Barbara Biesecker--"Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric"

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1992), pp. 140-161
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237715

"many of us have found it necessary to question some of our discipline's most basic theoretical assumptions as we have understood that the rhetorical histories that emerge out of and are shaped by those assumptions have consequences both for the practices of our profession and everyday lives and for the lives of our students" (140).

Biesecker acknowledges current efforts to place women within the canon of rhetoric scholarship. Much has been written about how "decidedly male experiences have been made to stand in for the history of Rhetoric as such" (141). In reference to female representation in rhetorical scholarship, Biesecker says, "we cannot but be compelled to rethink our [female] roles both in and outside the classroom" (141).

"recent critical essays seeking to discredit the myth that 'Man' is Rhetoric's hero by writing women into its history find precedence in a relatively prodigious past" (141). Biesecker states that though she's supportive of these revisionist efforts, "we must also...caution against the potentially debilitating consequence of their work: female tokenism" (141).

Adrienne Rich defines female tokenism this way: "the power withheld from the vast majority of women is offered to few, so that it may appear that any truly qualified woman can gain access to leadership, recognition, and reward; hence that justice based on merits actually prevails. The token woman is encouraged to see herself as different from most other women, as exceptionally talented and deserving; and to separate herself from the wider female condition; and she is perceived by 'ordinary' women as separate also: perhaps even as stronger than themselves" (141).

While revising scholarship to include women alongside men creates a more diverse rhetorical history, it may also "unwittingly...perpetuate the damaging fiction that most women simply do not have what it takes to play the public, rhetorical game" (142).

Biesecker, though she understands the dangers of tokenism, wonders "at what point circumspection leads to silence, stagnation, and inactivity" (142). She's willing to risk tokenism to extend an equal voice. She wants to "underscore yet another effect of attempts to insert 'great women speakers' into the official record we call the canon, an effect that utterly escapes out detection as we weigh only the risk of female tokenism" (142).

Biesecker compares this revisionist history as to affirmative action in that we try to include those who have been historically disadvantaged. But in its implementation in the cultural sphere, "the project misfires" (143).

"What I find objectionable in the affirmative action approach to the production and distribution of knowledges...is its underhanded perpetuation of 'cultural supremacy'" (143).

"When deployed in the cultural sphere, affirmative action signifies nothing less that the power of the center to affirm certain voices and to discount others...the affirmative action agenda conserves the putative authority of the center by granting it license to continue to produce official explanation by the designation of what is and what is not worthy of inclusion" (143). Essentially, by maintaining that the core texts represent the gold standard, we privilege the criteria of the old order.

She wonders: "What are the criteria against which any particular rhetorical discourse is measured in order to grant or deny its place in the canon? One way into this question is to recognize that the rhetorical canon is a system of cultural representation whose present form is predicated on and celebrates the individual" (143).

"Already entailed in the valorization of the individual is a mechanics of exclusion that fences out a vast array of collective rhetorical practices to which there belongs no proper name" (144).

"In short..we...have not yet begun to challenge the underlying logic of canon formation and the uses to which it has been put that have written the rhetorical contributions of collective women into oblivion" (144). She applies this critique to Karlyn Campbell's attempt to insert women into the historical canon because she plans her inclusion around the individual. Such an attempt "resolidifies rather than undoes the ideology of individualism that is the condition of possibility for the emergence of the received history of Rhetoric" (144).

So what should take its place?

 She references an earlier essay from Campbell which argues effectively at looking at diverging epistemologies. Campbell writes "it is difficult to view them as an audience, i.e. as persons who see themselves as potential agents of change; unlike other rhetorics, rhetorics directed toward the liberation of women must take as their point of departure 'the radical affirmation of new identities'" (144). Though Biesecker appreciates her argument, she argues that her use of Bitzer's theoretical arrangements--which she argues against, essentially using his arrangements as a contrasting point--"marks the essay's complicity with precisely those normative theorizations that it seeks to oppose." Biesecker sees Campbell's desire for "consciousness raising" works against establishing a uniquely female rhetorical perspective as it "posits an irreducible essence inhabiting the subject and a tropology (figurative use of language) of the psyche that writes presence as consciousness, self-presence conceived within the opposition of consciousness to unconsciousness" (146).

