. In its recovery of this understanding of Eros, the Great Speech becomes paradigmatic for the reconceptualization essential to persuasion. The generous understanding of the concept of Eros had been lost both by an abusive

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interpretation of it and then by a deeply impoverished reinterpretation of the concept in response to the abuse. This overcoming of a diminished understanding of a concept represented the act of persuasion, and the consequence of this persuasion was a reconstitution of the subject as an erotic being. The Great Speech thus enacts and represents what Socrates argues is the purpose of rhetoric: to guide souls through the activity of persuasion. Souls are guided not by encountering strict rational argument or formal inferential reasoning but by discourse that imaginatively engages them and that gives new content to the concepts with which they make sense of their lives. This concept must speak more forcefully to actual experience—­even if this experience has been filtered through a culturally corrupt understanding or through an inadequate or distorted understanding arising from personal experience. The persuasion that leads to and embodies a more adequate understanding of the concept is both a recovery of meaning and also the discovery of something new. So, the guidance of souls is not the offering of a predetermined path discovered in advance by the rhetor and subsequently positioned by the rhetor so as to move an audience down it. Persuasion requires the paradox of nondirective guidance that allows the audience to discover and evaluate for itself the values that are shaping and directing it. As Yunis points out: “Eros, vividly portrayed, arouses Eros. This psychagogic, or soul-­moving, phenomenon, which is the hallmark of erotic art, was familiar to Plato and his contemporaries through the profusion of erotic art produced in Athens and Greece generally” (112). Most importantly, Eros is “felt as a kind of movement that provokes movement in response” (Yunis, 112). Erotic experience and its capacity to move souls—­to provide guidance—­ exemplifies human responsiveness. Eros is central to persuasion because it calls for and calls forth response. This response is not simply reactive but opens up the subject, as Anne Carson demonstrated, to possibilities not otherwise available. In the grip of Eros, as Socrates argues, humans undergo a change in how they think about themselves and their worlds. This responsiveness to Eros provides new content to the concepts that had previously ordered a life. This responsiveness is at the core of persuasion. Again, Yunis captures this experience well: On this account, persuasion is not just a matter of words, phrases, forms of argument and all the other linguistic phenomena that are catalogued in the sophists’ rejected rhetoric books (266c-­267e), but the creation of desire in the auditor’s soul. The art of discourse based on this psychology is designed to exploit the soul’s natural capacities for desire and transcendence. It persuades

152 / Chapter Six by recognizing, and controlling, the naturally existing desire that is specific to any persuasive goal and any particular audience. (115)

Persuasion exceeds rational agreement; it reorders or reconstitutes the soul. Plato recognizes two sources for erotic experience: perception and persuasion. One is the province of the lover, the other of the beloved. The origin of erotic experience for the lover is perception. The lover is not persuaded of the value of Eros; he is overwhelmed by the experience in its immediacy. The lover is overtaken by the sight of the beloved. In contrast, the beloved’s entry into erotic experience is not through perception but through discourse. The beloved’s relationship to erotic experience is far closer to the reader’s experience. They are both moved by artful language. Where the lover enters erotic experience through ecstasy; the beloved and the reader enter erotic experience through persuasion. Prior to the beloved’s encountering the lover or the reader encountering the Platonic text, neither may have had any immediate prompting to challenge or reconsider the understanding under which they were operating. They may have had no or only limited awareness of the ways in which concepts central to their self-­understanding foreclosed possibilities. As Yunis points out: “It is entirely possible that previously the imagined young man had no idea that he had such aspirations, that he even could have had them. But, like the soul’s wings that by nature sprout and fly upwards, according to Plato’s psychology such aspirations are innate in the young man” (116). Socrates’s speech becomes the paradigmatic instance of persuasion, offering a detailed example of how persuasion can work. Persuasion appeals to potential meanings in a concept that are not, at present, affecting how the concept is understood. In the potential of the beloved or the reader to respond to language that moves them resides the crucial factor for persuasion. In this instance, the understanding of the concept of Eros changes, and with the change, Eros is experienced differently. In Socrates’s account it is in the beloved’s response that persuasion occurs. The beloved’s responsiveness is what permits persuasion to happen. And that responsiveness is then generative. The beloved’s response to the lover calls for further response. The mutual responsiveness is what enables the subject to grow in understanding of the possibilities inhering in their subjectivity. The conversation of the lovers is the ongoing action/event of persuasion. If this account shows the involvement of Eros in persuasion, it is still not clear how such an account can establish the relevance of persuasion, so understood, to politics. It would seem that rather than Eros grounding political persuasion, it creates problems for it, as such a grounding attempts to

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reconcile two types of human relationship that seem to be radically different. Hannah Arendt, for one, sees the erotic and the political as fundamentally irreconcilable: “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces” (242). Although her account of love differs from Bersani’s, they both see love and politics as antithetical. For Bersani, eros is drawn to sameness and aggressively opposed to difference; for Arendt, love eliminates the “in-­betweenness” that defines a world that is political. If plurality is the prerequisite for politics, love is exclusive—­there is no plurality. For that reason, it is antipolitical. A theory of persuasion that locates the action/event of persuasion in the constitution or reconstitution of the individual needs to address the challenges and threats to political life that inhere in an erotically organized life. The difficulties involved in the relationship of Eros to politics are not limited simply to their being two significantly different, and possibly irreconcilable, forms of human relationship. For Freud, Eros was necessarily antipolitical, for the force of Eros in the life of the individual fundamentally threatened loyalty toward membership in a group: Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling. Their rejection of the group’s influence is expressed in the shape of a sense of shame. (93)

Freud also saw, as I mentioned earlier, the destructive force of Eros in the creation of masses, a creation fueled by a regressive pull toward a merger into an undifferentiated psychic field. The mass represented a fundamental abrogation of political community. If an appearance of a political institution remained, it was only an appearance in which the possibility of making decisions that could be called political had been gutted out. A mass is a collection of human beings bound together not by a shared process of decision-­making but by the absence of such a process. In the creation of the mass, the political has degenerated into an emotional dependence on the power of a leader who provides a shared identity for the group. The disintegration of the psychological boundaries separating individuals is the precondition necessary for the power of an authority figure to undo individuals’ achieved psychological structure as independent beings. The appeal of the absolute authority that is crucial to the formation of a mass resides, in part, in the joy of giving up responsibility for the self as an individual. In the abandonment of this responsibility, the political is abolished.

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Eros, then, represents two serious threats to political life. First, it can undo politics by fostering relationships between individuals that engender commitments rendering the political at best a secondary concern and at worst an alternative and opposing source of loyalty. Second, by destroying the integrity of individual actors in the creation of a mass, a regressive turn in Eros undermines political structure. In either of these possibilities, Eros seems to stand in opposition to efforts to conduct a life that is politically responsible and in which the individual assumes some sort of responsibility for the quality of that political life. If the responsiveness at the heart of persuasion is Eros in action, how does one move from a concern with the individual to a concern with the political? In part, the answer must lie in the understanding that an individual can only emerge from a healthy and supportive political order. The two entities are not in opposition but deeply dependent on each other, even if at times they may be at odds. This opposition should not be resolved into a new synthetic unity; rather, the tension between the individual and a particular political understanding is essential to the maintenance of the plurality, which is the condition for politics. Jonathan Lear argues that Eros is both a positive and a negative force within political life. In its positive contribution to politics, Eros fosters the development of new and more complex meanings as the alternative to the regressive operation of Eros in the formation of a mass: “Whatever its regressive tendencies, love is also a force within us for development into an ever more complex and higher unity” (Lear, 153). In the dialectic of responsiveness, Eros promotes understandings of the self and the world in which richer, more vital possibilities are imagined. This imagining is, at the same time, a movement toward better self-­understanding, as individuals come to terms with drives that have impelled them to seek certain affirmations from the worlds into which they were born. At other times, it offers a more expansive view of human possibility. It enlarges an understanding of what politics could be. As Lear explains, this movement to a richer understanding is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an affective transformation in which one’s relation to oneself and one’s world is changed: But a good-­enough interpretation is more than a secondary-­process conceptualization. It is a conceptualization that is lovingly directed toward and in touch with its “object.” A good-­enough interpretation is thus structured like an emotion. For the interpretation is itself a sublimation, an organized manifestation of love, and it is lovingly directed toward the drives which are less organized manifestations. And so the acceptance and internalization of

The Individual and Political Persuasion  /  155 a good-­enough interpretation is part of an emotional reorientation toward one’s inner and outer world. (213–­14)

This process of examining the concepts through which a life is structured leads to what Lear labels as radical evaluation, an evaluation in which individuals reflect on the values they have inherited and, through this act of reflection, make those values their own. It is through such reflection that individuals become autonomous and can make lives that are thoroughly their own. Such autonomy represents the ideal in which the movement to becoming an individual should culminate. But if the autonomous individual is the culmination of an erotically organized life, Plato sees this autonomy less as the completion of an individual subjectivity and more as an ongoing process. He emphasizes that the conversation of lover and beloved—­as the place in which one participates—­is an instance of being that transcends the history of one’s individual life. His image is one of planting seeds. Lovers continually foster the growth of beloveds, who will in turn presumably at some point become lovers and foster the growth of their own beloveds. It is the conversation and not the participants that is immortal. And the conversation is immortal because it is continuing. Its continuity is never assured but is dependent on human appreciation and commitment to exploring human possibility. It is a commitment to persuasion. The conversation’s goal is not to arrive at knowledge but to support and further persuasion in which the richness and vitality of concepts develops. Participation in that process represents the best life for humans. Persuasion embodies the intellectual and affective transformation of subjectivity—­it is the action/event in which one fully experiences what it means to be a subject and to assume responsibility for that subjectivity. Persuasion thus acquires a dual political role. It is the paradigmatic act that distinguished politics as a particular human order, and it creates an ethical standard against which to measure any political order. If, as Lear claims, a mass is “a social group composed of proto-­individuals: a We that is not a collection of I’s” (23), then we might claim that a healthy political order is a We (a differentiated community—­a genuine plurality) that is a collection of Is. Through the action/event of persuasion, these Is constitute an achieved We whose unity is an ongoing project as the concepts, values, and beliefs they share acquire continued vitality as a plurality of individuals participate in life grounded in persuasion. This ongoing constitution of a We is enacted through the self-­rule at the heart of political life. If political life, and democracy in particular, is dependent on and

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committed to the rule of self-­governance, however defined, then such self-­ rule itself depends upon the possibility of persuasion. For it is through persuasion that individuals take ownership of the political orders that govern them. Such individuals are not simply obedient or submissive to a political order but, through their active assent, give the order legitimacy. In the absence of persuasion, there can be collections of individuals, but these individuals are not necessarily constituted as political beings. If, as Jonathan Lear contends, the individual is a psychological achievement, it is equally true that an individual who has an identity as a political actor is also an achievement. Such individuals view themselves not merely as beings determined by the rule of others but as beings who participate or have a right to participate in a political order that they in some capacity authorize and to whose well-­being they are able to contribute; these individuals benefit in turn from the order to which they contribute. Persuasion is essential to this sense of meaningful belonging. If, however, a theory of persuasion based on the individual in his or her particularity is to provide an adequate account of how persuasion works when discourse is not merely between two individuals but directed at larger groups, then it is important to look at the difficulties that seemed to prevent Socrates from envisioning a responsible effort at persuasion once discourse moves beyond the intimate exchanges of erotically matched individuals. In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues that the rhetor who would practice the true art of rhetoric must both know his or her subject matter and understand the souls of the audience. As Socrates acknowledges, these requirements put enormous burdens on someone who wishes to practice rhetoric responsibly. But if this practice of rhetoric is difficult at the level of the individual, it would seem to be almost impossible with a larger audience whose diversity of souls would preclude any discourse that could effectively address such a plurality: “the vast systematic psychology of desire and discourse that he [Socrates] proposes has so far proved unachievable and seems likely to remain so’” (Yunis, 120). Yunis offers the possibility that the sheer magnitude of the task of mastering this comprehensive psychology—­if one wished to pursue a truly artistic rhetoric—­may simply have been Plato’s way of emphasizing the failure of rhetoric as it was then practiced. Certainly, this requirement would seem to make rhetoric impossible. But the tone is not mocking, even if Socrates mocks the failure of the current theoreticians and practitioners of rhetoric. Socrates’s discussion of the need for knowledge of the audience’s psychological constitution and the need to acknowledge the audience’s diversity is serious and intended to convey the genuine and complex challenge that a true rhetoric faces. The intended seriousness of

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Socrates’s argument for the need for knowledge of the audience’s psychological constitution is evident in a tension within the dialogue. Early in the dialogue, Socrates jokingly claims to understand Phaedrus and what drives him. If the claim is partly a light-­hearted teasing of Phaedrus, it is also a way of Socrates letting Phaedrus know that Socrates does, indeed, have a good understanding of who Phaedrus is. Since Socrates clearly hopes to persuade Phaedrus, who is not his beloved, the drama within the dialogue argues that it is not futile to pursue persuasion, even if its success is not assured. What Socrates offers Phaedrus is friendship and not an erotic relationship. This offer of friendship is a recognition that the two men hold things in common, and that such sharing can be the basis for a political relationship. As Phaedrus comments at the dialogue’s conclusion: “And pray for these things for me. For friends’ things are in common” (Plato, Phaedrus, 279c). The complexity of the rhetorical situation is exemplified in this attempt by Socrates to persuade Phaedrus, for even though that effort does not succeed, Plato’s mimetic representation of it is productive: it has provoked readers for over two millennia to reconceive how they think about rhetoric and Eros and about the relation of rhetoric and Eros to politics. And if no consensus has emerged, that fact itself may reveal how the effort at persuasion is one that seeks to generate discourse and not one that seeks a definitive resolution. Put another way, persuasion is not primarily concerned with reaching a conclusion but with pursuing an activity that keeps both the erotic and the political vital. This understanding still leaves the problem of persuasion and plurality unresolved, and that problem is a pressing one, especially since the need to respect plurality, even as one seeks provisional unities, is essential to modern democratic political orders. A response to this problem begins to emerge once we consider that to the extent that plurality depends upon a respect for diversity and that a respect for the integrity and importance of individuals is necessary for a genuine diversity, then a commitment to the individual is, by extension, a commitment to plurality. The question, then, becomes: How does the persuasion that takes place between individuals acquire traction in larger public discussions? For a theory of persuasion that cannot address the issue of how to speak to a larger and heterogeneous public is inadequate. The beginning of an answer starts with the recognition that if any public discourse is finally to become meaningful and promote new understandings, it needs to be internalized. Such internalization happens within individuals. These individuals are not simply isolated, atomic units with no relations to others; rather, to the extent that they operate within a shared set

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of cultural and political values and beliefs, these individuals can influence one another. This ability is not an accidental feature of the individual. If Lear is correct that the self forms in part by the internalization of the ideal-­I, then an individual can only come into being if that individual internalizes the cultural values of the world into which he or she was born, as those values are manifested in the loving responses of parents to a child’s needs. Such individuals are constituted to seek responses from the cultures into which they are born and to make demands on the products of those cultures for further affirmation. To be an individual is to seek increased and deeper cultural experience. To be an individual is to seek discursive works that can challenge one’s current constitution and, through the dialectic initiated by that challenge, explore what one can become. Plato moved beyond the self-­imposed limitations of his character Soc­ rates by creating discursive works that are intended to circulate, that are intended to provoke erotic responses which involve audiences of readers who are willing to put their understanding of Eros and rhetoric at risk. In his choice to write, Plato embraced the risks that reside in offering discourse to plural audiences. To do so, he must have viewed plurality as a resource, as different individuals in different situations make available different perspectives on a potentially shared culture. And the mimetic account of how Socrates conducts his life is itself a further endorsement of plurality. He seeks life in the city, and he seeks to talk to a multiplicity of differing interlocutors as a way to gain a perspective on his own values and beliefs. This effort is so essential that Socrates cannot imagine living his life in any other way. Plato complicated this picture by presenting another way to pursue political discourse. Unlike Socrates, Plato constructs dialogues that are both poetic and philosophical or, more correctly, whose philosophy is embedded in its poetry. The dialogues are rhetorical efforts at persuasion that seek to alter understanding not simply through argument but by embedding philosophical, political, ethical, and literary issues in affective works that are designed to elicit responses from their readers. The dialogues provoke activity, and it is when the readers engage in this activity—­through their exploration of the drama and ideas in the dialogues—­that they reconstitute themselves. This reconstitution is not necessarily uniform. And as different interpretations emerge and put pressure on each other, a more complex understanding of the philosophical, political, and ethical concepts at play emerge. This interplay is an ongoing effort at communal persuasion. The multitude of vying interpretations of the dialogue creates an important analog to the lovers’ conversation. Various interpreters are brought together

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by a shared love object, the dialogue itself, and in their shared and contested interpretations they create a community that is larger and more enduring than any one reader. In their contest over the concepts of Eros and rhetoric, they exemplify a communal discourse that models the reconceptualization of key values that is the hallmark of a vital political community. The readers are plural; their politics are plural and can differ significantly. Still, they form a community. Their motives for entering this community can vary widely—­from anger and distaste for Plato, to advocacy for what they take his positions to be, to attempts to understand a complex text whose meanings are neither self-­evident nor stable, to simple careerism and professional promotion. But to the extent that they truly engage each other, those members become part of a community. Those who do not choose to engage with the others have made the choice, whether they realize it or not, not to be members of the community. With that choice, they forgo the possibility of being persuaded, of examining and reevaluating the concepts with which they entered the critical discussion. But those who participate actively in this community of readers exemplify the possibility of a politics that is not defined by loyalty to a particular position or ideology but to a commitment to honoring a plurality that expands human understanding and that affirms a freedom at the heart of that expansion. In the Phaedrus, Socrates criticized written discourse because it could not exercise control over who its audience was. Written discourse is inherently promiscuous and compromises the power of that author to control the meaning. Written texts, unlike private conversations, function with audiences whose members are plural. Thus, meaning is determined not by the transmission of a fixed set of ideas by an author but by the responsiveness that the author’s text provokes in the reader. The shift from private speech to public writing, therefore, carries with it a second, fundamental shift: in the paradigm of how a text operates rhetorically. Meaning is no longer to be understood in terms of an author communicating a particular understanding to a reader (this model of communication of meaning from author to reader parallels the traditional model of persuasion in which meaning is conveyed from speaker to listener) but rather as a more precarious occurrence in which readers, attempting to make sense from their particular vantage points, arrive at what they take the text to mean. Both risk and lack of control lie at the heart of this enterprise. But the giving up of a total control is also the creation of an opening for the responsible exercise of freedom on the part of the reader. The readers’ understanding will be one that has significance for them because they will have developed it in response to a text that makes demands on them. This kind of reading becomes paradigmatic

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for the creation of new understanding. It can, of course, be abused, and readers can simply find what they want to find in a text. Such an abuse would not be an instance of persuasion, but rather a refusal to be open to persuasion. Reading as persuasion, as an instance of an audience making sense of an experience, depends upon readers’ responsiveness. Meaning emerges in the play between reader and text, and between reader and reader. As various individual readers and various camps of readers engage with each other, meanings or significant disagreements as to meaning develop and uncoerced communities form. These communities acquire identity not simply because they hold certain ideas in common but because they have come to hold these ideas in common by responding to each other. This common understanding embodies not a shared knowledge but a shared persuasion. It can deepen or change depending upon future interpretations that impact it. The Platonic dialogues thus exemplify how poetic cultural products can both respect plurality and generate common understanding to support a community that shares beliefs, values, and perceptions. The persuasion that is achieved by a philosophical poetry becomes, through the action/event of persuasion, the discursive place where the individual can enter into meaningful political sharing.

seven

Persuasion, Tragedy, and Transformative Discourse

Of all the literary genres that Greece bequeathed us, tragedy is surely the one that best illustrates the paradox that Marx, in the Introduction to his Critique of Political Economy, formulated on the subject of Greek Art in general and the epic in particular. If it is true that works of art, like any other social products, are connected with a specific historical context and that their genesis, structures, and meaning can only be understood within and through that context, how is it that they remain alive and continue to communicate with us when the forms of that social life have been transformed at every level and the conditions necessary for their production have disappeared? To put it another way, how can one claim that the tragic works and genre are historical if one also recognizes their transhistoricity, the fact that they have survived across the centuries? —Jean-­Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-­Naquet, “The Tragic Subject: Historicity and Transhistoricity,” Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 237 At the end of the journey, passion emerges as the fundamental crossroads of aesthetics and politics, where the most essential questions that have been posed since time immemorial finally meet. —Michel Meyer, Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature, 7 For there are two questions which still remain to be asked. Is it really the case that what is called a tradition carries so clear and single a meaning? And, whatever our answer to this, what actual relations are we to see and live by, between the tradition of tragedy and the kinds of experience, in our own time, that we ordinarily and perhaps mistakenly call tragic? —Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, 14–­15

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Tragedy, in its emotional and intellectual engagement with the audience, exemplifies the ways in which the artistic use of discourse can reconstitute an audience emotionally, ethically, and politically. This complex response of the audience to tragedy can help us understand how the action/event of persuasion can transform a subjectivity. The issue is not whether tragedy may or may not disclose some fundamental questions about the human condition but rather how it makes its understanding available to an audience in a way that resonates with the audience’s larger experience of its own situation. Because tragedy’s impact on an audience cannot be reduced to its having presented an argument, it becomes a lens through which to view persuasion and the complex ways in which discourse can transform subjectivity. It was tragedy’s ability to shape an audience’s emotions that led Gorgias to use tragedy to illuminate the power of persuasion. He located this power in the capacity of a discursive form to create powerful emotions that then shaped how an audience perceived a situation. Like Gorgias, I am not interested in arguing for a certain truth or understanding that tragedy may convey; rather, I am interested in exploring how tragedy is able to communicate to or involve an audience in a complex experience, one that can move an audience to reflect upon and possibly alter its own self-­understanding. Put another way, I want to look at the ways in which tragedy becomes intelligible and meaningful because it finds or invents a form or forms of understanding that allow experience to be meaningful. These forms of understanding are not to be confused with the dramatic formal structure of tragedy; they are, instead, instances of what Raymond Williams identified as structures of feeling. In its creation of a form of understanding, tragedy demonstrates how the operation of persuasion cannot be equated simply with deliberation or argument but how deliberation and argument become meaningful for persuasion only if they participate in the emotional, ethical, or political transformation of the audience because they are embedded in an imaginative structure that connects argument and deliberation to experience. As Jean-­Pierre Vernant observes: “In art, production produces not only an ‘object for the subject’ but also ‘a subject for the object’—­for the new object just created” (Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet, 140). If, as Raymond Williams has demonstrated, the various forms that tragedy can assume are responses to human experience as it is shaped by history, then tragedy as a form (or more correctly, as a collection of forms) succeeds by persuading an audience not of a truth per se but of an interpretation that makes experience available in a form that can assist the audience in making sense of who they are at that time in history. Tragedy provides an exemplary instance (and it is by no means the only instance) in which a structured experience can transform

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subjectivity by bringing a subject inside that experience so as to realign an audience’s emotions and understanding. Tragedy succeeds because it creates a tragic subjectivity.

