Negation and the Contradictory Technics of Rhetoric

Abstract

Responding to critiques of instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing, this article explains why such approaches do not necessarily suppress the materiality of language or inhibit the writer's ability to experience that materiality. Relying on Samuel Weber's re-translation of Heidegger's term, Ge-stell, as “emplacement” and Maurice Blanchot's understanding of the contradictory function of negation in language, the article demonstrates how rhetoric both secures language in place with a particular meaning for the sake of an external goal and unsecures language from that meaning. Without endorsing all instrumental approaches to rhetoric and writing (or the concept of instrumentality in general), the article then argues that there is no reliable way to distinguish inherently valuable writing from instrumentally valuable writing.

Notes

¹In this article I use the words “rhetoric” and “writing” interchangeably, even though I recognize that they can, and often do, refer to different things. Arguably, though, all theories and pedagogies of writing can be understood more generally as theories and pedagogies of rhetoric, and this is what I mean to suggest by interchanging them. I also interchange them in order to be consistent with the sources I use, many of which use the term “writing” instead of “rhetoric.”

²In Rhetoric Reclaimed, Janet Atwill explains that the end of productive knowledge (techne), unlike the ends of theoretical and practical knowledge, is “always ‘outside itself,’ residing not in the ‘product’ but in the use made of the artistic construct by a receiver or audience” (195). Importantly, though, she also argues that the means by which techne works is “not reducible to ‘instrument’ or instrumentality” but is instead “an interpretable, predictable process” (92). As indicated by both my parenthetical caveat and the disjunction between “instrument” and “techne,” I share Atwill's position that techne is not reducible to instrumentality. For a detailed explanation of the differences between techne and instrumental reason, see Jospeh Dunne's Back to the Rough Ground: Phronesis and Techne in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.

³I want to thank both Jim Brown and Diane Davis for recommending that I read this important article.

⁴It's actually more accurate to say that Weber's re-translations begin with the term “technik,” from “Die Frage nach der Technik,” the title of Heidegger's essay, which is usually translated as “The Question Concerning Technology.” But according to Weber, “technology” is too narrow (it excludes the meanings technique, craft, skill) and too theoretical (it implies an applied science) to capture the sense of bringing-forth or unlocking present in techne, which is, in part, what Heidegger was referring to with the original “technik” (980). Thus Weber prefers “technic” to “technology.” Weber also explains that it is normally assumed that the thing Heidegger is questioning (or, as he prefers, “questing”) after is the wesen or essence of technics. But as Weber points out, later in the essay Heidegger argues that technics compels us to understand the meaning of wesen not as a kind of generic type but rather as the way in which things “hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay”) (“The Question” 30). Weber thus translates wesen as “goings-on” in order to capture this sense of movement he sees present in Heidegger's understanding of the term (983).

⁵Lynn Worsham makes a similar comparison between rhetoric and Ge-stell in “The Question Concerning Invention.” I review her argument in the next section.

⁶Specifically, Heidegger argues that when Ge-stell “holds sway,” there is a danger that everything brought-forth will concern us only as standing-reserve; that is, we will be unaware of and uninterested in the existence of products as objects, as things in the world that have value in and of themselves. Once this happens, he warns, we risk turning humanity itself into standing-reserve and mistakenly perceiving everything that is brought-forth as our own creation (“The Question” 27). Heidegger also argues that when Ge-stell reigns, it can drive out that form of bringing-forth, “which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance” (27). In other words, Ge-stell marks all bringing-forth as a kind of regulating and securing (27).

⁷It's important to point out that some scholars who advocated understanding writing as a techne (e.g., Richard Young and Janice Lauer) considered that understanding to be more in line with a writing-as-inquiry approach than a problem-solving approach. Although there is some overlap between an understanding of writing as a process of inquiry and writing as a cognitive process of problem solving (an approach advocated primarily by researchers Linda Flower and John Hayes), there are important distinctions between the two. When understood as a process of inquiry, for instance, writing begins with the writer's open-ended questions not with problems in need of a solution that exist outside of the writer. The writing-as-inquiry approach also more readily recognizes the role of chance in writing than the problem solving approach does. For more on these differences, see Lauer's “A Response to Ann E. Berthoff”; see also Michael P. Carter's “Problem-Solving Reconsidered.”

⁸See The Postmodern Condition 60–67.

⁹I am restricting my claim about instrumentality and “certain theories of rhetoric” to those that are related to pedagogy. In other words, I recognize that many theories of rhetoric (e.g., some historical, feminist, and postmodernist theories) are not meant to guide decisions about how to teach speaking and writing.

¹⁰See, for instance, Scott's “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic.” Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9–17; Leff's “In Search of Ariadne's Thread: A Review of the Recent Literature on Rhetorical Theory.” Central States Speech Journal 29 (1978): 73–91; and Cherwitz and Hilkin's “Toward a Rhetorical Epistemology.” Southern Speech Communication Journal 47 (1982): 135–162.

¹¹For instance, see Young; see also Lauer's “Writing for Insight,” 1–6; and Elbow's Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

¹²Carter develops the idea of archeological beginnings from the Greek term arche, which refers to a threshold point where the infinite enters the finite, the divine enters the human, and the spiritual enters the material. Characterized by the interpenetration of contradictory forces, arche evokes a kind of Janusian thinking that Carter describes as a state of “doubleness and betweeness—being neither in nor out but at once in and out; at once facing the past and future, the known and unknown” (25).