"I must admit that I find less than satisfactory the conceptualization of history and social change implied in Campbell's reformulation of female subjectivity, a conceptualization wherein the ideology of individualism and the old patriarchal alignments are reinscribed. In Campbell's work, the possibility for social change is though to be more or less a function of each individual woman's capacity to throw off the mantly of her own self-perpetuated oppression, to recognize her real self-interests (interests that are her own as  a woman and, thus, are shared by all women) and to intervene on behalf of those interests" (146).

Campbell's revisionist history doesn't overturn "those structures of oppression larger than individual consciousness and will...positivity lines up with activity, while passivity and with it femininity are identified as negative" (146).

"Thus if, as feminists, we want to produce something more than the story of a battle over the right to individualism between men and women, we might begin by taking seriously post-structuralist objections to the model of human subjectivity that has served as the cognitive starting point of our practices and histories...I want to argue that the post-structuralist interrogation of the subject and its concomitant call for the radical contextualization of all rhetorical acts can enable us to forge a new storying of our tradition that circumvents the veiled cultural supremacy operative in mainstream histories of Rhetoric" (147). Post-structuralism "sets up the conditions for a 'new' definition of techne that considerably alters our way of reading writing history by displacing the active/passive opposition altogether" (147).

A reencounter with post-structuralism

"post-structuralism attacks identity as such and not just particular and isolated forms or versions of identity...Derrida shows us how the identity of any subject, like the value of any element in a given system, is structured by and is the effect of its place in an economy of differences. In short, against an irreducible humanist essence of subjectivity, Derrida advances a subjectivity which, structured by differance  and thus always differing from itself, is forever in process, indefinite, controvertible...Thus subjectivity in the general sense is to be deciphered as an historical articulation, and particular real-lived identities are to be deciphered as constituted and reconstituted in and by an infinitely pluralized weave of interanimating discourses and events" (148).

Using Derrida and post-structural hermeneutics Biesecker argues that "it becomes possible to forge a storying that shifts the focus of historical inquiry from the question 'who is speaking,' a question that confuses the subjects of history with the agents for history, to the question 'what play of forces made it possible for a particular speaking subject to emerge?" (148). It seems that in Burke's terms Biesecker is arguing that we revision Rhetoric by emphasizing the Scene-Agent ratio, wherein the entirety of the moment gives rise to the speaker instead of the speaker standing out against the moment.

Biesecker then turns to Foucault.

"Foucault mobilizes the concept-metaphor 'discursive formation' in order to work against the widespread tendency amongst social theorists to presume that the socius is operated by a coherent logic that can account for all relations and practices...Foucault emphsizes time and again that the socius is a discontinuous space constituted by heterogeneous fields of objects operated by a 'body of anonymous historical rules,' a nonstatic arena woven of dispersed 'I-slots'" (149).

"Thus for Foucault, identity is defined by way of one's relation to or place in a network of social, political, cultural, and economic practices that are provisional (in the sense of historical and not essential), discontinuous (in the sense of nontotalizable), and normative (in the sense of rule governed and governing)....subjectivity and identity as made available by, rather than existing outside of or prior to, language and representation" (149).

"Where Derrida would speak of the ever-shifting limits that persistently thwart our desire to make the subject cohere in any final sense, Foucault would chart the localized rules and mechanisms of differentially situated subjects in a nonstatic but hierarchically organized space" (150).

"Feminist and non-feminist historians alike have claimed that Foucault's decisive contribution to our understanding of social economies and their conditions of existence and emergence, is encapsulated in his theory of subject positions, a theory that resolutely challenges the assumption that ideology can be demystified...If, as Foucault suggests, 'power is everywhere,' then it seems only reaonable to conclude that there is nowhere out of which anything like an insurrection may gain its foothold...the very notion of resistance seems nothing more than a fragile proposition" (151).