The Tragic Subject In “The Tragic Subject: Historicity and Transhistoricity,” Vernant uses Marx’s comments in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as a point of departure for exploring the power of Greek tragedy to continue to move audiences, even as those audiences reside in cultures historically removed from the particular institutions and daily life that enabled tragedy to inform an experience both powerful and meaningful. Vernant borrows from Marx the insight that human production creates a world in which human subjectivity, in its sensual, emotional, and intellectual constitution, is also a product of that production. Art can offer compelling experiences because it creates the audiences who are receptive to those experiences. The audience’s perception has been informed by the principles that guide the art. These audiences can be moved by art because they have been constituted as subjectivities who perceive the world in certain ways. As Marx points out, the art of the painter creates paintings that then inform how the eye sees. The body’s potential ways of comprehending experience develop and mature in response to the human products that direct attention and guide the subject’s perception so that certain aspects of experience become salient. The everyday apprehension of the world is, thus, a product of the historically determined modes of production into which one is born. These modes and their shaping of sensual, emotional, and intellectual apprehension allow experience to be meaningful. For Vernant, these ways of making sense of experience are possible because the products and modes of production from which they arise generate traditions and practices that define areas of action. He points to the ways in which Euclidean geometry, by rendering space as abstract, enabled a certain practice of mathematics, and to the ways in which Plato and Aristotle invented a practice of philosophy that, despite the very different circumstances in which it is pursued today, is still shaped by forms of argument, conceptions of evidence, and central questions that were initiated by its founders. Vernant makes no claim that such intellectual or aesthetic traditions need to continue inevitably, and it is certainly conceivable that they could become empty forms of human activity that cease to speak meaningfully to human concerns. But his argument implies that when these intellectual and aesthetic modes of proceeding do persist, this persistence can be

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traced back to certain features that defined these activities and that continue to speak to people’s experiences. Vernant’s particular concern is to explain how a dramatic form that arose under very specific historical and cultural conditions has continued to be a source of profound and moving experience. Why has Attic tragedy remained a vital art form and not simply an antiquarian preoccupation? His answer is that not only did the Attic tragedians invent aesthetic and/or political works that were “objects for spiritual consumption designed for the citizens and adapted to them: through the spectacle, reading, imitation, and establishment of a literary tradition” (Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet, 240); they also, through these works, invented a form of subjectivity that became central to the West’s understanding of what it means to be human. Discourse forms that spoke principally or only to a set of specific historical and cultural conditions, while powerful, would not have the resonance that tragedy has acquired in the Western tradition. The transhistoricity of tragedy is a consequence of the tragedians having created “a ‘subject,’ a tragic consciousness, the introduction of tragic man” (Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet, 240). What tragedy did was give form to an experience that prior to the form might have impacted people but remained incoherent or unconceptualized. Certainly, there was suffering before tragedy, but the power of tragedy—­its contribution to a particular approach to human calamity—­resided in its ability to make suffering intelligible to its audience. It did this not by presenting some larger understanding of the universe in which suffering was redeemed by its place in a more comprehensive (possibly divine) purpose, but by framing this suffering as a problem. In so doing, tragedy created a subjectivity in which suffering was experienced as meaningful and not simply a random affliction. This creation was not ex nihilo but a response to some feature of the individual or the world that was profoundly disordering. It had power because it spoke to a core threat that was felt but, prior to the invention of tragedy, could not be articulated in a way that made it emotionally and intellectually coherent. If Vernant is right, one of tragedy’s major contributions was to transform subjectivity in the West by providing a way or ways to interpret the fundamental fact of suffering. According to Vernant, tragedy accomplished this transformation not by arguing a thesis that sought to demonstrate the world was a certain way; rather, its power resided in two other elements: it presented human action as entangled in an inescapable complexity, and it foregrounded its own construction as an effort at informing experience. Unlike epic, which claims to convey a reality, tragedy’s form emphasizes that it is a work of fiction. Its power is not grounded in a truth claim but in the way in which the

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audience’s engagement with the tragic action creates an interpretation of the world that renders suffering coherent. Tragedy is a form of persuasion. Tragedy is powerful because it persuades its audience that the world is tragic. As such, tragedy is not a fact of the natural world or even an inevitable understanding of the human condition; rather, it is an orientation toward that world that has succeeded in enabling humans to give some form to suffering as it has emerged in the lives of human beings. Tragedy does not disclose a truth; it offers a persuasive interpretation. It could only succeed at such persuasion if, as a form of experience, it spoke meaningfully to aspects of the audience’s encounters in and of the world that impacted the audience, and to the ways in which those encounters were unsettling and threatened to undermine both the audience’s sense of itself and its sense of itself as something of value. Tragedy was powerful because it made available to its audience a subjectivity that enabled that audience to think in more nuanced ways about their lives. For audiences that felt no such threat (those, for example, for whom any experience of suffering could be explained as part of a larger plan, even if the plan itself were not fully comprehensible to the audience), tragedy would have little or no power to transform that audience’s subjectivity. As Aristotle would point out in his Rhetoric, with such audiences there is no available means of persuasion. The world is felt as tragic only by those people who have been persuaded that the world is tragic, and who, through their engagement with a self-­consciously fictional work, have acquired a tragic subjectivity. Because of a specific set of historical, cultural, and political factors, fifth-­ century-­BCE Athens developed an audience that was potentially receptive to tragedy as a cultural form. For Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet, Attic tragedy played an integral role in the constitution of a citizenry that was democratic. Tragedy did not so much celebrate a civic identity as it helped form and maintain one. It was an imaginative form intended to do ideological work—­its purpose was to contribute to the constitution of democratic citizens. By incorporating a legendary past into a set of contemporary issues, tragedy allowed or invited the citizens of Athens to conceive of themselves in a new way. Rather than treating characters from heroic legends as heroes or as models to be imitated, these characters were now a resource with which to explore problems. As Vernant observes: What used to be praised as an ideal, the touchstone of excellence, is brought into question before the public. The hero becomes the subject of a debate and interrogation that, through his person, implicates the fifth-­century spectator, the citizen of democratic Athens. From the point of view of tragedy, human

166 / Chapter Seven beings and human action are seen, not as realities to be pinned down and defined in their essential qualities, in the manner of philosophers of the succeeding century, but as problems that defy resolution, riddles with double meanings that are never fully decoded. (Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet, 242)

As they witness the action and the choral comment, the audience members encounter a cultural and political form that does not simply present a thesis about human beings and human action but one that has the effect of denying the audience a resolution to the problem that the drama enacts. As an imaginative form, it creates an audience for whom its central and informing political concepts become questions. Tragedy makes a democratic audience reflective about democracy as a political form. And in catalyzing this reflection, the tragedians created not only a tragic subjectivity but a democratic subjectivity. What is crucial for tragedy is that the events represented on the stage engage the audience emotionally. In this way, the actions imitated are internalized and become part of the audience’s psychic life. The experience of tragedy is necessarily divided: on the one hand there is a compelling engagement with the represented action and on the other hand there is distance from it. Both elements are crucial. To experience tragedy as a meaningful form is to be brought inside an event that reconstitutes a subjectivity by provoking a response in the audience that is both emotional and intellectual. The human responsiveness central to persuasion is equally essential to tragedy. Because the tragic spectacle is emotionally moving, it makes a demand on the audience to respond. One consequence of its impact is to disrupt what might have been a previous sense that humans understand themselves. Tragedy challenges the complacency or naïveté that can characterize everyday life. Equally, it enables people to reflect on events that in their devastation seem to argue that human purpose and action are without meaning. The challenge that tragedy creates is directed not simply to people’s private understandings of themselves but to the public consequences that follow when such understanding is not interrogated. Democracy, as it was lived in fifth-­century Athens, required the audience to understand that human subjectivity was not capable of being enclosed into a fixed understanding. Further, such an understanding should not lead to despair but should provoke questioning and discussion. Such questioning and discussion are essential to any democratic citizenry capable of making the political decisions necessary to sustain the city as a democracy. The questioning that tragedy provokes does not lead to a stable answer. It is not a form of questioning that eventuates in knowledge. Instead, it is

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an inducement into a way of life; it is the discovery of a particular type of subjectivity. This subjectivity is itself not static but remains vital by encountering a set of experiences that make it difficult for it to settle into a stable knowledge. Still, the temptation to move from persuasion to knowledge is deeply attractive, and it is one that tragedy often resists or calls into question by foregrounding the claim to knowledge as a strategy by which humans contrive to be ignorant of who they are. The temptation to treat persuasion as knowledge is often exhibited in tragic figures who are defined by a rigidity that the tragic action calls into question and that ultimately contributes to the character’s downfall. Oedipus is paradigmatic of such inflated faith, certain that he possesses a knowledge that enables him to solve the problems threatening to undo an achieved human order. Tragedy is alert to the tendency to lapse back into the illusion that people know who they are—­ that they can be transparent to themselves. The experience of tragedy is to persuade us otherwise. A resistance to the temptation to equate persuasion with knowledge is central to tragedy. The fact that tragedy was performed in various civic festivals as part of the city’s normal celebrations underlines the need for the repeated experience of encountering the human as problematic. The counter to such a temptation involves the second innovation of tragedy. Tragedy’s presentation of heroes drawn from the past but located in present situations foregrounded that these dramas were works of fiction. The time in which the action takes place did not and could not exist. For the tragic experience to be possible, the audience needs a form that allows it to understand that it is not seeing the dramatized representation of an actual event. The understanding that the events being enacted are fictional is essential to the experience. The importance of understanding tragedy as fiction was made clear early in its history. When the tragedy of the Capture of Miletus, which depicted the then-­recent Persian conquest of this Athenian ally, was performed, it so emotionally disturbed the audience that its playwright, Phrynichus, was fined, and the tragedy ordered never to be performed again. Witnessing an event of such suffering was simply too emotionally wrenching for the audience. It produced emotions but not those appropriate for tragedy. The grief was too recent and too raw to permit the emotional distance necessary for tragedy to succeed as a certain kind of dramatic form. The point of tragedy was not to provide consolation for traumatic events, but to create an emotional and intellectual space for audience members to reflect upon the concepts and values that informed a democratic city. For tragedy to succeed in its creation of a democratic subjectivity, its purpose could not be to represent disasters faithfully but instead to construct plots that, in their self-­conscious fictiveness, could move audiences to an

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understanding of the human situation that was both troubling and bearable. What tragedy offered its spectators was an interpretation of the human situation, and if it were to work as an experience, then it had to be understood as an interpretation. The drama was effective, was moving, because it persuaded the audience of the cogency of the interpretation. If the audience could experience the action of the play with a sufficient balance between emotional closeness and distance, the experience would produce a questioning and possibly a need for discussion. The need for this questioning was not result of any argument but arose because the audience could no longer rest comfortably with themselves given what they had witnessed. The experience was transformative, not because it provided knowledge but because it led to questioning and reflection. If the experience was fictive, it also needed to speak to some aspect of the audience’s subjectivity in which the audience could recognize itself. Further, this recognition was not so much the uncovering of an understanding that simply happened not to have been available but could with effort be recovered; rather, it was an acknowledgment of a problematic aspect of subjectivity whose authority one recognized even while realizing that such a problem played a crucial role in defining subjectivity’s nature. Since one’s subjectivity is by its very nature unknowable, the best one can hope for is an ongoing effort to come to terms with oneself—­that is the task of persuasion. If one cannot finally know oneself, one can construct fictions or interpretations that allow one to confront what it means to be a creature who is by their nature out of touch with themselves. Again, this understanding is not an intellectual proposition or conclusion grounded in the apprehension of a stable and determinative rational order but an interpretation of which one is persuaded. To be so persuaded by tragedy is to develop a tragic subjectivity. Presumably, such a subjectivity is essential for a democracy—­or so the civic performance of tragedy would suggest. The Athenians seemed to believe that any political order dependent on citizens playing a significant role in self-­governance requires the constitution of a political identity that is not naturally occurring. If people are to govern themselves, they need to be transformed into a citizenry who can see humans as problematic, as creatures who, whatever the goodness or badness of their intentions, find themselves the authors of actions that can undermine those intentions. It is not simply that people can make mistakes or that if they were better informed, they could make more accurate judgments, but that it is impossible for humans to have the kind of understanding that would free them from a partiality that is inherent in being human. However much a human actor

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may aspire to the condition of the gods and to the all-­encompassing vision of the gods, humans cannot escape their own limitations. An understanding of that impossibility should generate a certain humility and, possibly, tolerance. These virtues would seem essential to a democracy. And if Hannah Arendt is right that plurality is the condition necessary for politics, then a recognition of limits is also a recognition of the plurality of perspectives and understandings (all partial) that are both a challenge and a resource for political life in general and democracy in particular. In its recognition of human limits, tragedy investigates the ways in which humans seek to evade what it means to be human. Such an investigation is not an abstract inquiry into what it means to be human, but an action through which a democratic citizen is constituted. Neil Croally makes this point: Attic tragedy of the fifth century was political; it was primarily a discourse of the polis. By understanding its educative function, we do not merely assert the political nature of tragedy; we give it substance. Tragedy is political because, in common with the other main institutions of fifth-­century Athenian democracy, it teaches (through its own distinctive way). That is, education was political, and the polis was educative. (68)

To characterize Attic tragedy as educative is to understand it as an act of persuasion. How did Attic tragedy seek to persuade its audience? If Attic tragedy was political and operated “through its own distinctive way,” what was this distinctive way? And what was the substance of tragedy and what made that substance political? Croally agrees with Vernant, Vidal-­Naquet, and others that this substance was democratic, not because it argued for the value of democracy but because it brought its audience inside activities that were essential if they were to function as a democratic citizenry. In particular, tragedy’s dramatic scenes represented actions and its choral odes presented these actions as problems. These dramatic representations created unsettled experiences that problematized the concepts through which a democratic audience understood themselves. Such representations foregrounded democratic ideals and understandings and made them into open-­ended questions: “Tragedy, great ideological production itself, examined the ideology (the self ) of the audience. That was its teaching” (Croally, 68). Tragedy persuaded its audience not because it sought to instill positive content in them but because it transformed the subjectivity of the audience. As Vernant argued, it created a tragic subjectivity. What distinguished such a subjectivity was an ability to engage in self-­reflection. Such self-­reflection

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was not so much an investigation of one’s private self but of the cultural and political values that made a self possible in that culture and the polis: The self that tragedy examines is not something physical or a person (or persons) that the audience could identify with the contemporary world. Tragedy does not work like comedy. Rather, we should see the self as something more to do with the values and beliefs held by the audience, which, for reasons of economy, I prefer to call ideology. In an earlier work I defined this as the authorized self-­definition of the dominant group, that is the citizen body. (Croally, 67)

If Attic tragedy educated its Athenian audience, it also educates us as to how persuasion works. What tragedy allows us to see is that persuasion is not primarily the successful transmission of particular content; it is the reconstitution or transformation of an audience’s subjectivity by bringing an audience inside an experience that makes concepts central to its identity available for reflection and reconsideration. As Stephen Halliwell comments in his discussion of Plato’s preoccupation with tragedy: “If there is a core to the many uses of tragedy found in Plato’s oeuvre, it lies in this idea of ‘the tragic’ as the forging of a (re)valuation of life on the anvil of suffering” (399). The suffering undergone in tragedy is educative because it is transformative—­through the audience’s participation in the suffering they witness, their subjectivity is remade (forged) on the basis of a reevaluation of values that contribute to that subjectivity’s constitution. If tragedy investigates values central to its audience, it also often investigates the role of speech both as an effort to evade understanding and as an unintended revealer of that understanding. Much of tragedy proceeds through mimetic presentations of rhetoric. This mimesis is found especially in dramas of Euripides. As Simon Goldhill has argued, “the contests of authoritative explanation, the relations between present and past, the relation of words and world, are, then, three major concerns fascinatingly brought to the fore by Euripides’ use of contemporary, professionalized rhetoric” (149). Although the discursive agons often are not formal trials, they proceed through exchanges of accusation and defense that replicate a trial. They are rhetorical performances that make rhetoric a subject for critical reflection. Speeches both move the action forward and reveal character. If, as a discursive form intended to educate, tragedy involves efforts within the play to promote or resist persuasion, its subject is not simply the values and understandings central to the civic body but also the role of persuasion in advancing, challenging, disguising, or obscuring such values:

Persuasion, Tragedy, and Transformative Discourse  /  171 Tragedy as a genre, tragic language, is in this way a fundamental element of the fifth-­century enlightenment—­an exploration of the developing public language of the city, performed before the city. Staging the agon, dramatizing the corruption and failures of communication, displaying the conflicts of meaning within the public language of the city, provoke the audience of tragedy towards a recognition of language’s powers and dangers, fissures and obligations. (Goldhill, 149)

Tragedy, as a performed critique of democratic ideology, is necessarily an investigation and reflection on persuasion.

Hippolytus and the Implacable Demand of Eros In his tragedy Hippolytus, Euripides brings Eros and persuasion together. Presented at the Athens City Dionysia in 428 BCE, it was awarded first place. In its exploration as to why discourse fails, the Hippolytus makes persuasion into a philosophical problem and argues that, like Eros, persuasion is a power whose boundaries cannot be determined by the conscious intent of a rhetor. The tragedy begins in the refusal of a chaste Hippolytus to honor the goddess Aphrodite. For the goddess, Hippolytus’s chastity is an affront, and she seeks revenge by arousing a passion for the young, chaste Hippolytus in the queen, Phaedra. Tortured by this passion, Phaedra confides in her nurse, who then seeks to persuade Hippolytus to reciprocate Phaedra’s passion. He angrily rejects the nurse’s offer. In her humiliation and shame, Phaedra commits suicide, leaving a note falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape. Her suicide and note lead Theseus, who is both Hippolytus’s father and Phaedra’s husband, to curse and banish Hippolytus, who is subsequently killed by Poseidon’s bulls. After Hippolytus has been mortally injured but before he dies, Artemis informs Theseus that Hippolytus was innocent. A dying Hippolytus forgives Theseus. Through Hippolytus’s death and his failure to defend himself against a false testimony, Euripides demonstrates both the implacable force of Eros and the complex nature of persuasion. Bernard Knox, who sees the play organized in terms of the alternatives of silence and speech, each of which is ultimately futile, recognizes that speech is a particularly dangerous power, for, despite the assumption that speech serves human purposes, it sets in motion forces that it cannot control: Speech is what distinguishes man from the other animals. But in the Hippolytus its role is not simply to point out the distinction between right and wrong.

172 / Chapter Seven It is presented not as an instrument which makes possible the conception of moral choice and expresses moral alternatives, but an explosive force which, once released, cannot be restrained and creates universal destruction. (216)

If a foundational principle for rhetoric is that mastering of the art of rhetoric empowers speakers to achieve their purposes through the skillful use of discourse, then the Hippolytus offers a radical critique of rhetoric and persuasion. The issue is not one of intentional corruption but of the delusion that the consequences of discourse can be brought under human control. Although the Hippolytus begins with a focus on the power and threat posed by Aphrodite, the action unfolds not only as the working-­through of the consequences of a transgression against and disrespect of the divinity of Aphrodite but also as a disaster in which persuasion occupies a key place. If there is divine retribution, the agencies through which that retribution proceeds are the operation of desire and the intrusion of rhetoric. This point is made by Christopher Pelling in his analysis of the play’s concern with rhetoric: “The unspeaking, solid testimony of the tablet [Phaedra’s suicide letter] is eventually more persuasive than anything artful speech can achieve (Zeitlin 1985)—­and more misleading. This is a play about failed communication, and the rhetoric that misfires is central to it” (91). It is a play in which the power of both Eros and peitho are probed. Charles Segal has argued that “‘Purity’ is clearly a central theme in the Hippolytus,” and “Euripides exploits the several meanings of ‘purity’ in order to probe more deeply into the moral dilemmas he raises and the complexity of our ethical judgments in general” (“Shame and Purity in Euripides’ Hippolytus,” 278). Connected to concerns with purity are those concerned with shame. For Bernard Williams, Euripides’s drama is an exploration of the ancient Greeks’ complex understanding of shame: By the later fifth century the Greeks had their own distinctions between a shame that merely followed public opinion and a shame that expressed inner personal conviction. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, such a distinction is not only expressed but does much, in a complex and sophisticated way, to structure the action. (95)

Williams sees both Phaedra and Hippolytus as characters who exemplify the emotional and ethical complexity that follows upon these two different understandings of shame. For Williams, shame is an emotion at the core of ethical life: “By giving through the emotions a sense of who one is and of what one hopes to be, it [shame] mediates between act, character,

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and consequence, and also between ethical demands and the rest of life” (Shame and Necessity, 102). Purity and especially shame, then, represent the type of concepts that Greek tragedy made into problems and that provoked the kind of questioning that Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet saw as the purpose of tragedy in a democratically constituted Athens. Certainly, Hippolytus invites such readings and offers audiences an opportunity to reflect on the complexity of ethical life and understand why shame is an ethically important emotion. It makes the ethical life into a problem and thereby offers its audience an interpretation of themselves in which they inhabit a tragic subjectivity. But Hippolytus does more than create an occasion to reflect on the complexity and centrality of purity and shame; it offers an interpretation of desire that acknowledges both the power of Eros and the human effort to evade this power by constructing lives that seek to escape from the vulnerability entailed by a recognition of Eros. Knox argues that human choice is shown to be irrelevant in this tragedy and that the action should be seen principally as a conflict between two warring deities, a conflict in which the human characters are merely victims (206). He is partly right, but the situation is more complicated. If Hippolytus’s loyalty to Artemis is, at least in part, a consequence of his denial of his sexuality, then his moral character implies a choice, even if unconscious, to deny part of who he is. For once one acknowledges the inescapable role of Eros in a human life, purity can look very different. Rather than being an ethical virtue, it can become a ploy to avoid acknowledging one’s own humanity and the vulnerability that, in part, defines such a life. In response to the power of Eros, purity, when it is elevated into the sole or commanding virtue, can look like an effort to deny desire an opening, and in walling off a human life, purity can become the valuing of death over life. To be pure in such cases is not so much to be clean as it is to seek an aseptic existence, one that removes a character from a life that would, otherwise, remain in a relationship with a larger world, a world that would inescapably enter the self and negate this effort at absolute self-­ determination. So, however much purity and shame are made into problems by Hippolytus, desire and its power are the more fundamental problems for the play. Purity—­as the evasion of desire—­and shame—­as an emotion that registers the way in which the psychological force of purity shapes ethical response—­reveal both the power of Eros and the self-­destructive effort to constitute a life outside desire. Coupled with this concern with the power of Eros is a concern with both the power and limits of rhetoric as a discursive art that proposes strategies to navigate this world and to bring desire under control.

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Hippolytus opens with a prologue in which an angry Aphrodite announces that she will enact vengeance on Hippolytus for his arrogant refusal to acknowledge her power as a god. For her, Hippolytus’s purity is far from an admirable quality; instead, she is affronted by the pride of those who deny her power and refuse to honor her: Such as worship my power in all humility, I exalt in honor, But those whose pride is stiff-­necked against me I lay by the heels. (Euripides, 5–­8)

At issue is not simply a display of a divine pique at receiving insufficient honor, but the deeper problem of what such disrespect reveals and of the ways in which an ethical vocabulary can be used to disguise what is a refusal to accept responsibility for being a creature subject to desire. For Aphrodite, Hippolytus’s purity, however he may represent it, is really an instance of pride. It is pursuit of autonomy on the assumption that one can construct a life free from the contamination of desire, and that in the exercise of such freedom, one can master the power of a god. As Phaedra’s nurse maintains, in the case of Aphrodite, such a pursuit denies the power that makes life possible: “For she engenders us, / and sows the seed of desire whereof we’re born, / all we her children, living on the earth” (Euripides, 449–­51). Aphrodite is the life force; she is the power of generation, and to refuse to acknowledge this unruly power and to elevate chastity into the sole virtue that grounds an ethics is to dishonor life. The action of the play will disclose the impurity that can be disguised in the pursuit of purity. Aphrodite’s prologue frames the play and provides an interpretation of Hippolytus’s chastity before he makes his initial appearance. This framing is consequential for the way in which the audience will hear Hippolytus’s words and reveals one of the ways in which tragedy as a form of understanding effects persuasion. By the order of the presentation of speeches, a tragedy can create contexts for the examination of language. Through the juxtaposition of speeches, it can open up a dissonance between performance and meaning. This dissonance can then lead to a questioning of the performed discourse. This performance, which can no longer be taken at face value, creates a gap between surface appearance and deeper reality, and in so doing makes rhetoric itself into a problem. As Theseus will lament later in the play, it is difficult to determine the true from the false, and he wishes that “all men should have two voices, one the just voice, / and one as chance would have it” (Euripides, 926–­27). This fantasy is of a world without rhetoric, a

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world transparently and immediately knowable. But it is a fantasy, and in the world of the play and the larger world in which the audience lives, there is no possibility of eliminating rhetoric. The power of a well-­constructed discourse cannot be evaded, and in raising that issue, the play cautions the audience in taking its own meaning as being transparently available. Its own rhetoric has turned both the play and rhetoric into problems with which the audience must contend. To be adequate to the experience of the play, the audience must question that experience itself—­it must reflect on the ways in which the artful structuring of discourse cannot be allowed to foreclose the need for the audience to examine how its response has been shaped and to take appropriate responsibility for its response. In this, the experience of the play functions as a disciplining or possibly expansion of responsiveness into a mode of self-­reflection. Before Hippolytus appears on scene, the audience has been prepared to receive his speech in a certain way and to question his self-­presentation and self-­understanding. This construction of the dramatic action has consequences for the concepts that the tragedy will explore—­in this case, chastity and purity. Aphrodite accuses Hippolytus of blasphemy (Euripides, 12) and of having counted her “the vilest of the Gods in Heaven” (Euripides, 13). His chastity is seen by her as not so much an expression of purity as an aggressive refusal to acknowledge a life-­affirming power. There is something of the hysteric in Hippolytus, and Aphrodite rejects his own self-­estimation of the value and the meaning he ascribes to his purity. She readily acknowledges that it is fair that he honors Artemis—­that such an honoring is a healthy recognition of the plurality of powers or divinities that impact human existence—­but she challenges his right to pick and choose which gods he will recognize. The action of the play will be a working-­out of retribution for blasphemy against the legitimate claims of desire. In pursuit of this retribution, Aphrodite shows no pity for others who suffer as part of Hippolytus’s inexorable punishment. The operation of desire is implacable and is indifferent to its consequences for individual humans—­as a divinity, Aphrodite embodies a power that cannot be appeased or negotiated with, but that must be respected. The demands of desire do not necessarily coordinate with the intentions and interests of humans, nor do they answer to humans’ conception of justice. Phaedra and Theseus will both suffer mightily, as will Artemis, but neither Phaedra nor Theseus is the play’s tragic hero. They are victims, part of the damage inflicted in a world that refuses to come to terms with the power of desire. In this tragedy, Aphrodite is not represented as an ally for humans; she is an angry goddess, and in her anger she does not