¹³To elaborate, Carter argues that invention is an archeological topos where the known is juxtaposed against the unknown, the familiar against the unfamiliar (141). Not only does he then redefine writing, arguing that it is an event through which we engage in archeological beginnings, but he also re-values it, arguing that because writing is a form of archeological beginnings, it has intrinsic value. And what separates us as human beings who posses consciousness from entities that do not, he continues, is “our potential for awareness of that participation and thus the sharpened sense of intrinsic value that comes from the apprehension of a full partnership in creation” (138–139). As humans, in other words, we are capable of enjoying an awareness of participating in beginnings, something that Carter deems valuable in and for itself (138–139). For Carter, this awareness not only contributes integrally to the value of writing (allowing us to understand it as “one of the most powerful and accessible ways we have of heightening our consciousness of being creative and thus becoming full participants in creation”) but also provides us with a powerful new rationale for teaching writing.

¹⁴To clarify, critiques of instrumental approaches to rhetoric suggest that these approaches limit our experience of the non-resourceful, material properties of language in two ways: first, they suggest that under the auspices of instrumental approaches to rhetoric, writers experience language primarily as a tool and, as a result, encounters with the materiality of language are understood as failures to master language (i.e., as failures to efficiently use the tool); and second, they suggest that, through their demand for textual features like clarity and coherence and for pedagogical features like teachability and transferability, instrumental approaches to rhetoric actually suppress the materiality of language, thus presumably limiting writers' opportunities to experience that materiality. Although the first suggestion is unequivocally considered a key component of the critique of instrumental approaches to rhetoric, there is some question regarding the status of the second one. Look, for instance, at the following three statements from Diane Davis' Breaking Up [at] Totality: (1) Writing is most threatening when it “opens the possibility for an/Other hearing, a hearing of that which has been drowned out by the workings of the [meaning-making] machine itself” (234); (2) What we need is “an/Other kind of writing, one that is interested at least as much in exscriptions as it is in inscriptions, an é(x)criture that zooms in on what the will to ‘clarity’ sheers off: what is laughable and laughing in language” (20, original emphasis); (3) “What's at stake in the debate [about writing pedagogy] is the excess, the noise/static that gets ‘let by’ (silenced) in the name of a reproducible practice” (224). In these claims, Davis suggests that the need for meaningful, clear prose and for reproducible teaching practices suppresses the materiality (i.e., laughter, excess, or noise) of language. However, in the following two statements she suggests that nothing can ultimately suppress the materiality of language: (1) “The strategies of linguistic protection we teach students in comp courses […] do battle perpetually with any text's own propensity to crack up” (100, original emphasis); (2) “And yet the philosophical impulse is relentless in its efforts to censor, to negate, to still the roaring laughter-in-language so that it might build epistemologies and establish ethics. It is relentless…but unsuccessful” (95, original emphasis). The message, then, is conflicted, as critics seem caught between the need to point out how instrumental approaches to rhetoric require (and, indeed, produce) a style of writing that does not allow the materiality of language to shine forth and the need to show that the materiality language shines forth no matter what we do to make it disappear into usefulness.

¹⁵Negation, of course, is a central term in the philosophy of G.F.W. Hegel and is particularly important to his understanding of dialectic. To oversimplify, Hegel understood dialectic as progress or development through negativity: a thing (an idea, knowledge, society, etc.) develops, moving from potentiality to actuality, through opposition to its “other.” Through this opposition, something new arises-a new determination of meaning that points beyond itself to a future determination, becoming both a result and a new beginning. Hence the idea that dialectic is positivity (i.e., progress, development) through negativity. But as many critics have pointed out, this progress comes at a price: every determination of meaning is also a denial of meaning. Or as Vitanza has aptly put it, negation is a process of inclusion through exclusion. In his 1997 Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Vitanza argued that the history of rhetoric as we know it is founded on the exclusion of sophistry. And in his 2000 “From Heuristics to Aleatory Procedures,” he claimed that heuristics create meaning through negation, that is, by excluding the third alternatives or “monsters of thought” (193).

¹⁶For more on this process of negation going “too far,” see Derrida's “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” especially 259–260.

¹⁷Blanchot also describes this paradox of language in the following: “If it [language] were to become as mute as a stone, as passive as the corpse enclosed behind that stone, its decision to lose the capacity for speech would still be legible on the stone and would be enough to wake that bogus corpse” (Literature and the Right to Death” 384–385).

¹⁸This quote comes from a larger passage in which Blanchot makes this point more clearly and emphatically: “Whether the work is obscure or clear, poetry or prose, insignificant or important, whether it speaks of a pebble or of God, there is something in it that does not depend on its qualities that that deep within itself is always in the process of changing the work from the ground up. It is as though at the very heart of literature and language, beyond the visible moments that transform them, a point of instability were reserved, a power to work substantial metamorphoses, a power capable of changing everything about it without changing anything” (397).

¹⁹Blanchot reiterates Paulhan's point in “How Is Literature Possible?,” arguing that anyone who “desire[s] not to take [words] into account, to leave thought its empire whole” provokes an excessive concern for language. In other words, the writer who “wants to be absent from words or to be present only to those he reinvents” is the one destined to be “endlessly occupied with them” (81).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly Pender

Kelly Pender is Assistant Professor of English at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University