The Stactive Style: Whiteness and the Rhetoric of History

Abstract

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

Keywords:

• history
• stylistics
• whiteness

Notes

¹ The quote is taken from Thompson’s The Poverty of Philosophy (303), where he explains the methods and assumptions that ground the discipline of history and defends the discipline against those who would reject it as trapped in the bourgeois ideology of empiricism.

² Aside from the history of race and whiteness, perhaps no subject needs to be discussed historically and concretely more than Islam. Concrete history helps us understand how Islam is not a hermetic religion that unilaterally determines all so-called Islamic nations’ cultural and political practices, but rather, like Christianity, it is the local, complex product of interactions between foreign invasions, competing or parallel religions, economic arrangements, and political contests (see Ahmad). It is impossible to understand Islam in Iran, for example, without understanding the constitutive role of C.I.A. interventions, economic nationalism, and the internal and external undermining of liberal and leftist political parties. Just imagine what the current U.S. debate over Iran’s nuclear program would sound like if the general public had more than an abstract (and often racist) understanding of the nation’s dominant religion.

³ A 2015 dialogue between two philosophers, published on the New York Times website (“The Stone” opinion column), evidences everything I discuss in this section. Titled “Looking ‘White’ in the Face,” the two philosophers, working under the assumption that “postmodernism has tremendous value for antiracism,” fail to consider the contradictions between postmodern doxa and antiracist doxa (Yancey and Caputo). They profess the inherent goodness of resisting metanarratives, declaring that all metanarratives “lull [people] into the myth of progress,” as if metanarratives never motivated people to work harder for progress or enabled people to challenge dominant conceptions of progress—as if the metanarrative of human emancipation did not enable people to challenge the metanarrative of Southern “tradition.” Predictably, the philosophers proclaim the inherent goodness of multiplicity and difference, without considering the difficulties (and, I would say, undesirability) of being radically pluralistic when constructing historical knowledge. Rather than help readers concretely grasp how capitalism and liberal democracy rely on and reproduce whiteness and racism, the philosophers ask how we might “do the deeper ethical work of dwelling near one another, recognizing our shared humanity,” failing to address the concrete political initiatives that must emerge from such ethical work if that work is to actually ameliorate the suffering caused by unequal access to healthcare, education, and wealth. I certainly appreciate their ethics, but I am troubled by their unchecked assumptions.

⁴ The widespread use of the verb “haunt” is particularly troubling. The introduction’s authors use it at least four times, and Ratcliffe uses it at least twenty-seven times, in a variety of contexts, in Rhetorical Listening. Although it is both aesthetically interesting and a well-intended homage to Toni Morrison’s work on the psychosocial causes and effects of whiteness, the verb does little to illuminate the historical dynamics of whiteness. In fact, it often mystifies them and enables writers to circumvent the difficult work of identifying the earthly and all-too human sources, instantiations, and consequences of individuals’ and groups’ perpetuation of white ideologies. Instead of copying relevant passages from the texts, I encourage readers to keep an eye out for the verb as they peruse the symposium (360, 361, 365, inter alia) and Ratcliffe’s monograph (7, 18, 28, 47, 79, 110, 171, inter alia).

⁵ The authors initiate this peculiar use of via in the introduction’s first paragraph: “matters associated with bodies emerge via cultural socialization (bodies are marked, or coded, by socially constructed cultural categories such as gender, race, class, age, nationality, etc.)” (359). Again, with via in front of what seems to be an abstract agent (“socialization,” even though “matters” is also an ambiguous subject-agent), three things happen: (1) the abstract agent becomes an ambivalent object-subject, (2) agency and action fade into the background, and (3) the sentence becomes thematically stative while sustaining active predication. To similar effect, Ratcliffe uses via numerous times in Rhetorical Listening (69, 70, 71, 85, 96, 111, 156, inter alia).