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flinch to injure innocent characters. These characters are victims and their fate, however sad, is not tragic. Hippolytus, in his prideful contempt for Aph­ rodite, is the tragic figure. Phaedra is both collateral damage in Aphrodite’s punishment of Hippolytus and a representative example of how Eros overtakes the character who falls in love. While her suffering and death are sad, they are of secondary interest to Aphrodite: “Her [Phaedra’s] suffering does not weigh in the scale so much / that I should let my enemies go untouched / escaping payment of that retribution / that honor demands I have” (Euripides, 46–­49). If Hippolytus is Aphrodite’s blasphemer, Phaedra is her victim. In her experience of desire, she exemplifies the loss of self that caused the Greek lyric poets such anguish. The poignancy of her situation is a reminder of human vulnerability, of how one’s destiny is not fully under one’s control. Desire comes unbidden. In its ability to undo self-­possession, desire challenges the idea of a self that can determine its own course. As Anne Carson puts it in analyzing a fragment by Sappho: Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside her: orpeton. No battle avails to fight off that advance: amachanon. Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate. (4)

Aphrodite is clear that she is responsible for Phaedra’s passion: “Phaedra saw him / and her heart was filled with the longings of love. / That was my work” (Euripides, 26–­28). Desire operates independent of and with indifference to human intention. And although Phaedra will feel intense shame at her feelings, she is not responsible for those feelings. She has done nothing to deserve her suffering. Indeed, she is, at least initially, ethically laudatory—­she actively resists her own passion. Her experience of her passion is agonizing. If Anne Carson can characterize the experience of Eros as bittersweet, Phaedra appears to taste only the bitterness: “Phaedra groans in the bitterness of heart / and the goads of love prick her cruelly, / and she is like to die” (Euripides, 36–­38). Her desire is experienced as an illness—­it has invaded her from the outside, entering independent of her will. As the play opens, she is determined to resist it and is suffering mightily because of her resistance. There is no sweetness or joy in this love—­it is felt simply as affliction. Euripides does not have Phaedra rhapsodize over the physical charms of Hippolytus. There seems little tenderness in this love. It is clear that Phaedra

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cannot undo this love simply by choosing not to feel it. What her suffering makes evident is that, despite Hippolytus’s self-­congratulation at his own chastity, humans cannot control Eros. If being chaste is a choice, then it is one that violates a natural order of desire, and it will set in motion forces that will rebound on the character in his pride at being chaste. However praiseworthy purity can be, if it is pursued to the exclusion of all other legitimate concerns, it undermines a character’s ability to know himself. Chastity need not always be an ethical virtue, or at least it is not a straightforward virtue, and it cannot be the sole virtue that structures an ethical life. It can disguise an unhealthy rejection of life, one that holds that individuals are autonomous and can remove themselves from more entangled relationships with others. To the extent that chastity is involved in the pursuit of autonomy, of a life uncontaminated by desire, one in which purity can be a cover for the need for invulnerability, the elevation of purity to the highest of virtues represents a turning away from life. Following the prologue, Hippolytus enters the stage and gives a speech that would appear to be the celebration of an idyllic pastoral existence. On its surface, the speech is an act of devotion to Artemis. But given Aphrodite’s just-­concluded oration, the audience is primed to be skeptical of Hippolytus’s speech and to see his self-­presentation as an instance of self-­ignorance. The audience is presented with an act of language that reveals the character of the speaker and provides insight into his character in a way that the character himself does not understand. Hippolytus sings a joyful praise for a place that is outside of and protected from a harsher world. The garland that he offers is symbolic of a nature removed from contamination by any human toil: no flocks are pastured there, and no crops are grown. The “inviolate Meadow” approaches being a hidden garden (only pollinated by bees), or better yet a sanctuary. Its innocence—­its chastity—­occurs naturally, and as such, Hippolytus sees it as figuring his own innate purity, which is also a natural occurrence and owes nothing to the labor of instruction. This meadow is an Eden-­like place in which harmony is natural and spontaneous. It has no sense of lack that might instigate a desire. That this speech is problematic and should not be taken at face value is apparent immediately in the reaction of Hippolytus’s servant. He responds to the speech not by commending Hippolytus for joy in this pastoral existence but by asking if he is open to advice. The servant recognizes the potential blasphemy concealed in the euphoric celebration. Knox reads Hippolytus as an intellectual and mystic who is distinguished from the mass of mankind by the logical consistency of his beliefs, and he discounts the servant’s response as an example of the contradiction that allows most

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people to unreflectively accept the moral compromises in their lives (221). But where Hippolytus sees only an uncomplicated world in which chastity is a natural occurrence for those whose souls are moved by an innate purity, the servant sees a more complex situation. Without denying the value of chastity or the honor due Artemis, the servant suggests that things are more complicated, that multiple gods deserve honor. At some level, this suggestion is an argument for or caution about psychological complexity—­many powers shape human character and action. The servant cautiously raises the possibility that what Hippolytus sees as a simple matter of honoring one and only one divinity can be an instance in which a “haughty heart breeds arrogant demeanor” (Euripides, 94). In warning against having a “haughty heart,” the servant detects the same pride that has infuriated Aphrodite. He suggests that Hippolytus needs to ask himself whether his chastity might not be as simple and pure as he thinks it is, or whether it might also be an expression of arrogance. He warns Hippolytus that his attitude may be an affront to Aphrodite—­that Hippolytus is not acknowledging the legitimate claims of his own sexuality. Hippolytus brushes this warning off, claiming that he does acknowledge Aphrodite, but that he chooses to honor her at a distance. In so claiming, he assumes that a character such as himself can control his own emotional life and that he can determine it solely as a matter of will. Such an assumption reveals his arrogance—­his belief that he is free to honor a god on his own terms. This pride (this self-­assessment) recasts a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of its own desire as a virtue. It is a willful form of self-­ignorance. If Hippolytus deals with his sexuality by denial, Phaedra wrestles with a passion that she would deny if she could, but whose power exceeds her ability to bring it under control. In this struggle, she contrasts with the serenity of the asexual Hippolytus. As she enters, racked with suffering, she expresses a wish to be with Artemis—­she wishes for the release that would come from an all-­encompassing involvement with the hunt—­the giving over of consciousness to the natural and joyful movements of a body acting spontaneously. She imagines the life that Hippolytus celebrates. But this is a fevered wish. Her passion does not afford the simple escape that Hippolytus’s preclusion of desire provided him. Phaedra, in her passion, is frantic. In many ways, she is the opposite extreme to Hippolytus: where he is composed and at peace with himself; she is torn and in active contention with her own feelings; where he is simple, she is complex; where he seems, in his innocence, to be outside the ethical life, she is a character in the throes of an ethical crisis. She is a character riven by conflict, experiencing both involuntary

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passion for Hippolytus and shame at experiencing such passion. In her vulnerability, she seems to possess a humanity that Hippolytus lacks. Her despair is deep, and she sees no way out of her situation. She has not deliberately trespassed on any ethical norm; she has, in fact, tried consciously to resist her passion, but it is beyond her control. She is clear that neither she nor Hippolytus is guilty of having done anything wrong, but that she is nonetheless ethically culpable: “One I love destroys me. Neither of us wills it” (Euripides, 319). Her situation is so dire that she sees death as the only possible way to reconcile her passion with her shame. Death provides her with the answer to an unsolvable problem, a dilemma in which neither side can in good faith be denied. Death would allow Phaedra to escape from her passion and maintain her purity. She sees no other possibility for the contest between passion and shame. But where Phaedra seeks to retain her purity and thus can see no possible action other than death, her nurse views the situation differently. While initially horrified by Phaedra’s passion for Hippolytus, the nurse is more amenable to finding a less absolute, less pure solution than suicide. The nurse is a paradigmatic rhetorical character (Knox, 218). She embodies rhe­t­ oric as an art or practice intended to provide practical solutions to human conflicts. After her immediate alarm at Phaedra’s passion, the nurse is led by both a strong pragmatic streak and a genuine devotion to Phaedra to propose a strategy that will offer Phaedra an option other than death. The nurse’s concern is less with shame, understood as an ethical value integral to a character’s sense of her own identity, and more with how to deal with a potential embarrassment without incurring the second sense of shame—­the shame experienced as public disapproval. For her, purity and shame are not ethical issues but problems to be managed. Where Phaedra and Hippolytus find themselves in extreme positions (their purity is integral to the extremity of their positions), the nurse is more down to earth and operates from an understanding that life is complex and requires comprise. Her concern is not with the pursuit of an idealized existence or with distress at the violation of one’s sense of identity but with finding a solution that deals with the immediate problem. Her pragmatism offers not an alternative ethics but an alternative to ethics. In its approach to addressing difficulties, it is deeply rhetorical. As Meno, in the dialogue named for him, says to Socrates, Gorgias, as a rhetorical pedagogue, contends that it is not possible to teach virtue, but that one can teach rhetoric, and such instruction will equip one to be a successful actor in the world. Rhetoric is what allows one to negotiate the world as it is—­it is a practical art.

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Rhetoric, in the character of the nurse, is offered as a way to contend with Eros. Far from desire being all powerful, it can be dealt with strategically by one skilled at rhetoric. Humans are not fated to be at the mercy of a desire that, indifferent to human intentions, rules their lives; but they can, by their ability to define what is at issue, take control of their own destiny. Rhetoric enables one to cease being a victim and become an actor. The course of a life is not inexorably determined but can be changed through the action of persuasion. The power of persuasion is evident as the nurse seeks to move Phaedra from a position of despair to one that sees that a remedy to her situation may be possible. By recasting her own response to the disclosure of Phaedra’s passion as a temporary overreaction which she now sees as foolish, the nurse begins her effort at persuasion: Mistress, the trouble you have lately told me, coming on me so suddenly, frightened me: but now I realize that I was foolish. In this world second thoughts, it seems, are best. Your case is not so extraordinary, (Euripides, 433–­37)

She proceeds to recharacterize Phaedra’s plight. Phaedra’s situation is not the overwhelming and unnatural event that it might at first seem; rather, her passion for Hippolytus is mundane—­people fall in love all the time and they have no control over the process. There is nothing to wonder at here; the only issue is how to cope when such a situation arises, and that question is practical, not ethical. Christopher Pelling provides a good analysis of the rhetorical skill exhibited in the nurse’s speech, and he suggests that despite this skill, the audience would recognize the speech’s incongruity: “Time and again the nurse makes a generalization about life—­human life, divine life—­and matches it to the current situation: yet a listener in the theater will surely suspect that the parallel does not work, or works in ways which are less cozy than she suggests” (Pelling, 89; see also Knox, 218). I am not so sure that the nurse’s rhetoric is so transparently suspect. Her praise of Aphrodite recognizes not only the goddess’s power but also her contribution to human life. The nurse cites examples of divine indiscretions, noting that they have not led inevitably to disaster and that some people who have submitted to Aphrodite even “dwell in heaven” (Euripides, 456). This argument is an effort to reestablish some perspective in a situation in which Phaedra is so overwhelmed by shame that she has been rendered both frantic and immobile. In the nurse’s speech, one hears echoes of Lysias’s praise of the non-­lover and his assertion of the need for rational calculation to

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contend with the madness Eros brings to the lover. The nurse’s reasoning may be equivocal, but it is also powerful, and it is not simply rationalization. It offers consolation for suffering, absolves the sufferer, and puts forward a remedy to the suffering. Hers is not simply an instance of a corrupt rhetoric; rather, she seems not to understand the limits of rhetoric and to overestimate its power. The appeal of her argument is troubling because, in her concern with finding a solution to Phaedra’s problem, the nurse does not seem to acknowledge adequately Phaedra’s plight. In her unproblematic embrace of utility, the nurse’s advocacy confronts a limit to which rhetoric has paid insufficient attention. The chorus captures the ambiguity of the situation: Phaedra, indeed she speaks more usefully for today’s troubles. But it is you I praise. And yet my praise brings with it more discomfort than her words: it is bitterer to the ear. (Euripides, 481–­85)

While the chorus does not see the nurse as deceptive or manipulative or as having any motive other than Phaedra’s well-­being, it is Phaedra whom it praises. The chorus finds Phaedra’s resistance to her passion ethically laudatory, but it takes no solace in the rightness of her behavior. Even as it praises Phaedra’s actions, it registers its discomfort or unease. There appears to be no ethical response to Phaedra’s plight that doesn’t entail her destruction. She may not be responsible for her passion, but she is responsible for her response, even if she has no good options. To understand the play’s critique of rhetoric, it is helpful to note that the chorus acknowledges the utility of the nurse’s discourse for dealing with Phaedra’s troubles. The chorus does not find fault with the nurse. If the nurse exemplifies the approach of rhetoric to a difficult situation, then rhetoric is defined by a pragmatism that opposes tragedy. Rhetoric seeks to redescribe what appear to be situations in which there are no good choices, and in which one is simply a victim whose only choice is untenable. Instead of despair at this situation, rhetoric offers feasible ways to deal with problems that appear to be insolvable. If Phaedra believes that the only way to maintain her purity and deal with her shame is to commit suicide, the nurse suggests that things are not so dire. Her speech argues for a less extreme and more mundane interpretation. It imagines a world in which choice and action are possible, even in situations that initially appear devastating. It is important to emphasize that the nurse is led to this position because she cares about Phaedra. She is not trying to trick her but to provide a reasonable way

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out of a hard situation. The nurse’s rhetoric is not intentionally deceptive. If, in this drama, rhetoric leads to ethical corruption, it is not itself an ethically corrupt practice. Euripides’s portrayal of the nurse’s rhetoric does not show her to be manipulative; the nurse’s failure is not ethical—­what she is guilty of is not correctly reading a situation. She is mistaken about the pliability that she assumes Phaedra and Hippolytus to possess, and this mistake suggests the limits of rhetoric. The nurse’s advocacy displays an overconfidence in rhetoric’s ability to be effective in any situation. It is such a claim that Gorgias, as both a practitioner and teacher, makes on behalf of rhetoric in the dialogue Gorgias. Rhetoric is a problem for the Hippolytus not because it is corrupt but because it can, with the best of intentions, succeed in convincing an audience of something that is ultimately damaging to the audience because the rhetor fails to appreciate the depth of some ethical commitments. The world is not as malleable as rhetoric assumes, and for this reason rhetoric’s self-­ignorance poses a serious danger—­not just to the individual but to the larger political world (Knox, 220). Not all problems can be addressed through persuasion; and the refusal to understand that fact can contribute to tragedy. Phaedra is aware of rhetoric’s power to present enticing if destructive misrepresentations. She initially resists the nurse’s speech, offering a fairly pointed assessment of rhetoric’s injury to the state in its ability to put expediency in the place of ethics: This is the deadly thing which devastates well-­ordered cities and the homes of men—­ that’s it, this art of oversubtle words. It’s not the words ringing delight in the ear That one should speak, but those that have the power to save their hearer’s honorable name. (Euripides, 485–­89)

The power of rhetoric resides in the delight it produces in the hearer. Presumably, this delight arises because the rhetor tells the listener something that the listener wanted to believe but could not because it violated what the listener knew to be ethical. Part of the pleasure rhetoric provides is tied to its justifying beliefs so as to relieve the audience from any doubts about those beliefs. Rhetoric is powerful because it frees the audience to do what it wants but had hesitated to do because, at some level, it knew that what it wanted to do was wrong. The delight rhetoric occasions arises from this illicit self-­ affirmation. Rhetoric works because it cooperates with or exploits desires that the listener had but either did not acknowledge or was unwilling to

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give in to. It legitimates these desires, or at least it rationalizes them. The nurse’s speech accomplished exactly this legitimation. In redescribing Phaedra’s passion not as something extraordinary and vile but simply as something ordinary and no big deal, the nurse appealed to a part of Phaedra that Phaedra had struggled to deny. Her “oversubtle words” were able to create distinctions and reframe something that Phaedra knew to be wrong, and to present it as something standing outside ethical considerations. Phaedra’s response to the nurse prompts an active debate between the two of them on the ethics of rhetoric. The nurse accuses Phaedra of “high moralizing” (Euripides, 490). What this response does is to characterize Phaedra’s ethics as excessive. From the nurse’s perspective, Phaedra’s emotional overreaction has led her to put principle over life. She has lost capacity to view her situation reasonably and to develop a prudent response (Euripides, 494). The nurse is arguing that Phaedra, overwhelmed by horror at her own passion, is no longer able to judge her situation correctly. Her passion has distorted her perspective. The nurse’s concern is to save Phaedra’s life, and to do so she must alter Phaedra’s perspective. The nurse is moved to act not because she wants to abet the operation of lust but because Phaedra’s suffering has destroyed her sense of what is important. From the nurse’s viewpoint, Phaedra is a victim more of overreaction than of illicit passion. Accordingly, the nurse does not seek so much to justify Phaedra’s passion as to place it in a larger context, thereby making it less threatening. For Phaedra, such an approach is shameful. Shame is the emotion framing her understanding of her situation. The nurse acknowledges this emotion but tries to lessen its force by attaching it to an overscrupulous ethics: O, they [the nurse’s words] are shameful! But they are better than your noble-­sounding moral sentiments. “The deed” is better if it saves your life: Than your “good name” in which you die exulting. (Euripides, 500–­04)

The nurse’s response is effective because it disentangles the two senses of shame. She does what a skillful rhetor does: she makes distinctions. In doing so, she is partly an astute reader of character and partly not. She rightly raises questions as to which of the two forms of shame is driving Phaedra’s response. In characterizing Phaedra’s words as “noble-­sounding,” she implies that while the words may be noble, that surface nobility belies a less noble motive. She homes in on the conflicted senses of shame that have immobilized Phaedra, and she separates out the sense of shame that can be dealt with. The nurse perceives Phaedra’s concern with shame less as

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concern with maintaining her purity and honoring her ethical integrity and more as a concern with how the public would view her actions. Even though the nurse is partly right in her perception, she fails to see how shame as an emotion rooted in concern with another’s opinion is not merely a concern with reputation for its own sake but also has implications for how one views one’s own ethical integrity. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, shame is a complex emotion, for it is not simply the case that shame arises because of a concern with how one is viewed; rather, it may also arise because one has internalized a respected viewer crucial to one’s sense of oneself. Concern with how one is viewed is not only a matter of protecting a public image. The internalized public has an important role to play in determining stan­ dards that one uses to measure one’s own behavior. The internalized viewer functions as an ideal, and when one falls short of the ideal, one calls into question one’s own estimation of self-­worth. That is not to say that shame does not involve worry over how one will appear to others. Shame is an overdetermined emotion, and this nuance is what the nurse fatally fails to understand. She considers shame not as a response to one’s sense of what is right but only as an issue of reputation. The nurse argues that whatever shame Phaedra feels on account of her passion for Hippolytus, the more pressing concern for her is the preservation of her “good name.” If that is the case, there is a genuine question whether it is ethical to commit suicide simply because one fears public opinion. That is the argument that the nurse presses. Phaedra acknowledges the force of this argument: “What you say is true, but terrible” (Euripides, 504). She struggles to resist the case that the nurse is pleading so well (Euripides, 505). She is torn. The nurse recognizes this ambivalence and gives Phaedra a choice: if you think that you should be virtuous, then be virtuous; if, however, the virtuous choice is no longer so clear cut, then choose the next, second-­best, option: to allow the nurse to act on her behalf. In presenting this choice, the nurse, as rhetor, has transformed a situation of overwhelming suffering in which Phaedra seemed to have only one option (and hence no options) into an occasion for choice. Rhetoric, in its pragmatism, appears to have mastered an emotional and ethical paralysis. What rhetoric seems to offer is the possibility of self-­mastery. The nurse convinces Phaedra to allow her to act on her behalf. In effecting Phaedra’s persuasion, rhetoric plays a crucial role in the drama’s action. Phaedra is not destroyed by a passion that took possession of her; she is not a simple victim of desire. Rather her death is the result of a flawed but persuasive discourse. If Eros creates the untenable situation, it is Peitho that is ultimately responsible for Phaedra’s death and the subsequent events.

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It is not Phaedra’s passion that necessitates her destruction, but rather the successful operation of rhetoric that sets in motion the events that lead to her catastrophe. If Phaedra suffers on account of her passion, she is made a victim by rhetoric. The place of rhetoric in Phaedra’s downfall is instructive. If rhetoric presents itself as the alternative to tragedy, tragedy in turn raises questions about the limits of rhetoric and about its ability to offer guidance in crucial situations. If the nurse rightly perceives the role that reputation plays in Phaedra’s suffering, she fails to recognize two things. Her failure is crucial, for it highlights the way in which a rhetoric, when it assumes that people’s commitments and values are merely conventional, can lead a rhetor to misread a situation. This assumption is rhetoric’s misunderstanding of what it means for the world to be rhetorical. The world is not as malleable as rhetoric would seem to believe. The goddess Peitho does not have the power to shape all situations in ways that Gorgias claimed. There are limits to persuasion. The nurse does not comprehend the depth of ethical commitment—­she doesn’t understand that not all situations can be managed. Rhetoric, as the nurse unintentionally demonstrates, is blind to the possibility of tragedy. First, the nurse does not understand how central Phaedra’s reputation is to her self-­image. Phaedra’s concern with her reputation cannot be reduced to mere vanity; it involves something more essential to Phaedra’s self-­conception, something entangled in her sense of shame. The nurse underestimates the power of this form of shame. Second, she is also unprepared for the moral absolutism of Hippolytus. Her assumption that he can be induced to accept Phaedra’s love involves a serious misreading of his character. She assumes that he can be moved by either a speech or a potion. It is simply a matter of locating what will be effective. What this misreading of both Phaedra and Hippolytus suggests is that rhetoric’s view of the world as a place always amenable to human actions is wrong and injurious. Hippolytus shows rhetoric failing in two ways. First, in the case of Hippolytus, the nurse miscalculates her ability to persuade him because she does not comprehend that there are audiences whose rigid commitment to a set of values makes them unavailable for persuasion. And in the case of Phaedra, the nurse fails to appreciate fully the force of the values that shape an understanding of the world. Rhetoric fails to recognize its own limits. Even as the nurse must confront her failure, she continues to adhere to her commitment to rhetoric. Her failure does not cause her to reevaluate the role of rhetoric but rather to acknowledge contingency’s role in any action. To the extent that the nurse embodies rhetoric, rhetoric seems incapable of understanding its limits. Things turned out badly, but they could

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have turned out otherwise: “Had I succeeded, I had been a wise one. / Our wisdom varies in proportion to / our failure or achievement” (Euripides, 700–­03). Even after Hippolytus’s angry rejection of her approach to him on Phaedra’s behalf, the nurse is still not defeated and wishes to continue to figure out what action is possible. Phaedra puts an end to her efforts. For the nurse, Hippolytus’s rejection is only a temporary setback, and the situation can still be managed. What the nurse doesn’t realize is that her bungled emissary has changed the situation: the question is no longer how Phaedra can deal with her passion and maintain her purity; it is now how she can preserve her reputation. This concern is not merely with how others view her; it is a struggle with self-­image. If persuasion is an action/event in which an audience’s subjectivity is transformed as it comes to appreciate aspects of its values or beliefs it had previously not understood, then the nurse’s initial success in convincing Phaedra to let her act on her behalf discloses a danger inherent in persuasion. Rather than transform a subjectivity, a powerful discourse can succeed by affirming a subjectivity in its self-­ignorance, providing delight by telling the audience what it wants to hear. What makes the nurse’s destructive discourse important is that it points to a danger that inheres in persuasion that cannot be attributed simply to manipulation or pandering. Part of the corruption involved in manipulation or pandering resides in the intentions of the rhetor. In those cases, the rhetor seeks to move the audience for the benefit of the rhetor—­the rhetor considers his own interests and not those of the audience. The ethics of such a case are relatively straightforward. Euripides, however, is exploring a deeper problem: the injuries that rhetoric can cause when it is seeking, in good faith, to assist someone who stands in need of guidance. In the case of the nurse, she was operating from honorable motives: she sought to preserve the life of someone to whom she was devoted and whom she saw was in such emotional distress that she was not able to proceed reasonably. The nurse’s injury of Phaedra, although devastating, was also innocent. And her failure points to the fact that although persuasion is an action/event that transforms a subjectivity, persuasion cannot simply be a matter of internal reconstitution. The transformation or reconstitution must also be consistent with the subject’s core values, and it must attend to realities of the larger world that are not under the subject’s control. Persuasion must offer an interpretation in accordance with both who the subject is and the world in which the subject resides. Precisely because it is so powerful, persuasion must always be open to question whether its interpretation is sufficiently attentive to the complexity that it seeks to render intellectually and emotionally coherent. Such openness is essential