Biesecker tries to negotiate her use of Foucault as support for a revision of Rhetoric since he seems to argue that resistance is futile. She states, however, that "we must hold against the temptation to construe resistance as a structure that stands over and against power, as an event subsequent to the establishment of power. Resistance is always and already a structure of possibility within power and...power is always and already a structure of possibility within resistance" (152). They emerge from, as Foucault states, "something other than itself" (152).

The paradox is: how can resistance operate within an anti-humanist/ post-human theory.

"by reading the subject itself as a site of multiple and contestatory inscriptions, one can, they argue, locate a reservoir of revolutionary potential in the gaps, fissures and slippages of the nonidentical 'I'" (152).

"I want to press the issue of resistance to a further limit within the Foucaultian frame, once again using Derridean deconstruction as my lever" (152).

Argument thus far: Female rhetorics cannot be inscribed into the canon by using the rules of the canon. Instead, they must be wholly included using non-individualized criteria. To support this, Biesecker turns to a mixture of Derrida and Foucault. However, the post-structural theories raise issues about how to resist power structures within a post-human/anti-human framework, wherein power is not constitutive of agents but of the scene.

Retooling techne

Biesecker wants to use Foucault's primacy of place with Derrida's idea that the "subject...is always centered...outstripped by a temporality and a spacing that always already exceeds it" (154).

"were this excess that never appears as such figured into the Foucaultian calculation, it would become possible for us to recognize the formidable role structure plays in the (re)constitution of subjectivities and the capacity...of those subjectivities to disrupt the structure within which and through which they are differently inscribed" (154).

"a careful reading of Derrida's work will show that the very possibility of resistance is to be found in the articulation of an act and not in the negativity of the actor...Derrida's thinking on spacing shifts the site of resistance from the subject proper to the exorbitant possibilities of the act since spacing in this special sense is precisely that which 'suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of 'desire' or 'will.'" (154)

"if what we are trying to indicate is a certain structure of reserve that breaks open a pathway within the hegemonizing effects of power by mens of an act whose effluence eludes the mastery of the acting subject, then the word practice simply will not do...Thus what I am seeking to point to is...a force or structure of breaching in practice that establishes a cleft or fissure out of which an unforeseen and undesigned transgression may ensue" (154-155).

techne--"the sign for an exorbitant doing that depends upon practice but which does not obey the imperatives of practice" (155). Techne is productive; it requires practice or doing, but the doing doesn't define in reverse what it is. "techne can be used to refer to a kind of 'getting through' or ad hoc 'making do' by a subject whose resources are necessarily located in and circumscribed by the field within which she operates...[it] harbors within it the possibility of disrupting, fragmenting, and altering the horizon of human action out of which it emerges...What is 'new,' however, is the attempt to use techne differently by bracketing out the ethical/moral sedimentations that have...been attributed to the word and thereby making it possible for us to refuse to grasp the agent of history as identical with her intentions" (155).

"I am suggesting that if we use techne as a word signifying a way, manner or means whereby something is gained, without any sense of art or cunning, then techne signifies a bringing-about in the doing-of on the part of an agent that does not necessarily take herself to be anything like a subject of historical or...cultural change...techne displaces the active/passive binary...It is, as Derrida would put, the trace of 'the not-seen that opens and limits visibility'" (156).

Back to history

"this essay could be summarized as a call for a gender-sensitive history of Rhetoric that, in working against the ideology of individualism by displacing the active/passive opposition, radically contextualizes speech acts" (156-157)

"the argument I have put forward presses for a feminist intervention into the history of Rhetoric that persistently critiques its own practices of inclusion and exclusion by relativizing rather than universalizing what Aristotle identified as 'the available means of persuasion.'...Put simply, not only would one have to declare 'man cannot speak for her.' One would also have to admit that no individual woman or set of women, however extraordinary, can speak for all women" (157).

"For the academic feminist, however, that story may prove to be the most difficult of all to decipher. For in that story, we must begin to read ourselves as part and parcel of the history we so desperately seek to disown" (158).