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if persuasion is not to be falsely collapsed into a claim of knowledge. Persuasion is always an effort to come to terms with a world, and that world is not static. Tragedy makes persuasion into a problem by showing that persuasion can never be final but must always be open for revision when presented with compelling reasons or evidence that point to the inadequacy of the current interpretation. Persuasion is only possible if a subject is open to self-­questioning. Hippolytus represents another crucial limit for rhetoric. In his closedness—­in his self-­love—­he is paradigmatic of someone unavailable for persuasion. The failure of persuasion in his case contrasts with that of Phaedra. Despite her capitulation to a shame arising from a concern with her reputation, Phaedra wrestled with the problem of purity. She was profoundly conflicted and genuinely struggled with how to act in her situation. She faced doubt. Hippolytus confronts no such doubt. Unlike Phaedra, who suffers from desire, Hippolytus in his purity is wholly self-­regarding. There is a sense of self-­congratulation in his glorying in being chaste. His absolu­ tistic ethics effectively precludes the possibility of a more complex understanding. His commitment to his purity is a form of closure; it preempts the possibility of his seeing a more complex world—­his purity reinforces a radical simplicity. His purity is not so much an instance of innocence as it is one of evasion. He is a character who needs to be chastened, and Phaedra, in her suicide note that falsely accuses him, suggests as much. Despite suffering unjustly as part of Aphrodite’s revenge against Hippolytus, Phaedra directs her complaint not at Aphrodite as the cause of her passion but at Hippolytus and his self-­conceit. She accuses him of arrogance, and hopes that because of her death and false accusation, “he will have his share in this my mortal sickness / and learn of chastity in moderation” (Euripides, 730–­ 31). Her brief note argues that through suffering, Hippolytus will begin to be educated into a more complex ethical understanding that he has evaded through a purity that has simplified his life by creating an ideal of an exis­ tence freed from desire. His purity is a denial of his humanity. The vehemence of Hippolytus’s misogynistic response to the nurse’s revelation of Phaedra’s passion for him is symptomatic of a deep and troubling rigidity. His rage evidences a horror rooted in fear and hatred of women. The rage that characterizes his speech is excessive in its response to the nurse’s disclosure of Phaedra’s passion for him. By provoking Hippolytus’s diatribe, the nurse’s speech reveals that his chastity is grounded in part in a disgust at the existence of a gender other than male. He sees women as inherently deceptive and impure. He imagines or wishes there could be a world that was exclusively male, one in which women were no longer

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needed for childbirth. For Hippolytus, women are inherently corrupt and corrupting, and he associates them with disease: “So we [men] might have lived / in houses free of the taint of women’s presence. / But now, to bring this plague into our homes / we drain the fortunes of our homes” (Euripides, 623–­25). He argues that intelligence in women is especially dangerous. He rants against clever women and suggests that the stupid ones are less dangerous because they are less lecherous. Ideally, men would be quarantined, and women would be allowed to converse only with animals. His antipathy toward women is unbending: I’ll hate you women, hate and hate and hate you, and never have enough of hating. . . . Some say that I talk of this eternally, yes, but eternal, too, is woman’s wickedness. (Euripides, 664–­66)

Hippolytus’s apoplectic response reminds one of Aristotle’s characterization of hate: “One who is angry might feel pity when much has befallen [the person he is angry at], but who hates under no circumstances; for the former wants the one he is angry at to suffer in his turn, the latter wants [the detested class of persons] not to exist” (Rhetoric, 1382a). As one consumed by hate, Hippolytus has no pity for Phaedra. He is not angry with her; rather, he wishes that she and all women would simply cease to exist. Hippolytus’s hatred of women and his investment in his own purity are tied to his self-­love. Although ignorant at the time of the falseness of the charges against Hippolytus, Theseus accuses him of just such self-­regard: “Yes, in self-­worship you are certainly practiced. / You are more at home there then in other virtues, / justice, for instance, and duty toward a father” (Euripides, 1080–­82). While Theseus is wrong that Hippolytus lacks in duty toward his father, his point about Hippolytus’s self-­worship is telling. It speaks to Hippolytus’s affront of Aphrodite, of his refusal to give her the honor due her. If he worships Artemis, he equally worships himself. This choice is not necessarily conscious, although it is deliberate, and it raises the issue of how one can know oneself. His blasphemy arises from his self-­ ignorance, from his partial understanding of who he is and what honor he owes to a variety of gods. Hippolytus is a tragic figure not because he is wholly corrupt, his chastity only an instance of self-­delusion. Rather, he is a complicated mixture of nobility and self-­delusion. However problematic his purity may be, there is also nobility in his devotion to Artemis. In his complicated set of motives, he evinces an impurity that will be purified by his death.

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If the Hippolytus raises the issue of self-­knowledge, it equally addresses the issue of how one can know another. Theseus laments that there is no token that enables one to know who is a true friend and who is false (Euripides, 925–­26). This difficulty leads to the crucial exchange between Theseus and Hippolytus that, in effect, functions as a trial. And rhetoric as much as Hippolytus is on trial. Hippolytus begins his defense and assertion of his innocence by offering a conventional attack on eloquence. As a prelude to his defense, Hippolytus characterizes the role of eloquence as the subtle use of words to obscure what is transparently the case. If it were not for eloquence, Theseus could distinguish true friends from false and see the charge against Hippolytus was patently unfounded. And although Hippolytus acknowledges that he is recognized as a skilled speaker, his skill differs from that of a speaker whose purpose is to persuade the public. He argues that there are two kinds of eloquence: that of the demagogue who seeks to charm the mob and that of speakers like himself who speak to more “cultured experts” (Euripides, 989). But because he has now been falsely accused, it is necessary that Hippolytus engage in the kind of rhetoric appropriate to a public trial. He will need to make a case for himself in a forum that has already been tainted by the operation of corrupt rhetoric. In such a world, an honorable rhetoric is powerless. Hippolytus structures his defense as an argument from probability. He begins by offering as evidence the conduct of his life as proof of his virtue, of his chastity. He then works through and demolishes possible motives that he would have led him to rape Phaedra. Did he rape Phaedra because she was the most beautiful woman in the world? Did he hope to get Phaedra’s dowry? Did he hope to take Theseus’s place as ruler? He argues that he has no interest in being ruler, that no sane person who wished to be happy would seek such a burden. His argument has made a strong case that he could not possibly have had a motive to rape Phaedra. Neither desire nor advantage would have moved him to violate Phaedra. But however compelling the argument from probability may be, it cannot by itself prove his innocence. Hippolytus finally concludes that had Phaedra still been alive, it would have been possible to prove his innocence because “deeds would have helped you as you scanned your friends / to know the true from the false” (Euripides, 1023–­24). In such a situation, a judgment would not have to be made on the basis of probability. There would be ways to counter the manipulation of appearance by false but effective words. If Phaedra were still alive, then it might be possible to produce evidence in the form of her behavior and his that could have confirmed or refuted what was claimed. In particular, Phaedra’s suicide note would not have the authority that it does.

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Hippolytus’s argument from probability fails because, in the absence of an interrogation of Phaedra, there is nothing that he can say that will move Theseus to reconsider his belief that Hippolytus is guilty. The chorus acknowledges that Hippolytus has presented a strong defense: “You have rebutted the charge enough by your oath: / it is a great pledge you took in the God’s name” (Euripides, 1036–­37). But even with such an oath, Hippolytus can make no argument that can bring the authority of Phaedra’s testimony into question. There is nothing that he can say that would change Theseus’s mind, for everything that Hippolytus might say can be interpreted as self-­serving. That resolve is clear in Theseus’s response, which is both a dismissal of Hippolytus’s rebuttal and a disparagement of rhetoric: “Why, here’s a spell-­binding magician for you! / He wrongs his father and then trusts his craft, / his smooth beguiling craft to lull my anger” (Euripides, 1038–­40). There is nothing that Hippolytus can say that Theseus cannot interpret as yet more proof of his guilt. Rhetoric is powerless against an audience determined to resist it. Again, to acknowledge this powerlessness is to recognize the world is not infinitely malleable, and that a character moved by a powerful emotion is not available as an audience. With such a character, persuasion is not possible. In his angry dismissal of Hippolytus’s defense, Theseus displays the same rigidity Hippolytus evidenced in his response to the nurse disclosing Phaedra’s passion. Part of the reason that rhetoric is ineffective in this play is that speakers encounter audiences who for different reasons are closed to rhetoric. In each case, the anger is so intense that no words can mollify it. In such situations, rhetoric is powerless because it is suspect. The most compelling and reasonable speech can be interpreted as skillful subterfuge. In Theseus’s refusal to be open to persuasion, he parallels Hippolytus’s unwillingness to grant Eros a place in his life. In both cases, this walling-­off of something that would challenge the certainty of their understanding leads to devastating events. Although both Hippolytus and Theseus resist rhetoric because they are closed in advance to any appeal that might be made to them, the two characters differ in their fates. Hippolytus never reaches an accommodation with his dishonoring of Aphrodite. While he can acknowledge that it was Aphrodite who in her anger destroyed him, he never concedes that her anger was justified. He sees himself principally as a victim, and this perception blinds him to the narcissism that is part of that virtue. When he seeks an ideal witness of his innocence, he can only imagine himself as that witness: “If I could only find / another me to look me in the face / and see my tears and all that I am suffering!” (Euripides, 1077–­79). Theseus immediately

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interprets this heartfelt plea as self-­worship and dismisses it as consonant with the way Hippolytus has always acted. While Theseus’s interpretation is made in ignorance of Hippolytus’s innocence, it does resonate with the self-­absorption integral to Hippolytus’s chastity. Hippolytus’s virtue has destroyed him. He is too good for this world, and such an understanding is equally a recognition of his nobility and a recognition that his purity entails a rejection of a human life. It is not possible for such a character to continue living While Theseus falls victim of an anger that does not allow him to judge fairly, his action does not necessitate his destruction. His situation, however painful, is not tragic. Unlike Hippolytus, who is guilty of blasphemy, Theseus has committed an understandable if horrible error. Artemis discloses the truth to him and offers a complex analysis of the situation, one in which she exonerates Hippolytus but also presents both Phaedra’s ethical struggles and her final treachery. Artemis concludes that Theseus, in his anger and ignorance, was misled by Phaedra’s false discourse. He is a victim not of divine retribution but of corrupt rhetoric. Had Phaedra not killed herself and left behind a false accusation, Theseus might have learned the truth prior to banishing his son. A corrupted rhetoric contributed significantly to Theseus’s judging Hippolytus wrongly. Whatever fault Theseus committed can be attributed to a deceptive use of language. Hippolytus makes this extenuating circumstance clear by absolving Theseus of guilt. In his willingness to forgive his father, Hippolytus displays a compassion that his injury and approaching death have now made possible. Knox points to this act of forgiveness as the one “free and meaningful choice” (228) in the play, and asserts that it is “an affirmation of purely human values in an inhuman universe” (229). The lack of sympathy and moral self-­righteousness that played a major role in the absolutism and rigidity of Hippolytus’s ethical constitution has moderated a bit, and he is now capable of seeing his father as victim and not as victimizer. If this understanding represents growth, it is a limited growth. He offers no such forgiveness to Phaedra. She is no longer part of his narrative. Instead, he blames Aphrodite solely, but doing so does not lead him to understand the ways in which Phaedra too was a victim. For Hippolytus, there are only three victims of Aphrodite’s revenge: himself, Theseus, and Artemis. And in his final understanding of this situation, he does not speak to the role rhetoric has played in his demise; his suffering, as he sees it, is a function of his virtue, of his purity. Hippolytus’s understanding of his destruction by Aphrodite is limited, however, and does not represent the more comprehensive perspective of the

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tragedy. The tragedy was not simply the working-­through of Aphrodite’s revenge for Hippolytus’s blasphemy, and as much as it was a drama of revenge for the slighting of desire, it was also a confrontation with the limits of persuasion. Rhetoric, in its complex relation to desire, played a pivotal role in the downfalls of both Phaedra and Hippolytus. The assumption that rhetoric could prove an effective strategy to deal with overwhelming desire proved fatal. Rhetoric was the proximate cause of Phaedra being persuaded by her nurse to let her nurse disclose Phaedra’s passion to Hippolytus, setting in motion the events that led to Phaedra’s suicide. In the case of Hippolytus, rhetoric’s limitation was the inability of an eloquent defense to overcome false testimony—­a corrupt practice of rhetoric bested an honorable one. For Euripides, rhetoric, in both its ability and inability to move audiences, is a problem that merits exploration in tragedy. The consequences of discourse are integral to the tragedy, and these consequences point—­even more than the overpowering force of desire does—­to the role of human culpability in the production of human suffering. But Hippolytus cannot be reduced to a straightforward critique of rhetoric and its abuse. Things are more complicated. If rhetoric is a theme within the play, the play itself is an effort at persuasion. To the extent that it succeeds in moving the audience, the play provides an experience of a successful persuasion. If the play questioned rhetoric’s offering itself as an alternative to tragedy, it complicated this critique by offering tragedy as an instance of rhetoric. As a discursive form, Hippolytus provides a demonstration that persuasion cannot be reduced to the operation of argument but has to be understood as a consequence of a richer imaginative engagement. Through their incorporation as an integral part of the play’s action, the issues and concepts involved in persuasion acquire an intellectual and emotional valence. At the heart of this tragedy is the paradoxical experience in which the success of the play as an instance of persuasion depends upon its having successfully called into question the action/event of persuasion. If the play were to simultaneously show the appeal and limits of rhetoric and also the resistance to it, as a work of tragedy, it had first to persuade the audience of the rightness of its perception of persuasion. It had to create an interpretation that resonated with the audience’s daily life. The power of tragedy as a form arose from its ability to identify and present in a discursive form key ethical and political concepts. It made these concepts available to the audience in a way that allowed them to take intellectual and emotional ownership of the concepts. Hippolytus made desire and persuasion relevant by making them into problems that required the audience to reflect on and discuss them.

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In making desire and persuasion into problems via a discursive form that was itself an effort at persuasion, the Hippolytus was not offering positive knowledge about these concepts but seeking to provoke a response. As an act of persuasion, it was seeking to engage the audience’s capacity for responsiveness. The play asked or demanded that the audience, if they were to assume their role as audience, question the rightness of what they witnessed and appreciate the quality of the experience represented in the discursive form of tragedy. In this demand, tragedy functioned as a form of epideictic rhetoric. The tragedy did not seek a passive acquiescence in the audience but an active response. The Hippolytus created an experience that necessitated the audience cooperate in evaluating the problems the play investigated. The experience of the tragedy enriched the audience’s appreciation of the way in which the concepts of desire and persuasion rendered suffering intelligible and meaningful. In viewing or reading Hippolytus, the audience experiences a self-­division in which it undergoes a persuasive experience that renders persuasion problematic. In the tension that structures this response, the audience is brought inside a questioning that makes persuasion into a live issue. This active responsiveness enables the play to create a tragic subjectivity in the audience. Although the play engaged core issues for humans, it did not argue either a positive or negative thesis. Rather than move its audience through argument and deliberation, Hippolytus represented action so as to shape the audience’s perception of it. To return to Marx’s insight, the art persuaded the audience by transforming it, via a discursive product that then determined how the audience would perceive the represented action. Tragedy, as a discursive form, succeeded because it shaped perception—­it allowed the audience to see the world as tragic. Through the creation of a form that both moved an audience and demanded a specific response from that audience, tragedy constituted a subjectivity who could then perceive an action as tragic. Tragedy persuaded the audience that the world was tragic by informing suffering in a particular structure that rendered suffering meaningful. It provided a way to look at the world that gave form to suffering. For this tragic form to be successful, it had to resonate with the audience’s experience and make it cogent in a way that allowed the audience to integrate that experience into a larger understanding. Euripides accomplished this expansion of human understanding by raising questions about the rightness of constituting a subjectivity that sees value in terms of absolutes, one that sees purity as the virtue rather than as a virtue that needs to be integrated into a more comprehensive understanding of human limitation. He raised further questions about rhetoric as an alternative pragmatic

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approach, suggesting that it was blind to the ways in which virtue is not merely a choice for a character but can play a role central to a character’s identity. If rhetoric has offered itself as an art whose power resides in its ability to deal with a contingent world, Euripides showed a recalcitrance within the world that rhetoric, in its assumption of a radical contingency, was not able to appreciate. He showed how persuasion failed when characters were too rigid and also when characters assumed the world was fully malleable. As Peter Burian argues, “the drama proceeds as a series of encounters in which misguided estimations of the power of words successively produce omissions, repressions, indiscretions, irrational outbursts, and lies in a concatenation that brings destruction to all parties” (204). In his focus on the inadvertent consequences of and significant obstacles encountered by rhetoric, Euripides showed that the ethical and political difficulties attending rhetoric cannot be reduced to simple cases of manipulation or pandering. They run deeper. Hippolytus is a tragedy not only because purity and shame are investigated, but also because Euripides made persuasion into a question. By offering a self-­conscious fiction that foregrounds both persuasion and desire, the play created an engagement and distance unavailable to the characters in the tragedy, but that allowed the audience to gain perspective and understanding. An engaged viewing or reading of the play becomes a resource and occasion to question purity, shame, rigidity, and malleability—­ creating an ethical disposition necessary for a democratic citizenry that has to negotiate both desire and persuasion. The witnessing of the tragic action of the play creates an informed experience for the audience in which concepts central to the ways they make sense of the world are seen not as embodying settled or fixed understandings but are understood as emotional and intellectual responses requiring an active and critical assimilation into a subjectivity that seeks to be adequate to the world it experiences. Indeed, the emotional and intellectual appreciation of the play becomes an experience that demands the audience probe its own response. Further, if the audience is moved by the tragedy, then they experience persuasion and witness the power of desire. As a discursive form, tragedy makes available to them a certain kind of subjectivity—­in which the very effort to make sense of the disorder in the represented world transforms the audience into subjects who actively reflect on what it means to be a creature whose actions disclose a disorder of which they were unaware and for which they are partly responsible. The audience members are constituted as subjects who could understand tragedy and recognize the way in which it speaks to the worlds in which they live. In providing a compelling interpretation of these worlds, tragedy offers persuasion and not knowledge. As it seeks to render suffering

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meaningful, tragedy also provides insight into the ways in which persuasion itself must remain open and responsive to worlds in transition if it is to be adequate to the needs of the audience.

Tragedy, Revolution, and Persuasion If tragedy as a discursive form is persuasive because it creates a tragic subjectivity, the consequences of tragedy should not be limited to an appreciation of tragedy as a particular literary genre. The tragic should be a concept that allows people to make sense of events in their lives and the worlds in which they live. The vitality of tragedy as a genre depends upon its relevance to experience outside the theater. Raymond Williams’s study of tragedy begins from that insight. He argues that the use of the term tragic to describe particular forms of suffering in ordinary life should not be considered, as has sometimes been argued, an illegitimate application of the experience of an aesthetic form to everyday life, but that rather it should be understood as the recognition of the relevance of that form in making everyday experience intelligible. To claim certain human sufferings as tragic is not to misapply the term but to extend it appropriately to describe the emotional and intellectual significance of an event. Williams argues that events such as mining di­ sasters, the loss of a home to fire, or “the life of a man driven back to silence, in an unregarded working life” (Modern Tragedy, 13) are rightly understood as being tragic. To extend the concept to such events is to recognize, often obliquely, the ways in which the current disorder of the world is not merely sad, nor merely inevitable, but a consequence of a larger human action in which we are currently participating. If, as Vernant rightly claimed, there is a transhistoricity to tragedy, there is also a way in which tragedy is deeply historical. Williams’s argument encompasses both of these truths, as he offers an interpretation of the history of tragedy not as the persistence of a fixed genre across a variety of historical periods but as multiple reinventions of the form in response to differing historical circumstances. Although his argument is not intended to address the issue of persuasion, his interpretation of tragedy as a historical product provides a basis for understanding tragedy as a form of persuasion, as an ongoing reconstitution of a subjectivity that is tragic. If tragedy is a form of persuasion because it transforms a subjectivity, then it would seem that it cannot be a static form but one that must be dynamic and historical. Williams believes that the necessity of this insight is obscured by the pressure (often unconscious) to assume that if a genre persists across diverse historical periods, then the tradition in which that genre participates is necessarily defined by an essential continuity:

196 / Chapter Seven If we could admit that all these periods are in certain radical ways distinct, we might be able to go on to see what, nevertheless, they may have in common. But the pressure of “the tradition” is so strong that there is first one assimilation and then another, and the motives for assimilation are rarely examined. (Modern Tragedy, 29)

Williams offers an alternative approach to tragedy. He charts the ways in which secularization impacted how tragedy was seen, as it moved from a religious, to a metaphysical, to a critical form. He sees this movement as leading to the development of what he labels “modern liberal tragedy” (Modern Tragedy, 36). This conception of tragedy reflects the consequences of liberalism’s transformation of social life. What distinguishes modern liberal tragedy from an earlier form, such as Attic tragedy, is the way in which action and character are conceived. Attic tragedy treats action as central—­the play is a mimetic presentation of a working-­through of a disorder to a new order. Character is subordinate to action and is to be understood to exemplify figures whose choices manifest the tensions that give rise to the disorder and necessitate the new order. As Williams puts it: The absolute spirit of “eternal justice” was obviously more negotiable in ancient tragedy, where the explicit context was metaphysical, than in modern tragedy, with its emphasis on personal destiny. The point is not then to elevate the isolated personal destiny to identity with the whole action, but rather to look at types of action which, because of their essential content, have a tragic bearing and issue. (Modern Tragedy, 36)

In modern liberal tragedy crisis of character and not of action propels the tragedy forward. For Williams, seeing tragedy primarily as a matter of conflicts or forces challenging the individual and ultimately shattering the individual’s identity accurately reflects an intellectual and emotional experience of modern liberalism, but—­and most importantly—­it provides no way to reconceive current disorder and suffering. It leads to either despair at or acquiescence to the inevitability of an unjust human order. In promoting either despair or acquiescence, modern liberal tragedy leads to the mistaken conclusion that tragedy, which assumes the inevitability of suffering and injustice, must stand in opposition to revolution. This belief in revolution sees revolution as a directive ideal for the ultimate triumph of a human justice for all. Williams believes that the advocates of both tragedy and revolution subscribe to this dichotomy. He, however, does not accept it. He argues that tragedy and revolution share a fundamental

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perspective in which action is understood as the movement from disorder to new order. In the past such disorder may have been seen as preliminary to the reestablishment of a divine order, but—­in large part because of the historical process of secularization—­such disorder is now attributed to social and political decisions. Where modern liberal tragedy takes the plight of the individual to be the essential fact of human existence and hence makes character the focus of its attention, an approach to current disorder through a commitment to revolution understands that the plight of any individual needs to be placed in a larger social context. Tragedy is important for Williams because it must be placed dialectically against revolution, if revolution is not inadvertently to devolve into violence and new forms of oppression in which it understands itself primarily in terms of exclusive and antagonistic oppositions. Drawing on Carlyle, Williams remarks: “It is undoubtedly true that a commitment to revolution can produce a kind of hardening which even ends by negating the revolutionary purpose” (Modern Tragedy, 81). He sees the need for a persistent alertness on the part of those committed to revolution if they are not to fall victims to a new alienation as they oppose an existing one: We have still to attend to the whole action, and to see actual liberation as part of the same process as the terror which appalls us. I do not mean that the liberation cancels the terror; I mean only that they are connected, and that this connection is tragic. The final truth in this matter seems to be that revolution—­the long revolution against human alienation—­produces, in real historical circumstances, its own new kinds of alienation, which it must struggle to understand and which it must overcome, if it is to remain revolutionary. (Modern Tragedy, 82)

Given this inherent tendency for the opposition to alienation to produce new alienation that must in its turn be overcome, revolution as a form of social action embodies the fundamental movement in tragedy from a disorder rooted in fundamental forces to a new order, one that emerges as the tensions that produced the initial disorder are worked through. If revolutionary action is to remain revolutionary, there must be discursive forms that call such action back to its originating principles—­which, tragically, can be lost in the pursuit of that action. Williams’s commitment is to “the attempt to make this total revolution without violence, by a process of argumentation and consensus” (Modern Tragedy, 78). This commitment should not be mistaken for what Williams labels as an evolutionary approach to social action, which holds that the

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human contribution toward justice is limited and that there are larger impersonal forces that shape social relations, so human efforts can be, at best, opportunistic advances when these forces make possible limited changes for the better. Williams’s commitment to forwarding revolution through “argumentation and consensus” is really a commitment to persuasion. Although he never explicitly discusses tragedy as persuasion, his conception of tragedy as a necessary and balancing feature of revolution (of fundamental social change) means that tragedy’s role is to reconstitute the concept of revolution so that it remains emotionally and intellectually dynamic. A revolutionary tragedy does not proceed by a process of straightforward argument but rather creates experiences that constitute or reconstitute a subjectivity for whom the movement from disorder to order is not a predetermined process. Rather, suffering acquires meaning by being placed in a more encompassing context of a fundamental action initiated by the disorder; this process leads to the discovery of a new order in which the initial disorder is not merely negated but in which the fundamental forces at play are integrated into a more just arrangement. Although Williams does not take his argument in this direction, his reconciliation of tragedy and revolution suggests that, for him, a contemporary tragedy would function in ways similar to Attic tragedy. It would be a discursive form that made an essential political concept into a problem in order to promote a public reflection and discussion that worked to prevent that concept from becoming static. Tragedy would reinvigorate revolution as a concept with which to pursue creative thought about current social orders. Put simply, a contemporary tragedy should make the concept of revolution into a problem, not to undermine the concept but to ensure that it retains an intellectual, ethical, and political vitality that would allow its audience to respond to the complexity of their current situation. Such a tragedy would constitute its audience as a subjectivity both tragic and revolutionary. Simon Critchley says it plainly: “Tragedy is persuasion in action, and, more importantly, persuasion as action” (Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, 116). I would amend this a bit. Persuasion is never simply an action; it is also and simultaneously an event. Critchley implicitly recognizes this when he contends that “tragedy is the experience of moral ambiguity” (Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, 48) and that “tragedy is an invention: at once political, literary, and anthropological, namely taking place at the level of subjectivity” (Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, 33). If tragedy persuades, it does so by transforming a subjectivity. The transformation is accomplished not by argument but by bringing an audience inside an experience; the experiencing of the experience allows a concept such as justice or revolution, for example, to have

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valence that it would not otherwise have. Where Critchley uses persuasion to explain the action of tragedy, I use tragedy as an example of persuasion. As a model of persuasion, tragedy allows us to see that persuasion cannot be reduced to deliberation, or argument, or agreement but that it represents a mode of apprehension that transforms the subjectivity of the one apprehending the concept by connecting the intellectual content of the concept with the experience undergone. This connection can only be successful if the experience undergone resonates in some important way with the subject’s larger experience of life. Finally, the connection is dynamic, and as Williams’s concerns about the movement of revolution from a live concern to fixed and abstract and closed understanding remind us, the danger of persuasion is that it can be mistaken for knowledge. Persuasion must always be open to reconsideration. If persuasion answers to a need that the audience has, it does so by bringing the audience inside an action/event that seeks to align or realign the concepts with which we think about our lives with the experiences that we are living. A fundamental need of the audience is to investigate and reconstitute its subjectivity. This activity is ongoing for creatures who seek to be adequate to the worlds in which they live. That is the problem or challenge of learning to love the world appropriately. However stable a particular persuasion may be, it can never be final, for neither the world nor our subjectivity is ever fully and finally an object of knowledge. If tragedy can educate us about persuasion, there is also a sense that the tragedy that always haunts persuasion is the delusion that persuasion is knowledge or that it is somehow deficient in not being knowledge.

eight

The Ethics of Persuasion

Plato’s conception is the germ of all later techniques of persuasion, from the handbooks of argumentation used in college courses to the arts of the advertiser, the promoter, the politician, and even the educator. —Glenn Morrow, “Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 237 The generation of this cosmos came about through a combination of necessity and intelligence, the two commingled. Intelligence, controlling necessity, persuaded her to lead towards the best the greater part of the things coming into being; and in this way this universe was constructed from the beginning, through necessity yielding to intelligent persuasion. —Plato, Timaeus, 48a

For Alfred North Whitehead, Plato’s “final conviction, towards the end of his life, that the divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency,” marks the victory of persuasion over force, and “this doctrine,” he argued, “should be looked upon as one of the greatest intellectual discoveries in the history of religion” (166). Plato’s embrace of persuasion against the iron rule of force inaugurates an interpretation of cosmic events that eventually makes civilization possible: The creation of the world—­said Plato—­is the victory of persuasion over force. The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. They can persuade and can be persuaded by the disclosure of alternatives, the better and the worse. Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force,

202 / Chapter Eight however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. (Whitehead, 83)

While endorsing the centrality of persuasion for Plato, Glenn Morrow offers a more qualified assessment. Like Whitehead, Morrow believes that persuasion is central to Plato’s philosophy: “What his followers might have done in such a position of power, or what Plato himself might have done in such a position, is not part of his teaching. If we can believe his words, his main reliance was upon persuasion” (“Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 234). But however much persuasion was Plato’s preferred method for achieving change and bringing about a more just social order founded on reason, Morrow argues that his stance on persuasion also represents a major incoherence in Plato’s thought. He sees Plato’s twin commitments to persuasion and to critical reason as the source of a tragedy from which he could not escape: The tragedy of Plato, we can see, is not the conflict between noble words and ignoble and treacherous intentions. It is the conflict between his desire for the moral health of his fellowmen and the love of reason, critical reason in human affairs. Plato never renounced either of these objects of his devotion, but they are not easy to reconcile, and the form of the synthesis he gives them in his later days really means the victory of morality and the suppression of reason. (“Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 244).

The tragedy of Plato’s position becomes clear for Morrow in the Laws, when the Athenian Stranger places strict limits on the travel of citizens in the city that he is designing. Travel is to be restricted to a select few exceptionally trustworthy observers over the age of fifty who, if they return uncorrupted from their travels, can communicate what they have learned. If, however, anyone’s travel has corrupted him, then he is “forbidden to associate with anyone, young or old; and if he does not submit, he shall be put to death for meddling with education and the laws” (Plato, Laws, 951c-­952d, cited in Morrow, “Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 249). The draconian nature of this response evidences a fear, on Plato’s part, at how precarious the created political order is and a despair at reason’s ability to transform a citizenry. For Morrow, Plato recognizes that even the best laws, supported by the most responsible persuasion, cannot achieve the perfection and stability that could render this humanly constructed order immune from the need for correction at some point in the future. Any human order, however

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well-­conceived and skillfully effected, is threatened by the inevitable prospect of change. To maintain the authority of the laws, Plato decided that the possibility of criticism needed to be eliminated. Any questioning of the order, however well-­intentioned, would be corrupting. The conviction originally produced by persuasion must be maintained by force, and there could be no room for the operation of a critical reason that might question the law’s authority. In such a fully controlled state, persuasion would in fact become indoctrination—­and, as such, it would cease to be persuasion. The members of that community would not possess the freedom to integrate beliefs, values, and perceptions into an understanding of which they could take reasonable ownership. The constitution of their souls would not be the result of their internalization and integration of values and understandings; it would be imposed on them through a combination of soft and hard power. Given this external imposition, the citizens’ souls would not be their own. His proposed city would represent the antithesis of a Socratic life. Like many a tragic character, Plato’s pursuit of a genuine good led him to embrace a position that rendered impossible the good that he seeks. Plato’s choice to favor a moral authority that could not be questioned over the operation of a critical reason should certainly be considered as tragic, for it does precisely what Vernant and Vidal-­Naquet claimed to be the political purpose of Attic tragedy: it makes available a key concept for discussion and further investigation. To do so was not Plato’s intent, but it is the consequence of his both valuing persuasion and then putting in place a set of laws that makes persuasion impossible. Plato’s impasse makes persuasion into a problem. The problem is not Plato’s alone but follows from any theory of persuasion that casts persuasion in terms of the purposes of the rhetor and not the needs of the audience. As long as persuasion is understood from the point of view of the individual or group seeking to influence the understanding of another individual or group, it will inevitably come up against the issue of the imposition of belief. The issue is always how one can ensure control over another; the sticking point is that the audience, in its freedom, can evade the control of the individual seeking to persuade it. Persuasion, so understood, is something done to an audience. Those who responsibly consider the ethics of such an action rightly search for ways to limit the action of the person seeking to persuade the other. Normally, those seeking an ethics to guide speakers hold that the party at whom the persuasion is directed must be respected and not subject to intimidation, manipulation, or deception. This stance leads to the guiding ethical principle that

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the audience needs to be seen as an end in itself and not as a means to further the persuader’s ends. While such a principle is laudable, it still imagines an audience whose well-­being depends upon the largesse of the rhetor. The audience is still conceived primarily as passive, as the recipient of an action. Even more, this imagined ethical reform of persuasion assumes that mistakes like Plato’s are simply errors resulting from the rhetorical theorist’s unawareness of the way in which the need to shape an audience’s internal constitution for its own good ends up creating an audience neither just nor rational. Such an assumption in effect argues that Plato’s mistake is not tragic. But if we follow Morrow and see Plato’s mistake as a tragic misstep, then his failure raises deeper problems, problems that go to the heart of persuasion and cannot be adequately addressed simply by reforming the intentions of the person seeking to persuade. What Plato’s tragic choice makes evident is that efforts at persuasion are haunted by the uncertainty of control, of the recognition that even the most skillful act of persuasion has no guarantee of success. That a genuine persuasion is under no one’s control—­ neither the speaker nor the audience—­is the source of Plato’s tragedy, and it is what makes the ethics of persuasion philosophically significant.

Persuasion, Desire, and Time In arguing for the importance of persuasion to Plato, Morrow contends that Plato took seriously Socrates’s claim in the Phaedrus that the purpose of rhetoric was to guide souls. As further evidence, he points to the importance that Plato gave to the preambles in the Laws: Now the preambles in Plato’s text are just such laudatory compositions extolling the gods that the law seeks to realize in the life of the citizen and appealing to all that is noble in him to co-­operate with the law. These preambles and the laws that follow them are not to be stored away in some scribe’s library and known only to officials. They are to be frequently read and listened to by all, since they are one of the few examples of prose literature that may be safely put into the hands of the schoolboy and the citizen (811c-­e). (“Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 240-­41)

These prose preambles were to function in ways similar to the poetry of which Plato approved: they were to enchant the audience and through this enchantment inculcate the laws in such a way that they would be integrated into the emotional and intellectual constitutions of the audience. However

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much the preambles might embody the insights and dictates of reason, their purpose was to reform or reconstitute the emotional orientation of the audience. An audience so emotionally constituted would act in accordance with reason, even if the members themselves were not fully capable of the intellectual rigor and discipline necessary to establish the laws in the first place or to fully appreciate their justification. The audience could follow the dictates of reason without having to recover those dictates through the independent operation of its own reason. The laws’ authority resided in the correct emotional constitution of the audience. For Morrow, the same use of enchantment is at the heart of all moral instruction: “We try to enchant the soul so that it will instinctively love that which intelligent judgment pronounces best” (“Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 244). The purpose of moral education is to shape desire, so that the moral individual does not just grudgingly follow the law but also, moved by love, seeks to do what the law commands. This love of moral virtue is not the result of the operation of reason or the consequence of successful argument. Rather, this love so fully reshapes the soul that one is instinctively or spontaneously drawn to moral virtue. Internal conflict has been eliminated. Virtue is no longer even a matter of choice; it simply occurs. Of course, no moral reform is ever this thorough, but the hope of such a complete conviction is the guiding end of such instruction through enchantment. Morrow’s account of Platonic soul-­guidance points to two essential features of persuasion: the role of desire and the role of time. If persuasion entails not simply agreement or obedience but genuine desire (“love that which intelligent judgment pronounces best”), then the proposed belief, or understanding, or value, or concept must be internalized in such a way that it becomes an active and not merely passive element of the soul. Further, and this was the point at which Plato stumbled in the Laws, desire can only be desire if it operates beyond the conscious or deliberate control of the individual caught in its throes. Anne Carson argues that this loss of control, among other things, made desire so anxiety-­provoking to the early lyric poets: To control the boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-­ possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most of the important information that a person receives. When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. (44–­45)

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If an individual is unwilling to give up control, that individual forecloses the possibility of admitting desire into the self. And if the purpose of persuasion is to enable an individual to love something of value, then persuasion is only possible if that individual gives up control over the content and coherence of his person. It is in the necessity of giving up this control that persuasion differs from either agreement or obedience, for neither of these require the letting go of control over one’s self-­image. In the case of agreement, individuals agree because they choose to—­they remain in control, and the agreement registers an active decision to commit to or abide by their choice. In obedience, there need not be control, but there is also no staking of the self. When someone obeys, that obedience may or may not be a voluntary act, but it is one that recognizes an external authority warranting that choice. Desire is different. The lover does not control the arrival of desire, and, importantly, desire discloses something about the lover of which the lover had been unaware until overtaken by desire: “There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at a personal cost” (Carson, 36). That is, desire is inherently persuasive—­it convinces the lover of a truth. This conviction is not a matter of will; the truth that desire discloses cannot be managed to make a world conform to a preexisting understanding. It does just the opposite. Desire confronts the lover with a perception that makes a truth claim because its authority cannot be traced back to a self-­image that the lover seeks to protect. Desire persuades because it reveals, usually in unexpected ways. Carson makes the further point that this understanding arising from desire is “won from reality at a personal cost” (36). Persuasion, which is based in desire, often has to overcome resistance precisely because it puts an understanding at risk. It requires the person being persuaded to give something up, usually something that has informed an understanding of or approach to the world and that is integral to the individual’s self-­understanding. Persuasion requires one to see oneself differently, and the possibility of such a change in self-­understanding can be a source of serious anxiety and consequently of strong resistance. The challenge involved in relinquishing an understanding that has helped define how one perceives the world contributes to a second important feature of persuasion: the role of time. Often persuasion is discussed as if it were a singular and particular action that could be accomplished through the agency of one discursive act. But such an understanding runs counter to most people’s experience of persuasion, which is often not a straightforward linear progression from a previous understanding to a new one. The more

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usual course for persuasion involves a halting progression, one marked by reluctance and, at times, active resistance. It takes time to get used to a new idea and to understand it at a deeper level than surface recognition. Plato understands this need for time, and, as Morrow argues, the need for time features in Plato’s recognition of the relationship of necessity to persuasion: It [the ordering activity of intelligence] implies that the plan realized in the world process is not one imposed from without, but one that is elicited from the materials involved. It implies just that insight into ends, that understanding of materials, and that manipulation of necessities that characterize genuine craftsmanship. . . . Persuasion is a slower, but much surer, process than compulsion. Plato’s view has been presented, for the sake of simplicity, as if it might imply a single act of intelligent persuasion, effecting a cosmos at one stroke; but the generation of the cosmos is obviously a more prolonged process that this. (“Necessity and Persuasion,” 161)

According to Morrow, Plato, in his appreciation of the importance of time, opposes persuasion to compulsion. Compulsion can be done at “one stroke.” Since it is an external imposition of an order, there is no need to pay attention to the nature of the materials that will be given this new form. That assertion is a bit of an overstatement, since any compulsion that does not take some account of these materials might encounter a resistance that would effectively block that compulsion. But still, the point stands. Persuasion, unlike compulsion, requires the cooperation of the subject it seeks to persuade. Persuasion does not simply have to take cognizance of the limits created by the nature of an object; it must actively engage and transform the existing constitution of its subject. Persuasion’s goal is not to impose form but, to borrow Morrow’s apt phrase describing the factors that restrain a craftsperson, to elicit that form from the potentialities that exist within the object. The true craftsperson’s work is guided by an understanding of what is possible given the nature of the materials—­the new form is a consequence of persuading these materials, of realizing their potential in a new way. This process takes time, and it cannot be imposed. When that guiding principle is applied not to objects but to subjects, persuasion, like eros, can be understood as revealing a truth that inhered within the subject but of which the subject had previously been ignorant. In this action/event of revelation, persuasion does not impose an understanding but allows one to emerge that orders in a new way the beliefs, values, emotions, and concepts existing in the subject. It discloses a new and richer possibility for the way in which these elements are coordinated to reconstitute the individual so

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that the individual is truer to whom he or she can be. Such reconstitution takes time. Plato’s analogy to artisans mastering their craft because of their intimate knowledge of the necessities inhering within their materials is significant because it unintentionally reveals core difficulties for persuasion. The artisans that Plato imagines can succeed at their craft because they are working with objects and these objects, unlike subjects, are determined by necessities over which they have no control. These necessities follow from the nature of the matter upon which the craftsperson works as the artisan seeks to reorder it into a new form, and these necessities create the limits for a particular art. The art object that is shaped by the craftsperson is the result of an imaginative and practical synthesis of existing necessities into a new form. While it may be impossible to predict how a particular craftsperson will creatively incorporate the various materials into a new object, this new object cannot violate the necessities that give the materials their identities. The laws that determine possible combinations are fixed and certain. This fixity is a key difference between the crafts Plato imagines and persuasion. The possibilities for persuasion are not fixed or determined in advance in the way that the possibilities for any transformation of any material are limited by preexisting natural laws. Even if Socrates could develop a sophisticated science or art of persuasion in the Phaedrus—­an art dependent on both psychological knowledge of audiences and knowledge of appropriate subject matters—­ such an art could never guarantee that its products could ever possess the necessity that inheres in other artistic projects. The rhetor will never possess that level of control. Such control—­such shaping of a soul—­would be possible only if the rhetor could impose an understanding on the audience and the audience had no option other than to accept it. But in that case, there would no longer be persuasion; there would be coercion. For persuasion to happen, there must be freedom, and that means that no act or event of persuasion is ever fully under either the rhetor’s or the audience’s control. Time also plays an important role in persuasion. In Plato’s recognition that the preambles need to be available to the public and read frequently, he acknowledges that the understanding that is the consequence of persuasion is not permanent. It may be stable, but it is subject to change. Morrow sees Plato’s anxiety over this possibility as the source of his fatal embrace of total control over the information to which citizens had access. Anxiety about change caused Plato to eliminate a role for critical reason in any citizen’s attempt to understand the city’s laws. For if critical reason represents a source of authority located in the individual, there is always the possibility, and indeed likelihood, of individual opposition to the official understanding of

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the state. Individuals who can think for themselves are no longer able to be controlled by a preexisting authority. The authority of that authority is now subject to the approval of critical reason. At the very least, a commitment to critical reasoning means that loyalty to the state is no longer absolute and unquestioning. Such loyalty needs to be continually earned; it needs to submit to a persuasion that it cannot control. For those who seek order, that prospect is scary. It was sufficiently scary that, according to Morrow, it caused Plato to abandon a role for critical reason in the approval of the city’s laws. In his need to ensure a just moral order, he contradicted the value that was central to Socrates’s conduct of his life and gutted persuasion of any serious content: Socrates in prison, discussing with Crito the propriety of escaping, invokes (according to Plato’s account) the image of the laws themselves as arguing with him. “We have given you, Socrates,” the Laws say, “a choice between alternatives; either to persuade us that we are wrong, or to obey us.” This is the spirit of genuine persuasion, the willingness to be persuaded as well as to persuade. (“Plato’s Conception of Persuasion,” 250)

This commitment to persuasion ran deep, and in the Apology, Socrates argues that his essential service to the city is accomplished through his persistent effort at persuasion: “For I spend all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern, not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls” (Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), 30b). According to Socrates, persuasion is needed because the citizens of Athens are confused about their most important concerns. Assuming that this confusion is not a deliberately perverse pursuit of lesser goods, or a blasé embrace of incoherence, then it can be argued that it is an instance of the lack of self-­knowledge, a lack that is not incidental but structural. The absence of this self-­knowledge is Socrates’s fundamental concern and defines how he understands his ethical and political responsibilities. The fundamental Socratic challenge is to persuade his interlocutors that they don’t know who they are. The persistent danger confronted by Socrates is that an individual will confuse an unreflectively held set of opinions with knowledge. The belief that one can have true knowledge of the self assumes that any current lack of self-­knowledge can be rectified once one has sufficient information. This belief also assumes that any such lack arises from correctable mistakes. But for Socrates, the lack of individual self-­knowledge is not a matter of a lack of information or of

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some resolvable confusion; rather, it is a structural problem: subjects cannot be known because they dance in the chorus of a particular god, and humans cannot possess divine knowledge. At some level, humans are a mystery to themselves, and the Socratic quest is to be open to partial revelations of this mystery. Socrates is explicit that his life is structured by this quest: And what sort of person am I? One of those who are happy to be refuted if they make a false statement, happy also to refute anyone else who may do the same, yet not less happy to be refuted than to refute. For I think the former a greater benefit, in proportion as it is of greater benefit to be delivered from the greatest harm than to deliver another. (Plato, Gorgias, 458a)

The ethics of persuasion is shaped by the nature of this quest, as one seeks to understand the ways in which one’s current desires both enable and restrict one’s ability to respond creatively to the world in which one lives. The ethics of persuasion should provide guidance in loving the world appropriately. A simple statement that one should give priority to affairs of the soul over attention to the body or the pursuit of wealth would obviously change nothing because it is reasonable to assume that people are pursuing what they take to be good—­they are acting in accordance with their desires. Even if informed about their internal confusion, such information is inert, providing at best some sort of intellectual recognition and almost certainly not changing the way they desire. If change is to be possible, then their desires need to be reformed. Individuals need to be persuaded to love the good, and this persuasion does not principally involve overcoming some sort of intellectual shortfall; rather, their souls need to be reconstituted so that they are actively drawn to the good. Put that way, the emphasis on an intellectual shortfall in a generalized and abstract population is slightly wrong. It is not some far-­off they who are ignorant of who they are; rather it is we who are ignorant of who we are—­self-­ignorance (being out of touch with one’s own subjectivity) is what defines the human situation. If persuasion is to accomplish its purpose, it must transform desire, and if it does, it will transform subjectivity. But as the Platonic dialogues amply and repeatedly demonstrate, the most available response to persuasion is resistance, or, in the case of Phaedrus, an easy agreement that remains on the surface and does not require any serious reconsideration of who one is. If these responses represent the ways in which persuasion fails, then an ethics of persuasion should articulate the values that inhere in an open responsiveness. It should also acknowledge the abiding temptation to evade and flee from risks that such a responsiveness requires.

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Persuasion as an Internal Good If persuasion is not viewed from the perspective of the individual seeking to persuade another but from the perspective of the individual being persuaded, then it can be asked: what are the needs to which persuasion is a response; what is required for persuasion to occur; and what are the goods that arise from persuasion? The answers to these questions should provide the basis for an ethics of persuasion. Rather than a focus on manipulation, pandering, coercion, indoctrination, or some other abuse of persuasion by an individual seeking to use the audience as a means to advance the speaker’s interest, we can focus on why people resist or evade persuasion and on the danger of collapsing persuasion into knowledge. This focus can allow us to understand the intrinsic value of persuasion and not reduce persuasion to a means, even if it is a means pursued admirably and ethically. It can allow us to recover the contribution persuasion makes to a life that is marked by vitality and receptiveness. It can allow us to understand how persuasion is the action/event through which we learn to love the world appropriately. A further benefit of focusing on the ethics that govern the action/event of persuasion is that doing so directs attention away from the traditional concern with fending off possible corruption and instead seeks to understand the conditions that make persuasion possible. Focusing on the individual engaged in the action/event of persuasion allows us to think of persuasion as a practice and to draw explicitly on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the ways in which a practice is shaped by the internal goods that the practice makes possible. Understanding these internal goods will also help us understand the needs that occasion and the requirements that govern persuasion. For MacIntyre, a practice is: Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (187).

Practices come into being as human powers are shaped in a way that increases their effectiveness in promoting actions and making objects that enrich human life. In so doing, practices expand human possibilities. If persuasion is a practice, as defined by MacIntyre, then it must involve the development and disciplining of a natural power. In the case of persuasion

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as a practice, the development in question is that of a natural capacity for responsiveness into a form of activity that makes possible a richer and more complex response to the issues and opportunities that engage an individual or a community in pursuit of an understanding of who they can become. As human beings we are shaped in part through a natural responsiveness, but this responsiveness need not develop in ways that advance our growth. Individuals and communities are often stalled in their development because of responses that are rigid or inappropriate or self-­protective or delusional or that fail in a variety of ways. It is important to recognize the multiple ways in which growth may fail to happen, because this recognition makes clear that persuasion is neither a natural nor an inevitable form. Rather, it has a history, and “there are of course sequences of decline as well as progress, and progress is rarely to be understood a straightforwardly linear” (MacIntyre, 189). Accordingly, there will be times when persuasion occupies a lesser role in individual or communal lives; there is no guarantee that at any given time persuasion will necessarily be seen as a value. Persuasion, as either an individual or communal action/event, is an achievement—­and as such, it is only possible as a practice if people are willing and able to pursue it, and if external conditions cooperate and allow this pursuit. The ethics of persuasion should follow from what is required to make persuasion possible as a practice. To understand how persuasion as a practice is possible, it is necessary to appreciate MacIntyre’s categorization of goods internal and external. To begin with, both internal and external goods are goods. The differences between the two arise from the way in which one obtains or accesses them and from who benefits from each good. MacIntyre lists “prestige, status, and money” as examples of external goods. These are things that people can and do pursue and that bring benefits (and also problems) with them. What makes them external is that they can be acquired by a variety of means; their acquisition is not tied to participation in one particular activity. Internal goods, by contrast, can be achieved “only by engaging in some particular kind of practice” (MacIntyre, 188). The good and the practice are essentially linked. If one does not understand and abide by the values and the rules that govern the practice, one cannot achieve or possess the good. Internal goods are available only to those who are willing to submit to the discipline of practice. No internal good, including persuasion, must necessarily persist, and to the extent that external goods can be powerfully attractive, they represent a threat to internal goods. All goods run the inherent risk of being reduced to external goods, with practices becoming valued only as a means to obtaining an external good and no longer conceived as having an

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integrity that needs to be respected. This danger is especially acute in any society in which power, status, and wealth are aggressively sought: “We should therefore expect, that, if in a particular society, the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound” (MacIntyre, 196). It is certainly possible that in such a society some of the actions essential to persuasion could be taken over and used simply as means to influence others. These efforts to influence, in these societies, might well be called persuasion, and much of what we currently take to be persuasion may, in fact, be instances of precisely this kind of simulacra. MacIntyre argues that societies in which competitiveness is excessively valued are particularly vulnerable to loss of internal goods: “in any society which recognized only external goods competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature” (196). One has only to think of the role of advertising and the multiple strategies that have burgeoned as social media has become a more pervasive presence to understand how persuasion can be lost as modes of influence expand. The other distinguishing feature between the two types of goods is that external goods “when achieved . . . are always some individual’s property or possession” (MacIntyre, 190). They are “characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners” (MacIntyre, 190). MacIntyre considers power to be one such good, and one can see how in the history of rhetoric, when rhetoric was sought as a means to achieve political power, it was exactly that kind of good. The more skillful the rhetor, the more success was likely. An absolute focus on effectiveness can become a corrupting pressure on persuasion as an activity that has a set of internal values that should govern it. Further, in contrast to external goods, internal goods are not the property of particular individuals or groups, but when they are achieved, there is benefit that accrues to “the whole community who participate in the practice” (MacIntyre, 190–­91). If persuasion is seen not in terms of a power obtained by a speaker, but as a form of excellence in which an audience participates, then communal value of persuasion becomes more apparent. When individuals and communities become more skilled in the practice of persuasion, they advance in the ways in which they can more adequately understand themselves and discover the possibilities that inhere in their values and beliefs. To engage in an artful practice of persuasion, one that understands why persuasion is a value in itself and not simply a means to another end, should promote openness and humility. It should make individuals and communities more willing to put their understandings at risk because they have come to value the good involved

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in taking an active role in the transformation of a subjectivity so that it enhances further human goods and possibilities. Persuasion being an internal good explains why manipulation, pandering, coercion, and indoctrination cannot produce persuasion. All of these activities can certainly produce agreements or obedience, or they can allow an unscrupulous rhetor or authority to impose a command on a public or deceive a public into accepting a particular account. What they cannot do is make such acceptance or obedience the consequence of an action/event that is both free and necessary. And although agreement and obedience may well be the result of persuasion, they are not the purposes that ensure the integrity that makes persuasion possible. One should not confuse the results of persuasion with the principles that govern the form. If persuasion is the practice by which a subjectivity is transformed, then the conditions necessary for such a transformation must control and guide the action/event. The way in which a persuasion is internalized and reconstitutes a subjectivity is different from the way in which an external and imposed belief, value, or concept operates within or upon a subjectivity. Such impositions are never really part of the subject. They may come to dominate the subject and even determine actions and perceptions, but in important ways, these actions and perceptions are never really the subject’s own. Understanding persuasion as a practice is also an individual and political achievement. Although all humans have the potential to participate in persuasion, some individuals and communities can be precluded by personal, cultural, or political barriers. For persuasion as a practice to be possible, people need to understand and value it: “Practices then might flourish in societies with very different codes; what they could not do is flourish in societies in which the virtues [justice, honesty, and courage] were not valued, although institutions and technical skills serving unified purposes might well continue to flourish” (MacIntyre, 193). Individuals and societies may well have ways of determining understanding and shaping perception that do not involve persuasion. Such external determination is always a possibility and often a reality. Plato’s tragic emptying out of persuasion can be traced back to his lack of faith in citizens’ honesty, courage, and sense of justice. Because he felt that he could not trust citizens to use their critical reason (a practice that required honesty, courage, and justice), he substituted indoctrination for persuasion. To realize the goods internal to persuasion one must recognize and act in accordance with certain virtues. If justice, honesty, and courage are virtues necessary for any practice, then one who wishes to participate in persuasion will certainly need them. To understand what is further required for the

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practice of persuasion, it is helpful to consider the threats to it. There are several. If persuasion requires that one put oneself at risk, then the loss of control will be a serious threat and one that produces a significant fear. If a willingness to be available to persuasion implies a recognition that one’s current understanding is insufficient, then if someone is comfortable with who he or she is, that individual would see no point in pursuing a new understanding. Such an individual is not moved by fear but rendered static by self-­contentment. If someone does not want to take responsibility for themselves, they will not undertake the kind of investigation that would disclose where such responsibility lies. If someone is subject to a powerful authority, that person will be unable or very reluctant to exercise a freedom that may put them at odds with that authority. If an individual’s view of the world is narrow or confined, that individual may not be able or willing to entertain perspectives that differ from their own. If someone is not willing to evaluate with honesty and thoroughness the new understanding that is developing, then such an individual may simply substitute one surface understanding with another. What these difficulties collectively suggest is that persuasion requires subjects willing and able to put themselves at risk and to be open to the possibility that they may discover the inadequacy of their current understandings. One must be simultaneously humble and fearless. Risk and openness are necessary values for persuasion, but they are not by themselves sufficient. As I have frequently mentioned, persuasion cannot be reduced simply to an intellectual operation. It involves the transformation of a subjectivity. The nature of this transformation is caught in the close relationship between Eros and persuasion. As the Greeks understood, both of these powers come from without, take over the individual, disrupt normal understanding, and reveal a new truth. If the other difficulties that confront persuasion are connected to the need for freedom, the relation of persuasion to desire points to the role of necessity in persuasion. Persuasion is not simply something that one can deliberately pursue, and that one can bring under one’s control. Lear’s distinction between accepting responsibility for oneself and holding oneself responsible is relevant. The acceptance of responsibility depends upon a willingness to let go of a current and, in many ways, crucial understanding of who one is and to open oneself up to discovering not who one should be but who one actually is. For Lear, “accepting responsibility is constitutive of the process of individuation, the process by which I become an I” (Lear, 195). Although she casts this concern in different terms, Anne Carson, in her analysis of the Phaedrus, shares this insight. For her, Plato’s radical rewriting of the Greek lyric tradition hinges on Socrates’s

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understanding that desire is crucial precisely because it undoes the deliberate control that individuals so often value and that hinders them in understanding who they can be: To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it. Sokrates says it is a glimpse of a god (253a). (Carson, 153)

Such an experience is only possible if the individual is willing to give up control, and to be open to a necessity beyond his capacity to alter. It is a paradigmatic moment of responsiveness. This need for control is a major stumbling block for persuasion—­it arises in part to ensure that nothing discovered will seriously disrupt what was known before a subject submitted to persuasion. But however much persuasion does require, at some point, voluntary participation or acquiescence, it also exceeds the will of the person being persuaded. For the action/event to be an instance of persuasion, the new conceptualization, even or especially when it is about oneself, must be beyond the control of that self—­it has an existence that cannot be reduced to what someone might want it to be. It is that quality that allows it to be revealing. This new conceptualization may not be temporally prior to the action/event of persuasion, but it is logically prior—­it exists independent of the subject’s will. When I am persuaded, I learn something about myself that I did not know before. This discovery is at the heart of the Socratic quest. This quest that is essential to persuasion begins in one’s capacity for responsiveness and the way in which that capacity can develop, or—­in cases when growth is arrested—­the ways in which it has ceased to develop. The practice of persuasion involves the fostering and development of an ever more sophisticated responsiveness, one that expands my capacity to appreciate both who I am and the world in which I live. This responsiveness creates a more capacious emotional bond between myself and my world. Persuasion allows me to love the world appropriately. That is not the same as allowing me to love the world indiscriminately. Rather, it is an ongoing project in which I try to make myself worth loving and equally try to determine how this world should be loved—­to determine what is the appropriate loving response to this world. In certain circumstances the most loving response may well be one of resistance, or criticism, or, as Raymond Williams has argued, revolution.

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But it is important to remember the lesson of tragedy and that none of these terms has a fixed or unproblematic meaning. When one is persuaded, one gives content to these concepts by aligning experience and concept. What it means to resist or to cooperate or to oppose or to tolerate is not set in advance. To seek the meaning of any of these actions is to put oneself at risk and to make oneself open to discovering that one is the kind of subject who sees this determination to protect a current understanding as what resistance is in this situation. When I put myself at risk, what I may reveal is my ethical openness or my ethical obtuseness. I will then need to accept responsibility for those ethics, whatever they may be, because I will have revealed—­to myself at least, and possibly to others—­who I am. How I see myself will inevitably fall short of how I wish to be. And this dissonance should provoke further quests, as I respond to what my responsiveness has disclosed. Persuasion is thus an ongoing project. To structure a life in which persuasion is a central value is to constitute oneself as an individual committed to an ongoing inquiry into who that individual can become. If submitting to persuasion allows me access to a more nuanced understanding of myself, such an understanding is always capable of further refinement. This is the lesson at the end of the Phaedrus. After having argued for the understanding promoted through a discourse based in desire, Socrates says: If he [the person engaged in persuasion] has composed these things, knowing where the truth lies, and being able to assist, when he goes into refutative examination of the things that he has written about, and has the power, when he himself speaks, to show forth the written things as slight—­such a man must not be named after these things, but named after those things that he has taken seriously. (Plato, Phaedrus, 278c–­d)

He then goes on to make the point that such a person is not wise. The understanding gained is not that of a permanent or certain truth. Humans do not have access to that kind of knowledge: “To call him wise, Phaedrus, to me at least seems to be a big thing and to be fitting for a god only” (Phaedrus, 278d). Socrates suggests that one should call such a person “a philosopher.” That is, such an individual is a subject shaped by a desire that has developed through a responsiveness to a loving discourse that has in turn constituted the subject, who is moved by a desire that prompts an even greater development of the capacity to respond. That individual is growing into a subject who can love the world appropriately.

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The Persuasion of Socrates To appreciate the challenge that faces an ethics of persuasion, it is helpful to return to Morrow’s discussion of Plato’s fatal, if well-­intentioned, abandonment of persuasion and adoption of a program of civically enforced conformity to a moral order. Plato’s tragic mistake in the Laws is a testament to the ethics required if persuasion is to be possible. Despite his deep commitment to persuasion and his recognition that any serious progress in intellectual and emotional growth could only come through persuasion, he despaired at citizens being ethically transformed by persuasion alone. Or, if they were persuaded, he doubted that such persuasion would be sufficiently stable to persist and withstand challenges. But if this turn to state authority in the Laws represents Plato’s despair, elsewhere he offers a different picture of the efficacy of persuasion. In the Symposium, Socrates’s narration of his persuasion by Diotima provides an important counterexample to the Laws. However much Socrates’s narration of his education by Diotima is an encomium for Eros, it is also a mimetic representation of an individual undergoing persuasion. The importance of dramatizing the experience of persuasion is signaled by Socrates’s rejection of the way the previous encomia were presented, as he agreed to speak only if he could change the form in which he presented his encomium: “I’m not giving another eulogy using that method [i.e., simply attributing to Eros the qualities that the speaker values], not at all—­I wouldn’t be able to do it!—­but, if you wish, I would like to tell the truth my way” (Plato, Symposium, 199b). Even with Socrates’s rejection of the past method of praise, Plato had the option of having Socrates simply reproduce the instruction that he received from Diotima as a set piece, without any account of the actual experience of undergoing the instruction. Such a presentation would have satisfied the need to speak the truth about Eros, as Socrates understood it. Instead, Plato has Socrates present mimetically his education by Diotima. The reader not only learns what Socrates learns but witnesses this learning. Importantly, Socrates’s understanding of desire derives not from his personal erotic experience but from his education by Diotima. His understanding of Eros is the consequence of persuasion. Socrates is explicit about the role of persuasion in his understanding of Eros: “This, Phaedrus and the rest of you, was what Diotima told me. I was persuaded. And once persuaded, I try to persuade others too that human nature can find no better workmate for acquiring this than Love” (Plato, Symposium, 212b). The experience of persuasion has confirmed its value for him; it has transformed him into a subjectivity constituted by the activity of

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persuasion. Socrates’s narrative of his education by Diotima recounts and dramatizes the experience of a transformative persuasion. His encomium for Eros is the story of an individual experiencing persuasion and not that of an individual seeking to persuade someone else (although his mimetic representation of his persuasion is an attempt to persuade others). As such, it reveals what is required of an individual if he or she is to be available for persuasion. Socrates seems to believe that if he has any hope of persuading his audience, then he must show that his current understanding is a consequence of his having undergone a persuasion—­and that his transformation is likewise possible for anyone willing to engage in the practice of persuasion. Socrates’s transformation from a somewhat callow and naive youth, one very much like Agathon, into a more complex character—­one capable of a deeper appreciation of Eros as a demonic intermediary between gods and humans—­exemplifies the operation of persuasion. The consequence of Socrates’s transformation through persuasion is that he has become an erotic object, as Alcibiades will attest. Socrates’s mimetic presentation of Diotima’s persuasion of him involves multiple discursive strategies: refutation, narration, exposition, dialectic, clarification, analogy, and argument. The persuasion begins with a refutation, and to demonstrate the significance of this refutation as an essential opening for persuasion, Socrates prefaces his speech by subjecting Agathon to a refutation that reproduces the one that Diotima directed at Socrates. The importance of the refutation is to get the interlocutor to a place where he acknowledges the inadequacy of his current understanding. To be available for persuasion, individuals have to recognize that what they considered to be their knowledge with respect to a particular concept was, in fact, a surface understanding taken over from the commonplaces circulating in a given culture. Because the meaning of the concept was assumed as common knowledge, its incoherence was not evident. Consequently, individuals felt no need to investigate this concept. Only when the inadequacy of their understanding was made apparent were such individuals in a place to be potentially receptive to persuasion. Diotima’s persuasion of Socrates proceeds with her posing him a series of questions. Rather than impose an understanding on him, she seeks his active participation. For a persuasion to work, the audience must become active. This requirement is structural. If the audience remains passive, then a new meaning is taken over or imposed and the experience does not allow this understanding to be integrated into the subject’s understanding. Such a meaning remains abstract at best, and it lacks the emotional and intellectual content that are the consequence of an active synthesis of new meaning. The

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particular focus of Diotima’s refutation is to undermine simplistic dichotomies that pose two possibilities, which are mutually exclusive and preclude the possibility of a third alternative: beautiful/ugly; wisdom/ignorance; divine/human. Part of the power of such dichotomies is that they have an initial plausibility. Diotima gets Socrates to agree that there is such a thing as true opinion, and that it represents neither ignorance nor wisdom, but exists between the two states. It is not so much that true opinion participates in both ignorance and wisdom but that it represents a state of transition from ignorance to wisdom. It is intermediary. Diotima wants to use this example to enable the young Socrates to see that Eros represents an intermediary between the human and divine—­that Eros creates the possibility of a connection between the two. But to get to this understanding, Diotima must address Socrates’s initial response: “Yet everyone agrees he’s [Eros] a great god” (Plato, Symposium, 202b). Socrates’s resistance is understandable—­one does not simply give up an understanding when a point against it has been successfully made. The more likely response to such a situation is to resist the point even though it has challenged one’s understanding. If the individual who is to be persuaded is to be genuinely convinced, then the working-­ through of resistance is essential. Being persuaded is an active process and requires an individual to raise objections and questions. It is through this process that the individual takes ownership of the new understanding. And if knowledge is the endpoint of understanding and is only available to gods, then persuasion, like Eros and true opinion, must represent an intermediary state—­a place between ignorance and knowledge. Persuasion is the kind of understanding appropriate to human beings. Once Diotima has succeeded in the necessary but negative task of raising questions that suggest difficulties with the commonplace view of Eros, she begins an extended and more positive process of developing a more complex view. To explain the nature of Eros as an intermediary between humans and gods, she provides a myth of his birth and of his mixed parentage. This myth allows her to account for particular experiences undergone when an individual is caught in Eros’s throes. They myth’s authority is dependent on its speaking meaningfully to actual experience. It provides a conceptualization of erotic experience. Diotima uses the myth to untangle the confusion of Socrates and others in which they mistakenly ascribe to the lover the qualities of the beloved. Finally, within the process of persuasion, the myth prevents the development of what could easily become an abstract argument about Eros, grounding it instead in a narrative that sits in between refutation and dialectic. The developing persuasion takes place by allowing

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a complex concept to acquire an experiential content, thus enabling it to speak meaningfully to the subject’s actual experience. The methods by which Diotima brings Socrates inside the experience of persuasion are not limited to asking questions and giving mythic narratives. She mixes explanations into her questions. For example, when she and Socrates are attempting to clarify why only one form of love is given the name of love, Diotima uses an analogy that draws on the way the term poetry is used. Poetry, as a term for creative activity, covers the range of creative acts, but we limit its use to a particular practice. Likewise, love or desire can be directed toward a variety of entities, but we reserve the use of the terms to designating the erotic and affectionate relationships between individuals. Diotima has undone a commonplace, provided a mythic account that captures the quality of the experience of being in love, and clarified and restricted, in a nonartificial way, the term love. She is in a position to give positive content to the concept of love. She can introduce the idea that the object of love is not to possess beauty but rather to seek immortality through the activity of procreation—­and that the role of beauty is to provide the occasions for such procreation. Having established these points, she can then describe a process of erotic assent, beginning with physical attraction and concluding in a vision of the divine. The Eros revealed by Diotima transcends the other, more empirically based accounts of Eros from other encomiasts, and this understanding is what allows Socrates to now claim some insight into love. Such a radical transformation in how Socrates (or most anyone else) comes to understand the nature of erotic experience happens not because of the experience or because of reflection on the experience; rather, as Plato presents it, the transformation is possible because of an act of persuasion. This experience of persuasion was erotic and transformative. And if this act of persuasion required a teacher such as Diotima, it also revealed what was necessary on the part of the individual being persuaded. Young Socrates had to be disabused of a commonplace understanding and acquire a need for persuasion. He had to become active in the persuasion, both asking and answering questions and working through understandable resistances. He then had to follow an extended and complex argument, an argument that was persuasive in part because of the reach of its intellectual imagination. He had to value and be receptive to such an intellectual imagination. In this speech by Socrates, we are given a portrait of what is required of an individual undergoing and pursuing persuasion. It is a portrait of an erotic transformation brought about through a persuasive discourse. But if Socrates’s speech is an articulation and celebration of persuasion,

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the dialogue immediately raises cautions about the likelihood of such persuasion being easily available. If we are given an account of Socrates being persuaded, that account is followed by one in which Alcibiades resists persuasion. Alcibiades’s failure is not tragic but ethical. His failure is not a consequence of lack of intelligence or even an inability to comprehend what Socrates says. Rather, he is unwilling to put himself at risk in the ways necessary for persuasion to work. He is unwilling to give up or go against certain values that he holds firmly. His resistance to persuasion underlines what is necessary for persuasion to occur. One has to be willing to integrate new interpretations into one’s understanding in such a way that a subjectivity can be transformed. Alcibiades is unwilling to pursue this transformation; for all his perturbation in the presence of Socrates, he is content with himself—­he is in love with who he is and has no real desire to change. He becomes an example of how to love inappropriately, and as a consequence he cannot grow or develop as a subject. He is a reminder of the limits of persuasion.

The Ethics of Persuasion Young Socrates’s response to Diotima’s instruction—­and Alcibiades’s resis­ tance to a philosophic vision that he recognizes and to which he is drawn—­ help clarify the ethical issues that shape an individual’s availability to be persuaded. For persuasion to be possible, individuals must be willing to submit to the values that govern the practice. To be available for and to engage in persuasion, an individual must be willing to take the risks required to be open to a new understanding—­one that will require the individual to change. In contrast with the traditional discussion of the ethical issues that confront persuasion, an ethics of persuasion interested in the situation of the audience is not primarily concerned with combating or countering corruption on the part of an ambitious or unscrupulous rhetor. While an approach to persuasion focused on audience needs and responsibilities recognizes that corrupt practitioners of persuasion exist and should be held accountable for any injuries they produce, an ethics of persuasion focused on the audience is more concerned with how individuals, out of a desire to protect themselves, make themselves unavailable for persuasion. Such an ethics is interested in the ways in which individuals or communities close themselves off from the responsiveness necessary for persuasion. Its concern is with the issues of promoting and supporting responsiveness and of fostering its development into an ever more sophisticated openness. At the heart of this ethics is the development of a set of virtues to counter the understandable human desire for control and to address the anxiety that follows

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when such control is forsaken. Taking its direction from an awareness of the difficulties and obstacles that confront any individual or community when they put at risk understandings central to their identities, an ethics of persuasion seeks to articulate the virtues and values that can guide individuals as they transform themselves as subjects. If, as Vernant argued, Attic tragedy created, for the Western world, a tragic subjectivity, then in a similar fashion, a new theory of persuasion, based on the needs of the audience, should seek to discover virtues and values that make a persuasive subjectivity possible. This theory would acknowledge that however much persuasion can occur naturally, the action/event we call persuasion is an achievement dependent upon internalizing a practice that disciplines and increases the power and scope of that native responsiveness. In specifying an ethics implied by the logic of a practice, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that “we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage, and honesty” (191). Justice ensures that all practitioners are evaluated fairly and in accordance with the practice’s standards; honesty requires that one does not violate those standards for personal gain; and courage enables practitioners to put themselves at risk as they seek to discover what they are capable of. If a practice is to succeed in the production of goods that expand human possibilities, then the practitioners must have certain virtues that are necessary if they are to sustain themselves. For a practice constituted by the pursuit of internal goods to be possible, practitioners must subordinate themselves in their relationship to other practitioners (MacIntyre, 191). These virtues make the necessary relationships possible because they establish the conditions needed for an individual to enter and participate in a practice. If one is to participate in a practice, one must recognize and accept the standards that govern it. As MacIntyre points out, such standards have a history, and they are not immutable. They can be changed, but only by those who have accepted their authority and are then in a position to invent new ways to pursue the values and excellences that shape the practice. Only if someone is willing to acknowledge the ways in which the authority of the practice, as it has been determined in its history, both enable and limit what counts as participation in the practice, can that individual become a participant in the practice. To engage in a practice is to recognize that one is accountable to standards that exist outside oneself and that these standards create the criteria by which one’s actions and products are judged. If MacIntyre specifies the three virtues generic to any practice, he also recognizes that individual practices will also have specific virtues arising from the conditions necessary for the goods internal to those practices.

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A practice of persuasion grounded in human responsiveness is enabled and constrained by certain virtues. To cultivate a responsiveness arising from a developing, loving relationship to the world, individuals engaged in persuasion must honor an openness that may put their understandings of themselves at risk. This valuing of openness would conflict with the need to have control over one’s life. Humans have a strong and understandable tendency to protect their understanding of themselves. People are invested in their self-­images, and this investment can create a major stumbling block for further growth and for a developing responsiveness. Such stumbling blocks are especially likely if, as Freud and Lear maintain, “a person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity” (Lear, 4). Because people are out of touch with their own subjectivities, they experience a strong drive to resist persuasion and the challenge that it brings to any self-­understanding. Such resistance is evident in many of the Platonic dialogues when Socrates begins to probe the foundation of various interlocutors’ self-­conceptions. These efforts invariably fail. At a certain point the interlocutors become defensive and simply close down. Their unavailability for persuasion has little to do with their intelligence or lack thereof. Further, their ignorance of who they are is not a consequence of lacking information that might enlighten them. Their unavailability for persuasion runs deeper, for being out of touch with one’s own subjectivity is a structural feature for humans. Our unavailability for persuasion represents an almost instinctual response of self-­protection. A potential responsiveness becomes a fixed reaction. Although Socrates may have been naturally drawn to self-­investigation, he is not the norm. For most people, openness to such investigation is a hard-­won achievement. But if persuasion is to be an action/event that en­ ables individuals to move to richer and more complex understandings of themselves and their worlds, it is possible only if they are willing to put their current understandings at risk. Openness must be a core virtue for persuasion. Several virtues follow from openness. The first is humility. If individuals are to value openness, they need to acknowledge that their current state of understanding is deficient. Such acknowledgment is an act of humility. Once someone acknowledges that the current state of their understanding is deficient, then that individual is in a position to attend to new interpretations, thereby allowing that individual to progress in addressing that deficiency. But this humility cannot operate in isolation from other virtues. It needs to be accompanied by courage. Investigations into one’s deficiencies are never pleasant, and the temptation abides to abandon such investigations once they threaten to reveal how a particular self-­image may

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function to protect an individual from an unpleasant truth. It takes courage to persevere in an arduous inquiry that requires individuals to continually confront their own inadequacies. Further, such investigations never end; our understanding of ourselves is always partial and incomplete. To recognize and value this incompleteness requires not just humility and courage but also honesty and discipline. These core virtues of courage and honesty acquire a particular urgency in the practice of persuasion. The same is true of justice: for any genuine persuasion, an individual needs to be able to credit the value and relevance of their new interpretation. The individual needs to hold the horizons opened up by the persuasion to standards that warrant the worth of these new understandings. The virtue of openness needs to exist in dialectical tension with the virtue of rigor. Again, the Platonic dialogues are helpful here. Phaedrus, as a character, had a receptivity that mimicked an openness but that arose not from humility, honesty, courage, or justice but from the lack of any serious commitments—­he simply followed the currents of the conversation that flowed over him and which never seriously impacted him. He left the conversation as content with himself as he had entered it, and his subjectivity never underwent any transformation. Although at times enthralled by the discourse of Lysias and the conversation with Socrates, he was undisturbed by it. He provides a good example of how an individual can avoid persuasion by reducing their responsiveness to entertainment. Phaedrus is not erotically moved to make demands on the world (demands that will then return to him as demands that he grow to be more adequate to the world); rather, he asks the world to provide him with amusements. If responsiveness for Socrates receives its paradigmatic form in the evolving erotic dialectic of lover and beloved, Phaedrus substitutes the enjoyment of a set of pleasant exchanges for such an erotic dialectic. The frivolousness that defines Phaedrus’s participation in what he takes to be philosophical conversation underscores the importance for persuasion of a necessity that transcends the individual. Phaedrus’s willingness to entertain a variety of possibilities and to be receptive to Socrates’s challenge to his earlier understanding of both eros and rhetoric is less an exercise of freedom and more an instance of lack of commitment. In persuasion, freedom is intimately connected to necessity; it does not exist in isolation. For there to be persuasion, there cannot be coercion—­because any understanding forced on an individual cannot transform the individual’s subjectivity in a way that furthers the possibility for future development or that allows the individual to claim that new understanding as truly their own. Persuasion requires the particular freedom that allows one to take ownership of

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the understanding made available thereby. But one takes ownership because they are confronted by an understanding they must acknowledge—­or be false to who they are or would be. The freedom of persuasion involves the recognition that the new understanding makes a necessary claim on an individual. The reason that control is such a central concern is that the individual being persuaded must give up control and grant the authority of their new understanding, and while it is important that the person undergoing persuasion freely incorporate this understanding, the reason that the person freely incorporates this understanding is because it makes a claim on the individual that has the force of necessity. Persuasion cannot compel the necessity, but the individual undergoing persuasion must freely accept its claim. The dialectic of responsiveness is shaped by the productive tension of freedom and necessity. This dialectical tension is essential if one is to access the internal good of persuasion, and its absence is apparent in the set of corruptions that occur when freedom and necessity—­humility and rigor—­are absent. These corruptions—­manipulation, pandering, indoctrination, coercion—­are traditionally understood in terms of the unethical actions of rhetors. But an ethics of persuasion focused on the audience reconceives these unethical actions as failures on the part of the audience. Rather than viewing them as actions directed against an audience, an ethics of persuasion looks at the way in which, in such cases of corruption, the audience fails to be responsive in an appropriate way. Rather than viewing, say, manipulation as something done to an audience, an ethics of persuasion looks to the way in which an audience did not sufficiently challenge a false or corrupt interpretation, either because they lacked courage or did not question or accepted simply in deference to authority or were flattered or embraced an account that protected a self-­understanding. Without denying for a minute that manipulation and other corrupt actions represent unethical behavior on the part of the speaker, an ethics of persuasion sees them also as ethical failures on the part of the audience. It is precisely the seductive appeal or brute imposition of these actions that make the virtues that enable persuasion so important. These virtues guard against the embrace or acceptance of false interpretations, and they also guard against the temptation to equate persuasion with knowledge. If persuasion is to be an internal good, it is essential that the individuals constituted by persuasion understand that all persuasion is provisional—­that a developing complexity is at the core of persuasion. The ethics of persuasion has to value incompleteness as one condition that defines a creature capable of being persuaded. To value incompleteness is also to value the giving up of control, of remaining open. And this openness

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must also be in a dialectical tension with a willingness to challenge or question any interpretation that an individual who gives up control is willing to entertain. Only individuals governed by these virtues can engage in the practice of persuasion. In their absence, corrupt forms of acceptance or submission to brute forms of imposition determine subjectivity. The concern with the ethics of persuasion reminds us that persuasion is not merely or principally a linguistic event but a matter of individual and political import. Situated between ignorance and knowledge and serving as the intermediary that allows progress from ignorance in pursuit of a knowledge always and necessarily beyond humans, persuasion is the action/event that enables subjects to transform themselves so as to align better with the worlds in which they live and in which they wish to live. Persuasion, as the action/event in which a subject is reconstituted and transformed, represents the exercise of a freedom of self-­determination in an effort to be adequate to the world in which one lives. In the ongoing effort to learn to love the world appropriately, persuasion becomes the justification for the practice of rhetoric and a core value for democracy.

nine

Conclusion Persuasion in Light of Post-­Structural Rhetoric

If one of the important advances of post-­structural rhetorical theory is to relocate figures and tropes from their traditional place as part of the repertoire of the individual rhetor to their centrality in defining the operation of language as a system, one of the challenges arising from this redefinition is to formulate a theory of persuasion in light of this tectonic shift. The importance of this challenge becomes particularly clear when Laclau’s work is considered, for he is interested in using a theory of a generalized rhetoric not only to explain political change but also, at times, to suggest that this process of change is likely to further justice. His turn to a generalized rhetoric underwrites his theory of hegemony, but it does so by reducing the political to movements within language as a system that operates independent of human agency. Laclau’s analysis of the rhetorical foundations of political life explains how a certain particular term becomes the central and defining term for a historical understanding of politics at a particular historical moment. Contingency is structural for this linguistic process in which social identities are formed. There is no necessity to this process. The process is shaped by a variety of factors, and any particular understanding need not have happened—­the understanding could have been otherwise. As I have maintained, Laclau’s post-­structural rhetoric can describe, after the fact, an instance of political change, but it can offer no account of why a particular term acquires the central and defining role in an equivalential chain, nor does it seriously consider how a number of nonlinguistic factors may influence political understanding. Most importantly, his account of hegemony, in which contingency is the determinative factor for political change, fails to provide criteria to assess these changes and to defend prog­ ress toward a more inclusive and just democracy. These failures are particularly telling for those who are suspicious of persuasion because they

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believe that it operates not on behalf of justice or inclusion but to preserve the status quo or to issue in more repressive political change. Certain issues concern those troubled by what they take to be persuasion: manipulation, pandering, indoctrination, and coercion. For the critics of persuasion, persuasion serves to maintain and reinforce current arrangements of power that privilege certain sectors of the polity. Laclau does not address the ways in which the process of the redefinition of the political through the operation of a generalized rhetoric is subject to corruption. When he does discuss actual political change, he focuses on successes, like the Solidarity movement in Poland. He seems blind to the role of those in power who have no interest in expanding justice but are very much interested in maintaining control. Also, he seems to be unaware of the sources of resistance within individuals and within a population that move them to oppose change or to hold theories of justice that do not contribute to expanding its reach. As the recent rise of a politically repressive populism, often driven by a combination of nationalism and paranoia, suggests, the likelihood of a linguistic transformation promoting justice is at best uncertain, and more often, these transformations assist in the consolidation of power in the hands of those who can manipulate public discourse. Laclau’s linguistic analysis removes from consideration the force of emotional attachment and investment and is silent on the way in which that attachment and investment contribute to the interpretive frames through which humans view themselves and their worlds. For him, linguistic change happens independently of individual involvement; at best, individuals and groups are somehow affected by this change, although it is not clear how. Such analysis ignores not only that humans are shaped by the operation of linguistic systems, but also that they are attached to the world through their affective orientations. There is no role for desire in Laclau’s rhetorical analysis. Peitho is divorced from Eros. But such a divorce must necessarily lead to a truncated account of how change happens—­because it cannot explain the way that language shapes desire and the way, in turn, that desire influences language. When understood as an ongoing action/event in which an individual’s or group’s subjectivity is transformed, persuasion can explain how concepts central for an individual or a group have been redefined so that these concepts better align with an external reality. This transformation of subjectivity is the exercise of freedom in the light of the recalcitrance of necessity. Persuasion, so understood, is the operation of human responsiveness. This understanding of persuasion as the operation of human responsiveness can take seriously the ways in which political discourse is subject to failure and

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corruption, and it can explain why these are serious and abiding threats. It can also explain the revolutionary potential that inheres in persuasion. Such an account of persuasion does not limit responsiveness to rational deliberation, although deliberation can be one instance of such responsiveness; rather, it sees this responsiveness as rooted in and growing out of a fundamental erotic attachment to the world. Persuasion, as a concept, mediates the relationship of language and desire. Unlike a traditional theory of persuasion that focuses on the actions of the speaker—­an approach that post-­structural theories see as outdated and failing to understand either the way in which intention in language is transpersonal or the way in which language is not under the control of particular individuals but rather operates as a system—­a theory of persuasion as an action/event focuses, instead, on the ways in which subjectivities are transformed in the ongoing dialectical tension between concept and experience. Such a theory can acknowledge the operation of a generalized rhetoric and show how such a rhetoric becomes internalized and ultimately is incorporated in a transformed subjectivity. In its ability to explain how a generalized rhetoric becomes internalized, a focus on persuasion as an action/event in the audience recovers the relevance of rhetoric for both individual and political life. Persuasion, so understood, is not in competition with a generalized figurativeness or with the tropological nature of symbolicity as primary instance of rhetoric. Rather, a theory of persuasion as an action/event can collaborate with post-­ structural redefinitions of rhetoric to provide accounts of the ways in which key concepts both acquire meaning and are integrated into and directive for individual and political subjectivities. A theory of persuasion focused on the transformation of subjectivity can acknowledge that concepts circulate and are internalized independent of the actions of particular rhetors. A theory of persuasion that builds on the role of desire as a central developmental force in human existence focuses on a developing responsiveness that moves individuals to engage with their worlds, and that conceives these worlds as places capable of responding in ways that affirm those individuals. But if persuasion can be a source of transformation and affirmation, human responsiveness is also subject to corruption, and this corruption is an abiding threat. It is not surprising that an action/event that makes a demand that one change should be resisted. Individuals and groups do not easily relinquish understandings of themselves, especially when such understandings function, in part, for purposes of self-­defense. If “a person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity” (Lear, 4), then any experience that brings such ignorance to the fore is likely to be received as a

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threat. The ethics that governs persuasion is in large part a recognition of the way in which the activity of persuasion can be felt as threatening. But if individuals are out of touch with their subjectivity, then not only do they not understand themselves, but they are also out of alignment with the worlds in which they live. The desire that is necessary to attach one to the world can become corrupt; responsiveness can devolve into defensiveness. When such corruption occurs, individuals and groups are profoundly confused as to what they should desire—­they do not know how to love the world appropriately. Persuasion is the resource that allows us to address this situation. Further, when persuasion is understood in terms of both the actions of a subject and an event in which the subject participates, then the concern with persuasion as the exercise of a soft power by a rhetor—­usually a member of or representative for a ruling power structure, who manipulates or coerces those with less power—­is replaced by a concern with how subjects can realign themselves with the world in which they live. So understood, persuasion comes to be seen as the ongoing action of subjects who cannot know themselves but who must nonetheless assume responsibility for the worlds into which they were born. Persuasion embodies a continual inquiry into human possibility, and it becomes a resource through which both subject and world are brought into better alignment with the values and beliefs inhering in each. As an exercise of freedom that responds to the values that structure or should structure a world, persuasion becomes a source of criteria to judge a political order: does a particular order encourage and respect the action/event of persuasion? To value persuasion is to commit to political orders such as democracy in which subjects have the freedom to transform and reconstitute themselves as they seek to be adequate to the possibilities inhering in the values and beliefs that inform their subjectivity. A redefined theory of persuasion—­one that responds to the advances of a post-­structural rhetoric and to the critiques of traditional rhetorical understanding of persuasion—­argues that a foundational concern for human beings is to love the world appropriately, and that in this effort to love the world appropriately, individuals can transform both themselves and their worlds so that they become more fully human. Such a theory argues that persuasion should not be seen as a means to an end. Rather, it should be understood as an internal good to be pursued for the way in which it enriches human life. So understood, persuasion becomes essential to democracy, provides a standard to evaluate political change, and offers a philosophical justification for the practice of rhetoric.

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

I would like to thank Hosam Aboul-­Ela, Ellen Quandahl, and Rhianna Brandt, who read earlier versions of several chapters and offered comments that allowed me to strengthen my argument. I am fortunate to have at the University of Chicago Press an excellent editor, Kyle Wagner, who has provided both support and diplomatic suggestions that have helped me make my argument clearer and more available to readers. Two anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press, through their generous and attentive readings, contributed to the final version of this book. Their perspectives enabled me to rework parts of the manuscript so that I could foreground more effectively the logic of the argument. Jessica Wilson skillfully edited the manuscript and offered an attentive reading that I consider a great gift. Finally, my thanks to my wife, Lynn Voskuil, whose support sustains my work. The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Hous­ ton and the Martha Gano Houstoun Endowment in the Department of English at the University of Houston provided funding in support of this project. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “The Eros of Sameness and the Rhetoric of Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2019): 90–­110.

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I n de x

aggression: and difference, 58–­59; and eros/Eros, 58–­59; and erotic rhetoric, 72; and manipulation, 109; and otherness, 64; and persuasion, 8, 137; political, 64, 71 aggressivity: and difference, 59, 71–­73; and ego, 63; and hyperbolic ego, 63–­65; and imperialism, 71, 73; sexual, 73 agreements: and obedience, 214; and persuasion, ix, 2–­3, 214; and political solidarity, 27 alienation, liberal. See liberal alienation Allen, Danielle S., 79, 85, 113, 115, 122 analogy, and persuasion, 219 analysands, 96, 105, 132. See also psychoanalysis anger, 107, 117–­18, 191 animality, 4 antagonism, 48–­49, 54, 56–­57, 197 apate (deceit/deception), 10–­11, 14. See also deception Aphrodite, 89–­90, 171–­80, 187–­92 Apology (Plato), 147, 209 archaic mind, 95, 97–­99, 114, 116 Arendt, Hannah, 131, 141–­42, 153, 169 arguments/argumentation: and deliberation, 162, 193; and justice, 134; and persuasion, 41, 134–­37, 151, 219; political, 135–­36; and political change, 47; truth of, 16 Aristotle, 18–­24, 33–­36, 94, 96, 106–­9, 116–­18, 143, 163, 165, 188 astronomy, and persuasion, 16

audience: commitments of, 24; and control, 208; and deception, 13, 15; and decision making, 108; and deliberation, 31; and discourse, 134; diversity of, 79, 156–­57; and emotions, 13, 17, 23–­24, 107–­8, 162–­63, 166, 204; and eros/ Eros, 150; judgments of, 18–­19, 30, 108; knowledge of, 208; and perceptions, 17; and persuasion, xi, xiii, 5, 8–­9, 17, 22, 76, 87–­88, 106, 109, 203–­4; and philosophy, 16; and power, 20, 137; power of, 20; and rhetoric, 19–­20, 106–­7; and speaker, xi, 20–­21; and subjectivity, xiii, 193; and tragedy, 13, 162–­63, 193–­95; values of, 88, 108 authority: and freedom, 108; and politics, 142; and power, 20, 153; and sovereignty, 31–­32, 37–­38; and tolerance, 113; and values, 223 autonomy, x, 17, 50, 90, 99, 155, 177 Bacon, Francis, 146 behaviors, and values, 8 beliefs: and commitments, 10, 30; and desires, 110; and emotions, 119; and individual/society, 131; and perceptions, 160; and persuasion, 1. See also under values Bersani, Leo, 25, 62–­74, 77–­79, 81–­82, 153 Burke, Kenneth, 4–­5, 9–­10, 145 Buxton, R. G. A., 2–­3, 6, 13 capitalism, 27–­28, 47–­48, 50; global, 55 Carlyle, Thomas, 197

240 / Index Carson, Anne, ix–­xi, 2, 17–­18, 70, 81–­82, 90, 151, 176, 205–­6, 215–­16 catachresis, 53–­54 certainty, 30–­34 Cicero, 3–­4, 7, 14, 35–­36 citizenship: and choice/responsibility, 122; and democracy, 122; and obedience, 32; and race, 122; and tolerance, 113 clarification, and persuasion, 219 coercion: and persuasion, xii, 7, 18, 91, 127, 211, 214, 226, 230; and violence, 135 commitments: of audience, 24; and beliefs, 10, 30; to democracy, 147; and desires, 96; and feelings/actions, 122–­23; and human possibility, 155; to justice, 35; to persuasion, 133–­34; and values, 51, 185 commonality, 20, 46 communication: and deliberation, 37; and ethics, 138; and persuasion, ix, 5; and sovereignty, 37 communities: and diversity, 24–­25; and persuasion, 105, 213–­14; and plurality, 160; and responsiveness, 212. See also political community “Community and Its Paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘Liberal Utopia’” (Laclau), 1, 42 complexity: and deliberation, 23, 115; and persuasion, 6, 23; and political leadership, 47; and responsiveness, 94; and simplicity, 79 conceptualization: and persuasion, 111–­13, 116; and subjectivity, 105–­29 consent, 4, 23, 27–­28 controversy, 28–­38 conversations: and dialogue, 73; and difference, 73, 148; erotic, 71; as immortal, 155; and persuasion, 144, 155; and plurality, 148; private vs. public, 74, 149; and self-­knowledge, 67; and self-­ understanding, 124; and subjectivity, 74 Crawford, Neta C., 133–­41, 148 Critchley, Simon, 56, 87, 198–­99 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 1 Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 161 Crito (Plato), 124, 209 Croally, Neil, 169–­70 cultural change, 42. See also political change; social change Davidson, Donald, 43 Davis, Diane, 68

de Man, Paul, ix, 85–­86 deceit. See deception deception, 10–­11, 13–­15, 76–­78. See also apate (deception) decision making: and audience, 108; and experience, 139; of masses, 153; and persuasion, ix, 2–­4, 20, 22, 34; political, 32, 153; and reason, 33; and sovereignty, 31–­32 deliberation: abandonment of, 30–­33; and arguments, 162, 193; and audience, 31; and communication, 37; and complexity, 23, 115; and controversy, 35; and democracy, 36–­38; and difference, 23; and justice, 23; and liberal alienation, 30–­33; and persuasion, 21, 23, 28, 30, 38–­40, 93–­94, 96, 162; and political community, 23; and political theory, 36–­37; and rhetoric, 30; and sovereignty, 40; and values, 40 Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights (Lyon), 18 demagogues/demagogy: and dogmatism, 30; and eloquence, 189; force of, 38; and liberal alienation, 29, 38, 41; and polarization, 38; and sovereignty, 38 democracy: Athenian, 79, 124, 147, 169; and capitalism, 27–­28, 47–­48; and citizenship, 122; commitment to, 147; defense of, 25, 56; deliberative, 36–­38; and difference, 80; and discourse, 37; and diversity, 141; and equality, 122; and hegemony, 47, 55–­56; and history, 47; and liberal alienation, 29; and masses, 146–­47; and persuasion, xii, 3, 25, 27–­28, 127, 141, 155–­56, 227, 232; and Platonic rhetoric, 79–­81; and political life, 155–­56, 169; and political order, xii, 27, 123, 146–­47, 157; and politics, 27–­28, 47, 132; and populism, 55; radical, 25, 27–­28, 43–­44, 47–­48, 50–­52, 55–­56; rhetoric of, 27, 36, 79–­ 81, 227; and sameness, in Athens, 81; and self-­governance/self-­rule, 155–­56; as signifier, 125; and sovereignty, 37; and subjectivity, 168–­69; term, meaning and usage, 125; and tragedy, 171; and tropes, 113; and values, 167; and virtues, 169 “Democratic Philosopher, The: Rhetoric as Hegemony in Gramsci” (Fontana), 27 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 42

Index / 241 Descartes, René, 146 desires: and beliefs, 110; and commitments, 96; and dialectic, 82; and difference, 83; and discourse, 156, 217; and emotions, 119; and eros/Eros, 74, 78; humans shaped by, 70; and language, 230–­31; in lyric poetry, 205; and misrepresentation, 77–­78; and persuasion, 74–­75, 89, 192–­94, 204–­10; power of, 175, 194; and purity, 173; and soul, 210; and subjectivity, 70; and values, 24, 97, 110, 119 Dewey, John, 131–­32 dialectic: and desires, 82; and difference, 78; and discourse, 141; and eros/Eros, 82; erotic, 77–­79, 101, 110, 225; and persuasion, 5, 219, 226; and refutation, 220; and rhetoric, 1, 106; and subjectivity, 77 dialogue: and conversations, 73; and difference, 73; political, 71, 73–­74, 158; and rhetoric, 158 dichotomies, 196, 219–­20 difference: and aggression, 58–­59; and aggressivity, 59, 71–­73; and conversations, 73, 148; and deliberation, 23; and democracy, 80; and desires, 83; and dialectic, 78; and dialogue, 73; and discourse, 75; and eros/Eros, 25; and erotic, 69; and individuality, 65, 142; and intolerance, 62; and love, 69–­70; nonviolent resolution of, 83; and otherness, 52, 72–­73; and persuasion, 143; and plurality, 142, 148; as respected/ honored, 139, 142; rhetoric of, 61–­83; and sameness, 61–­83, 142; and similarities, 78; threat of, and risk, 25, 52, 58–­ 59, 64–­65, 71–­73, 75, 81–­83; unavoidability of, 67–­69; and values, 140; and violence, 62 discourse: and audience, 134; cultural, 72; democratic, 28–­29, 37; and desires, 156, 217; and dialectic, 141; and difference, 75; and eros/Eros, 72; and ethics, 138; and individualism, 132; of liberalism, 28–­29; modern liberal, 29–­31, 36–­38; of new order, 51; and persuasion, ix, 6, 141, 157; of polis, 169; political, 29–­31, 36, 38, 52, 73–­75, 79, 83, 86, 139, 143, 147, 158, 230–­31; of power, 38; power of, 175; of praise, 10; public, 124; and reason, 7; and rhetoric, 156; and

sameness, 75; and self-­understanding, 124; of soul, 74; of sovereignty, 30; of speaker, 6–­7; and subjectivity, 147; of those in power, 38; and tragedy, transformative, 161–­99; of Western liberalism, 28–­29; written, 83, 159 discursive genres, 72 discursive spatialization, 51 discursive strategies, for persuasion, 219 diversity: of audience, 79, 156–­57; and communities, 24–­25; and democracy, 141; and heterogeneity, 22; and inclusivity, xii–­xiii; and persuasion, 24–­25, 141; and plurality, 50, 157; as political value, 61; and politics, 68; as resource, 24–­25; as threat, xii–­xiii, 24–­25, 61–­62 divinity, and persuasion, 123 dogmatism, 28–­30 doxa (opinions or beliefs), 15, 85 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 163 ego: and aggressivity, 63; and critical faculty, 73; and eros/Eros, xii–­xiii, 81; hyperbolic, and aggressivity, 63–­65; and intolerance, 62; and Other, 63 elocutio, ix eloquence: and demagogues/demagogy, 189; and philosophy, 35; and reason, 3; and rhetoric, ix; of speech, 1; and style, 1. See also persuasion Emancipation(s) (Laclau), 1, 42–­44, 53–­55 emotions: and archaic mind, 116; and audience, 13, 17, 23–­24, 107–­8, 162–­63, 166, 204; and beliefs, 119; and conceptualization, 105–­29; defined, 140–­41; and desires, 119; and judgments, 108; and knowledge, 14; and orientation, 96–­97; and persuasion, 93–­94, 96–­ 97, 105–­29; power of, 116–­17; and responsiveness, 96–­97, 116–­23, 141; and self-­understanding, 116–­18; speech, 11; as subjective feelings, 140–­41; and subjectivity, 88, 105–­29; and tragedy, 13; and truth, 14; and values, 116, 119 Encomium of Helen (Gorgias), 10–­17, 76–­ 77, 88 enthymemes, 22, 107 episteme (language of truth), 85 equality: and democracy, 122; and justice, 18, 24; and race/racism, 122

242 / Index “Eros of Sameness and the Rhetoric of Difference in Plato’s Phaedrus, The” (Kastely), 233 Eros the Bittersweet (Carson), ix–­x, 2, 176 eros/Eros: and aggression, 58–­59; as antipolitical, 153–­54; and audience, 150; defense of, 74; and desires, 74, 78; and dialectic, 82; and difference, 25; and discourse, 72; and divine, 220; and ego, xii–­xiii, 81; and Hippolytus, 171–­95; and logos, 11–­12; and misrepresentation, 78, 80; and peitho/Peitho, ix, 17–­18, 25, 28, 89, 172, 230; and persuasion, ix–­x, xii–­xiii, 17–­18, 61–­63, 89–­91, 104, 110, 149–­52, 171–­72, 215, 218–­19; power of, x, 17, 90, 150, 173; and purity, 173; and responsiveness, 114; and rhetoric, 67, 150, 173, 180, 225; of sameness, 61–­83; and self, 101; and subjectivity, 58–­59, 69–­70, 90, 104; as threat, 90; and violence, 12 erotic art, 151 ethics: and communication, 138; and discourse, 138; of persuasion, xiii, 129, 201–­27, 232; and reason, 138; and transformation of subjects, xiii Ethics-­Politics-­Subjectivity (Critchley), 56 Euripides, 170–­95 exposition, and persuasion, 219 fanaticism, 28–­30 fascism, 51, 56; anti-­, 125 feminism, 8, 41 Ferrari, G. R. F., 69, 71 Fontana, Benedetto, 27 forbearance, and polarization, 28 force: and consent, 27; of demagogy, 38; and persuasion, 1, 8, 10–­11, 38, 42–­43, 91, 142; and politics, 28; and power, 27, 43–­44; and violence, 43–­44, 142 Foss, Sonja K., 2 Foucault, Michel, 69–­70 freedom: of audience, 108; and authority, 108; and autonomy, 90; and compulsion, 6; and inclusiveness, 50–­51; and justice, 87; and necessity, xi, 19, 33, 88, 92, 116, 226; and persuasion, 2, 3–­4, 6, 19–­20, 87, 92, 116, 225–­27; and political order, 127; and politics, 49; and reason, 33

Freud, Sigmund, xi, 62–­64, 67–­68, 88–­89, 91–­92, 97–­104, 105, 119–­20, 125, 131, 145–­46, 153, 224 Gagarin, Michael, 11–­12 Garsten, Bryan, 7, 25, 27–­41, 61–­62, 139, 143 Gearhart, Sally Miller, 8, 139–­40 Goldhill, Simon, 170–­71 Gorgias: and persuasion, 1, 10–­19, 75–­ 77, 88, 90, 162, 179, 182, 185; and Socrates, 179 Gorgias (Plato), 75–­77, 123–­24, 144, 182, 210 “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos” (Segal), 11, 14 Gramsci, Antonio Francesco, 27, 45–­47, 52–­53 Griffin, Cindy L., 2 Griswold, Charles, Jr., 71 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud), 131 hegemony: and consent, 27; and democracy, 47, 55–­56; and history, 47, 55, 126; and liberal alienation, 27–­59; and metonymy, 126; and persuasion, 23, 27–­59; and political understanding, 125–­26; and rhetoric, 27, 42–­44, 53; as theory of political discursive systems, 54 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 44–­47 Hesiod, 14 heterogeneity, 22, 46, 53, 144, 157. See also homogeneity Hippolytus (Euripides), 171–­95 Hippolytus, and Eros, 171–­95 history: and democracy, 47; and hegemony, 47, 55, 126; and political ontology, 48; and populism, 55; and values, 20, 34 Hobbes, Thomas, 29, 31–­33, 36, 38 homo politicus: and persuasion, 133–­41, 148; and power, 134 “Homo Politicus and Argument (Nearly) All the Way Down: Persuasion in Politics” (Crawford), 133–­41, 148 homogeneity, 22, 37, 45, 55, 81, 100. See also heterogeneity Human Condition, The (Arendt), 131

Index / 243 identity: and persuasion, 4–­5; political, 56–­57, 168 ideology, 159, 169–­71 immigration, 52 imperialism, 71, 73 inclusiveness, and freedom, 50–­51 inclusivity: and diversity, xii–­xiii; and intolerance, xii, xii–­xiii; and justice, 50, 229–­30 individual: and love of world, 217; and persuasion, 123–­29; and political persuasion, xiii, 59, 123–­60, 211, 214; soul of, 146; and subjectivity, xiii, 77, 92, 98, 125, 132, 155 individualism, 132 individuality: and difference, 65, 142; and Other, 64; and plurality, 142, 146; and political persuasion, 132, 140, 147; and reason, 146; and self-­understanding through conversations, 124; and universality, 54–­55 individuation, 27, 99–­103, 114, 215 indoctrination, and persuasion, 127–­28, 203, 211, 214, 226, 230 injustice, 54, 115, 122. See also justice Intimacies (Bersani and Phillips ), 62–­67, 70–­71, 73, 78 intolerance: and difference, 62; and ego, 62; and inclusivity, xii–­xiii; and marginalization, 40; and political life, 36; and political order, xii. See also tolerance Inventione, De (Cicero), 3 Is the Rectum a Grave? (Bersani), 63 judgments: of audience, 18–­19, 30, 108; defense of, 33; and emotions, 108; and experience, 15; and perceptions, 23, 94; and persuasion, ix, 1, 15, 23, 143; and political power, 19; and psychological phenomena, 112; and sovereignty, 30; and values, 20 justice: and arguments, 134; commitments to, 35; and common good, 35; and deliberation, 23; and equality, 18, 24; eternal, 196; and freedom, 87; and inclusion/inclusivity, 50, 229–­30; and persuasion, 127. See also injustice Kant, Immanuel, 1–­2, 6–­7, 31–­33, 36 Kastely, James, 80, 233

knowledge: of audience, 208; autonomous pursuit of, 5; and emotions, 14; and persuasion, 167, 199, 220, 227; and truth, 71–­72. See also self-­knowledge Knox, Bernard, 171–­73, 177–­82, 191 Laclau, Ernesto, 1, 25, 27–­28, 42–­58, 61, 86–­87, 89, 125–­26, 229–­30 Laws (Plato), 131, 202, 204, 218 Lear, Jonathan, ix, xi, 14, 88–­105, 109–­27, 132, 146–­49, 154–­58, 215, 224, 231; on radical evaluation, 155 Levitsky, Steven, 28 liberal alienation: and deliberation, 30–­ 33; and deliberation, abandonment of, 30–­33; and demagogues, 29; and demagogues/demagogy, 29, 38, 41; and democracy, 29; and hegemony, 27–­59; and persuasion, 27–­59; and power, 29; as symptom of deep skepticism about democracy, 29 liberalism, 7, 28–­30. See also modern liberal discourse “Liberalism of Fear, The” (Shklar), 7 linguistic systems, xiii, 230. See also semiological systems logos: and deception, 14; and eros, 11–­12; power of, 11; and violence, 12 love: as action/active force, 114; as developmental force in nature, 89, 99–­104; and difference, 69–­70; forms of, 63; inappropriate, 222; and libido, 99–­100; and Other, 63; and otherness, 64; persuasion as, 5; and responsiveness, 89; romanticized, danger of, 64–­65; and sameness, 70; and values, 114; of world, 217 Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Lear), xi–­xii, 105 Lyon, Arabella, 18, 20–­24, 27, 41 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 211–­14, 223 Madison, James, 38–­41 Madisonian republicanism, 40 manipulation: and aggression, 109; emotional, 20, 23, 107–­8; and perceptions, 108; and persuasion, 5, 20, 23, 36, 41, 89, 91, 107–­9, 127, 143, 186, 203, 207, 211, 214, 226, 230; and probability, 189; and rhetoric, 194

244 / Index marginalization, 30, 36, 40–­42 Marx, Karl, 161, 163, 193 Marxism, 44–­47, 55–­56 McCoy, Marina, 67, 72, 74, 78, 82 medicine, and rhetoric, 16–­17 metaphor, and rhetoric, 53 metaphysics, 85, 196 metonymy: and hegemony, 126; and rhetoric, 53–­54 Meyer, Michel, 161 misrepresentation: and deception, 76–­77; and desires, 77–­78; and eros/Eros, 78, 80; and heterogeneity, 53; of persuasion, 5; and rhetoric, 182; and sameness, 75 modern liberal discourse, 29–­31, 36–­38, 40–­41; tragedy as, 196–­97 Modern Tragedy (Williams), 131, 161, 195–­98 modernity, 29–­31; as displacement of persuasion by pursuit of certainty and unanimity, 30. See also postmodernity Monoson, Sara S., 79 Morrow, Glenn, 131, 201–­2, 204–­5, 207–­9, 218 Mouffe, Chantal, 44–­47, 56 narration, and persuasion, 218–­19 nationalism, 29, 31–­32, 52, 61, 230 “Necessity and Persuasion in Plato’s Timaeus” (Morrow), 207 New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Laclau), 44, 47–­52, 57–­58 Nicholson, Graeme, 73, 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, 85–­86 Nightingale, Andrea, 69, 79 obedience: and agreements, 214; and citizenship, 32; and persuasion, 214 Oedipus, 103, 112, 167 Oedipus the King (Sophocles), 103 On Rhetoric (Aristotle), 106 ontology, political, 47–­48, 50, 53 Other, 63–­65 Otherness: and aggression, 64; and difference, 52, 72–­73; ethnic, 52; and love, 64; threat of, 52, 72–­73 Outline of Psychoanalysis, An (Freud), 67 pandering: and persuasion, 36, 41, 89, 91, 127–­28, 143, 186, 211, 214, 230; and rhetoric, 194

paradoxologia, 13 partiality, 34–­35, 168 partisanship, and polarization, 27 “Passion of World Politics, The” (Crawford), 140 pathos, 20, 23–­24, 109 peithomai, 6 peitho/Peitho: as acquiescence, 6; and eros/ Eros, ix, 17–­18, 25, 28, 89, 172, 230; goddess, 17–­18, 89–­90; and persuasion, 2; as verb in middle voice, 6. See also persuasion perceptions: and audience, 17; and beliefs, 160; and judgment, 23, 94; and manipulation, 108; and persuasion, 152, 160, 203; and subjectivity, 214; and values, 160 persuasion: abandonment of, 218; as action/event, ix–­xi, 8, 21, 91–­92, 105, 112, 123–­29, 132–­33, 137, 141, 147, 152–­53, 155, 160, 162, 186, 192, 198–­99, 207, 211–­14, 216, 223–­24, 227, 230–­32; and civil society, 4; as combat, 8; as corrupt, 2; defense of, xii, 7, 28–­30, 33–­36, 61; as discursive form, 4; dramatizing, 218; ethics of, xiii, 129, 201–­27, 232; and harmony, 8; and history of abuse that has led to political division and fostered hatred, 38; as impure notion, 1; as inherently corrupt, 2; as internal good for enriching human life, 211–­17, 232; internal sources of, 9; and language, 4; language of, 85; limits of, 192, 203, 222; and necessity, 16, 88, 91–­92, 116, 207; as open-­ended process, 96; and openness, x, 74–­75, 128, 186–­ 87, 213, 215, 224–­27; problem of, xii, 1–­25, 136–­37, 157; purposes of, 22–­23; reconceived, 25; reconsideration of, xii, 57–­59, 85–­86, 121; redefined theory of, 232; rethinking of, 18–­25, 28, 85–­86; revelatory nature of, 116; and risk, 215; tamed, 38–­40; tamed, by representative structure, 41; and universality, 34; as valued source of soft power, 2, 7, 137, 232. See also eloquence; Peitho/peitho; political persuasion Phaedra, 171–­92 Phaedrus (Plato), 110, 150, 156–­59, 204, 208, 210, 215–­17, 225; Eros and persuasion in, x, 61–­83, 218–­19, 233

Index / 245 Philebus (Plato), 1 Phillips, Adam, 25, 62–­63, 67–­69, 74, 77, 81, 83 philosophy: and audience, 16; and eloquence, 35; history of; and individualism, 132; and loving world appropriately; and persuasion, 16, 74–­76, 83, 146, 160, 204, 232; political, 132 Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature (Meyer), 161 Plato: and democracy, 79–­81; and dialogues, 124, 160, 179, 210, 224–­25; on Eros and persuasion, x, 61–­83, 110, 151; and ethics of persuasion, 201–­10, 215–­ 18, 220; on Gorgias, 1, 75–­77, 123–­24, 144, 179, 182, 210; on persuasion, 1, 131; and philosophy, 163; and political persuasion, 131, 146–­52, 156–­60; and pursuit of genuine good, 203; and rhetoric, 79–­82; and Socratic life, 203 Platonic Political Art, The (Wallach), 79 “Plato’s Conception of Persuasion” (Morrow), 131, 201–­2, 204–­5, 209 Plato’s Democratic Entanglements (Monoson), 79 plurality: and communities, 160; and conversations, 148; and difference, 142, 148; and diversity, 50, 157; and individuality, 142, 146; and persuasion, 144, 155, 157, 160; and politics, 142, 144, 169; of subjects, 50–­51 poetry: apate or pseudos of, 14; and language, 14; lyric, 205; and persuasion, 16; philosophical, 160; and rhetoric, 1, 123–­24; and speech, 13; term, usage, 221 polarization, 27–­28, 38 polis, 19–­20, 22, 79–­80, 124, 142–­43, 169–­70. See also polity political change, 41–­42, 45–­53, 57, 87, 229–­32. See also cultural change; social change political community, 23, 52, 68, 74, 133, 139–­40, 153, 159 political culture, 70, 77–­78, 80–­81, 146 political identity, 56–­57, 168 political life, 36, 47–­51, 54, 57, 74–­75, 78, 80, 87, 113, 132–­35, 141–­49, 153–­56, 168–­69, 229, 231 political order, 49, 54–­55, 61, 113, 133, 142, 146–­49, 154–­57, 202, 232; and

democracy, xii, 27, 123, 146–­47, 157; and freedom, 127; global, 134; healthy and supportive, 154–­55; new, 47, 52, 58; and political identity, 168; and self-­ governance, 168; socio-­, 27; unjust, 87. See also social order political persuasion: and individual, xiii, 59, 123–­60, 211, 214; and values, 134, 140–­41, 143, 145, 149, 157–­58 political stridency, and persuasion, 28–­30, 38–­41 political theory, 36–­37, 86, 134 politics: authoritarian, 28; and authority, 142; and democracy, 27–­28, 47, 132; and diversity, 68; and force, 28; and freedom, 49; and negativity, 47–­52; and ontology, 50; and persuasion, xiii, 30, 59, 141–­43, 148; and plurality, 142, 144, 169; and polarization, 27–­28, 38; and populism, 230; and solidarity, 27; and speech, 142; true art of (Socrates), 143–­60. See also subjectivity: political polity, 24, 27–­28, 81, 230. See also polis populism, 55–­56, 230 postcolonialism, 41 postmodernity, 41, 56. See also modernity power: and audience, 20, 137; and authority, 20; of citizens/public, 19, 132; and discourse, 38; discourse of, 38; of emotions, 116–­17; of eros/Eros, x, 17, 90, 150, 173; and force, 27, 43–­44; and homo politicus, 134; and individualism, 132; and liberal alienation, 29; and persuasion, x, 2, 7, 12, 15–­18, 22, 27, 90, 116, 132, 134, 137, 143, 162, 180, 223, 232; political, 19, 24, 28, 32, 213; of public, 19, 132; pursuit of, 133–­34; and rhetoric, 173; of rhetoric, 182–­ 83; of sociopolitical order (state), 27; soft, 2, 7, 137, 232; of state, 132; and violence, 137 praise: discourse of, 10; of persuasion, 5, 10–­17 prejudices, 63 Protagoras, 79 Protarchus, 1 psychoanalysis, xi, 61–­67, 88–­96, 99, 103–­ 4, 105, 112, 115, 123, 127, 145. See also analysands Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 131 public trust, 36, 38

246 / Index purity, and shame, 173, 179, 181, 183–­84, 193–­94 Pythagorean theorem, 1, 42 race: and citizenship, 122; and equality, 122; as threat, 61 reason: and controversy, 33; and decision making, 33; and discourse, 7; and eloquence, 3; and ethics, 138; and individuality, 146; and persuasion, 3–­4; and violence, 6 reconstitution, and persuasion, 122–­23, 214 refutation: and dialectic, 220; and persuasion, 124, 219–­20; and rhetoric, 79–­80 religion: fervor, and alienation, 29; history of, 201; zealotry, and alienation, 29 Republic (Plato), 80 republicanism, Madisonian, 40 responsiveness: and archaic mind, 95, 97–­99, 114; and communities, 212; and complexity, 94; and emotions, 96–­97, 116–­23, 141; and eros/Eros, 114; and love, 89; and persuasion, 85–­104, 111, 114–­16, 119–­23, 128, 210, 216, 223–­24, 230–­31; and rhetoric, 85–­104; and subjectivity, 85–­104, 114–­16, 123 rhetoric: as antistrophos to dialectic, 106; appeal of, 192; artful, x, 18, 79; and audience, 19–­20, 106–­7; and catachresis, 53; and commonality, 20; and deliberation, 30; of democracy, 27, 36, 79–­81, 227; and dialectic, 1, 106; and dialogue, 158; of difference, 61–­83; and discourse, 156; as discovery of best available means of persuasion, 20; as discursive art, 173; efficacy of, 31; and eloquence, ix; and eros/Eros, 67, 150, 173, 180, 225; erotic, 66–­67, 72–­73; to guide souls, 204; and hegemony, 27, 42–­44, 53; history of, ix, 2–­3, 20, 106, 213; hyperbolic, 64; as internalized, 231; and language, 4; limits of, 72–­73, 173, 181–­82, 185, 187, 192; and manipulation, 194; and medicine, 16–­17; and metaphor, 53; and metonymy, 53–­54; and misrepresentation, 182; nonhyperbolic, 64; origin of, 4; and pandering, 194; and persuasion, ix–­xiii, 1–­10, 14, 18–­19, 20, 25, 27–­28, 30, 42–­44, 106–­8, 172, 204, 227, 229–­32; Platonic, 79–­82; and poetry, 1,

123–­24; poetry as species of, 123–­24; political, 35, 64, 68, 75, 83, 86; and political power, 19; post-­structural, ix, xii–­xiii, 25, 28, 52–­58, 85–­86, 125, 229–­ 32; and power, 173; power of, 182–­83; as practical art, 179–­80; probabilistic, 35; purpose of, 19, 151, 204; reconceived, xii; reconsideration of, 86; and refutation, 79–­80; and responsiveness, 85–­104; and sameness, 73; and society, 52–­57, 86, 125–­26, 229; sophistic, 1, 23, 33, 76, 108, 151; and soul, 72, 75, 204; and sovereignty, 31; and subjectivity, xiii, 85–­104, 231; and tragedy, xiii, 14; and tropes, ix, 52–­53, 229; and values, 185; Western, 10 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 94, 96, 106, 109, 116 Rhetoric of Motives, A (Burke), 4–­5 Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, The: Democracy and the Philosophic Problem of Persuasion (Kastely), 80 Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 233 Rhetorical Foundations of Society, The (Laclau), 52–­57, 86, 125–­26, 229 Richards, I. A., 7–­8 Rollins, Brooke, 8 Rorty, Richard, 1, 42–­43 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 31–­32, 36 sameness: and deception, 78; and democracy, in Athens, 81; and difference, 61–­83, 142; and discourse, 75; eros/Eros of, 61–­83; insufficiency of, 70–­72; and love, 70; and misrepresentation, 75; and rhetoric, 73 Sappho, 176 Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Garsten), 28–­29 Saxonhouse, Arlene, 68 secularization, 196–­97 seduction, and persuasion, 17 Segal, Charles, 11, 14, 172 self-­determination, 22, 58, 133, 227 self-­discovery, x, 216 self-­divestiture, 65 self-­expansiveness, 65 self-­governance, 40, 155–­56, 168 self-­knowledge, 67, 74, 82, 110, 116, 189, 209–­10 self-­reflection, 7, 141, 149, 169–­70, 175

Index / 247 self-­understanding, 5, 21, 48, 90, 99, 102, 108, 110, 116–­18, 124, 128, 133, 152, 154, 162, 175, 206, 217, 224, 226 semiological systems, 85. See also linguistic systems Shame and Necessity (Williams), 1, 172–­ 73 “Shame and Purity in Euripides’ Hippolytus” (Segal), 172 Shklar, Judith, 7, 90 simplicity, and complexity, 79 social change, 42, 45–­47, 53, 56, 198. See also cultural change; political change social order, 48–­49, 54–­55, 133, 146–­47, 198, 201–­2. See also political order socialism, 45 Socrates: on artistic pursuit, 108; as Athenian (political), 124; on democracy, 80, 123–­ 24, 147; on desire, 215–­17; on divinity, 123; on Eros, 65, 150, 220; as example of how to love inappropriately, 222; and Gorgias, 179; Great Speech in Phaedrus, 150–­51; on persuasion, 74–­75, 132, 208–­9, 217–­22; in Phaedrus, x, 65–­83, 110, 150–­51, 156–­57, 159, 204, 208–­10, 216–­25; on poetry as rhetoric, 123–­24; and political discourse, 75; and politics, true art of, 143–­60; on rhetoric, 73, 151, 156; and self-­discovery, 216; and self-­knowledge, 209–­10; and self-­ understanding, 110, 116, 124, 224; on subjectivity, 102; on written discourse, 83, 159 Socrates’ Defense (Apology) (Plato), 147, 209 sophists, 1, 23, 33, 76, 108, 151 Sophocles, 103 soul: and desires, 210; discourse of, 74; of individual, 146; and persuasion, 92, 151–­52, 205, 210; and rhetoric, 72, 75, 204; and subjectivity, 105; and witchcraft/magic, 15 sovereignty, 30–­32, 37–­38, 40 speaker: and audience, xi, 20–­21; discourse of, 6–­7; and elocutio, ix; and persuasion, 134; power of, 20 speech: as dangerous power, 171–­72; and deception, 14; eloquence of, 1; emotion, 11; and persuasion, 12, 171–­72; and poetry, 13; political, 75, 131, 144–­ 45, 148–­49; as political activity, 142; power of, 12, 14–­15, 150

subjectivity: and archaic mind, 95, 97–­99; and audience, xiii, 193; and autonomous individual, 155; and conceptualization, 105–­29; and conversations, 74; and democracy, 168–­69; and desires, 70; developmental theory of, 92–­96; and dialectic, 77; and discourse, 147; and emotions, 88, 105–­29; and eros/Eros, 58–­59, 69–­70, 90, 104; individual, xiii, 77, 92, 98–­99, 125, 132–­33, 155; and perceptions, 214; and persuasion, xi, xiii, 28, 58, 73–­75, 83, 85, 88–­89, 92, 104–­ 29, 132, 147, 162, 186–­87, 199, 213–­15, 224, 227, 230–­32; political, 24, 52, 57–­58, 73–­74, 80–­81, 146, 231; and responsiveness, 85–­104, 114–­16, 123; and rhetoric, xiii, 231; rhetorical, xiii, 85–­104; and soul, 105; and tragedy, xiii, 162–­71, 173, 193, 195, 223; transformation of, xiii, 110, 112–­13, 132–­33, 147, 155, 162, 164, 199, 210, 214, 230–­32; and values, 24, 95, 119, 125, 223, 232 symbolicity, 4, 231 Symposium (Plato), 218, 220 Talking to Strangers (Allen), 85, 113 Terrors and Experts (Phillips), 63, 83 Theodorus, 79 Theogony (Hesiod), 14 Timaeus (Plato), 201 tolerance: and authority, 113; and citizenship, 113; and forbearance, 28; and polarization, 28; as political value, 113; and values, 113. See also intolerance tragedy: Attic, 164–­65, 169–­70, 196, 198, 203, 223; and audience, 13, 162–­63, 193–­95; and deception, 14; and democracy, 171; and discourse, transformative, 161–­99; and emotions, 13; history of, 195; and language, 171; as modern liberal discourse, 196–­97; as paradigm for rhetorical transformation of subjectivity, xiii; as performed critique of democratic ideology, 171; and persuasion, xiii, 13–­14, 161–­99, 202, 204; power of, 13, 163–­64, 192; and revolution, 195–­ 99, 216–­17; and rhetoric, xiii, 14; and subjectivity, xiii, 162–­71, 173, 193, 195, 223; and suffering, 165; as transformative, 161–­99; transhistoricity of, 161; and values, 167, 170; and violence, 197

248 / Index Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (Critchley), 198 “Tragic Subject, The: Historicity and Transhistoricity” (Vernant and Vidal-­ Naquet), 161, 163 transformation: and persuasion, xiii, 59, 96, 104, 110, 112–­13, 132, 146–­47, 155, 213–­15, 230–­31; of subjectivity, xiii, 110, 112–­13, 132–­33, 147, 155, 162, 164, 199, 210, 214, 230–­32; and tragedy, 161–­99 tropes: and democratic inheritance, 113; and persuasion, ix, 25, 85–­86, 229; and political subjectivity, 58; and post-­ structural rhetoric, 229; and rhetoric, ix, 52–­53, 229 truth: of arguments, 16; and emotions, 14; and knowledge, 71–­72; language of (episteme), 85 unanimity, and certainty, 30 unconscious, 9–­10, 66, 68, 79, 81–­82, 97, 118, 173, 195 universality, 34, 54–­55 values: of actors, 134; of audience, 88, 108; and authority, 223; and behaviors, 8; and beliefs, 24, 34, 40, 51, 88, 97, 110, 113, 116, 119, 143, 145, 149, 157–­58, 160, 170, 213, 232; and commitments, 51, 185; cultural, 21, 103–­4, 114–­16, 158, 169–­70; and deliberation, 40; and democracy, 167; and desires, 24, 97, 110, 119; and difference, 140; and emotions, 116, 119; and history, 20, 34; and individuation, 114; internalized, 120, 203; and judgments, 20; and love, 114; meaning of life, 119; parents’, 120; and perceptions, 160; and persuasion, 8, 20, 24, 38, 95, 116, 122, 134, 143, 212–­13,

223, 232; political, 82, 127, 143, 148–­49, 157–­58, 169–­70; and political change, 51; of political culture, 70; and political persuasion, 134, 140–­41, 143, 145, 149, 157–­58; and rhetoric, 185; and sovereignty, 38, 40; and subjectivity, 24, 95, 119, 125, 223, 232; and tolerance, 113; and tragedy, 167, 170; and virtues, 223 Vernant, Jean-­Pierre, 161–­66, 169, 173, 195, 203, 223 Vidal-­Naquet, Pierre, 161–­66, 169, 173, 203 violence: and coercion, physical, 135; and difference, 62; and eros/logos, 12; and force, 43–­44, 142; and oppression, 197; and persuasion, 2–­3, 8, 135, 142; and power, 137; and reason, 6; threat of, 6; and tragedy, 197 virtues, 169, 177, 188, 213–­14, 222–­27; and democracy, 169; and openness, 224–­25; and purity, 173, 193; and values, 223 Wallach, John R., 79 Wardy, Robert, 2, 10, 13 Whitehead, Alfred North, 201–­2 Why Plato Wrote (Allen), 79 Williams, Bernard, 1, 172–­73, 184 Williams, Raymond, 131, 161, 162, 195–­ 99, 216 Wiser, James L., 146 Yunis, Harvey, 72, 74, 80, 82, 149–­52, 156 Zeitlin, Froma, 172 Ziblatt, Daniel, 28 Žižek, Slavoj, 55–­56, 87