Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love

Citation
Corder, Jim W. "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love." Rhetoric Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1985, pp. 16-32.

1.
We are all authors, and our lives and identities are the narratives that we construct - though we aren't always good at this coherent storytelling work.

"When I say that we make the fictions that are our lives, I mean to identify a human activity, not a foolish or evil one. History as fiction may become evil, of course, if we refuse to see any history except the one we've already accepted or if we try to force that history on others." (17) - Very Burkean!

"We are always standing somewhere in our narratives when we speak to others or to ourselves. When we use language, some choices have already been made and others must be made." (17)

2.
"Each of us is a narrative. A good part of the time we can live comfortably adjacent to or across the way from other narratives. Our narratives can be congruent with other narratives, or untouched by other narratives. But sometimes another narrative impinges upon ours, or thunders around and down into our narratives." (18)

"When this happens, our narratives become indeed what they are perpetually becoming - arguments. [...] Argument, then, is not something we make outside ourselves; argument is what we are." (18)

3.
"What happens if a narrative not our own reveals to us that our own narrative was wanting all along, though it is the only evidence of our identity? [...] Do we hold our narratives? Keep telling the story we have been telling? At all costs?" (19)

4.
Application of Rogerian rhetoric as a way to minimize threat of the encroaching other world - emphasis on listening and understanding over judgment. (NOTE: This is all pre-dating Foss and Griffin's Invitational Rhetoric, published in 1995)

But also the insufficiency - Rogerian argument "may even work, part of the time, in some settings. But [it] won't do. [It] does not, I believe, face the flushed, feverish, quaky, shaky, angry, scared, hurt, shocked, disappointed, alarmed, outraged, even terrified condition that a person comes to when his or her narrative is opposed by a genuinely contending narrative. Then it is one life or another, perhaps this life or none." (21)

-An agon that is zero-sum, rather than Arendtian. Does Rogerian argument presume rational participants - or at least one rational knower (the rhetor)?

Note the limits of Rogerian argument's application to rhetoric - originally designed for therapist-client situations; faces the same problems as attempting to import Freud's method wholesale into critical work. Rogers also advocates for acknowledging and then immediately evacuating the emotional parts of speakers' investments in the topic.

"Where arguments entail identity, the presentation of 'a statement of how the opponent's position would benefit if he were to adopt elements of the writer's position' is about as efficacious as storming Hell with a bucket of water or trying to hide the glories of Heaven with a torn curtain. If I cannot accept the identity of the other, his kindness in offering me benefits will be of no avail." (22)

5.
"Let us suppose that in this contention each narrator is entirely steadfast, wholly intent upon preserving the nature and movement of his or her narrative, earnest and zealous to keep its identity. I think we have not fully considered what happens in argument when the arguers are steadfast." (23)

-For two people equally steadfast, the others' reasoning and evidence will not appear as such under their narrative worldview. (Cf. Sharon Crowley, on the breakdown of communication between liberalism and apocalypticism)

"What can free us from the apparent hopelessness of steadfast arguments opposing each other? I have to start with a simple answer and hope that I can gradually give it the texture and capacity it needs: we have to seeeach other, to know each other, to be present to each other, to embrace each other. What makes that possible? We have to change the way we talk about argument and conceive of argument." (23)

6.
Again, the problems of Rogerian argument - presuming a speaker (client) who is not practicing advocacy in the same ways that speakers in real rhetorical situations may be attempting. The understanding audience of the therapist does not necessarily find an equivalent in all rhetorical situations.

7.
In situations where the speakers(' narratives, arguments, lives) are totally antithetical to each other, this is where we see the greatest need to change how we think of, talk about, and conduct argument.

"As we presently understand, talk about, and teach argument, it is, whatever our intentions, display and presentation. We entice with an exordium and lay in a background. We present a proposition. We display our proofs, our evidence. We show that we can handle and if need be refute opposing views. We offer our conclusion. That is display and presentation." (26)

"But argument is not something to present or to display. It is something to be. It is what we are, as I suggested earlier. We are the argument over against another. [...] To display or to present them is to pretend a disengagement that we cannot actually achieve and probably should not want to achieve. Argument is not display or presentation, for our engagement in it, or identity with it, will out. [...] if we are to hope for ourselves and to value all others, we must learn that argument is emergence." (26)

8.
"Argument is emergence toward the other. That requires a readiness to testify to an identity that is always emerging, a willingness to dramatize one's narrative in progress before the other; it calls for an untiring stretch toward the other, a reach toward enfolding the other. It is a risky revelation of the self, for the arguer is asking for an acknowledgment of his or her identity, is asking for witness from the other." (26)

-But, as Corder points out, we also cannot be assured of that witness from the other, so we have to be willing to do this without the assurance of positive regard.

"It can happen if we learn to love before we disagree. Usually, it's the other way around: if we learn to love, it is only after silence or conflict or both." (26)

"Rhetoric itself must begin, proceed, and end in love." (28)

9.
How to accomplish (and teach) this?

"The arguer has to go alone. [...] When argument comes to advocacy or to adversarial confrontation, the mutuality that Rogers describes will probably not occur. At the point of advocacy, most particularly at the crisis point in adversarial relationships, the burden is on the maker of the argument as he or she is making the argument. [...] The arguer, alone, must see in the reverence owed to the other, discover and offer all grace that he or she can muster, and, most especially, extend every liberty possible to the other." (2)

"The arguer must at once hold his or her identity and give it to the other, learning to live - and argue - provisionally. [...] We must keep learning as speakers/narrators/arguers (and as hearers). We can learn to dispense with what we imagined was absolute truth and to pursue the reality of things only partially knowable." (28) - A recognition of our selves' contingency

Learn to abandon authoritative positions, which we should not want in the first place - "An authoritative position is a prison both to us and to any audience." (29)

"We arguers can learn the lessons that rhetoric itself wants to teach us. By its nature, invention asks us to open ourselves to the richness of creation, to plumb its depths, search its exapnses, and track its chronologies. But the moment we speak (or write), we are no longer open; we have chosen, whether deliberately or not, and so have closed ourselves off from some possibilities. Invention wants openness; structure and style demand closure." (29) - Through a dialectic process (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), we necessarily close, but then open again and thus replenish our resources for invention.

"In an unlimited universe of meaning, we can never foreclose on interpretation and argument. Invention is a name for a great miracle - the attempt to unbind time, to loosen the capacities of time and space into our speaking. This copiousness is eternally there, a plenitude for all." (29) - Compare with Arendt on forgiveness, but also Sedgwick on reparative reading?

"The arguer must go alone, unaided by any world of thought, value, and belief except the one that he or she composes in the process of arguing, unassisted by the other because the other is over in a different place, being realized in a different narrative. In my mind, this means that the burden of argument is upon the ethos of the arguer." (30)

"We make truth, if at all, out of what is incomplete or partial. Language is a closure, but the generative ethos I am trying to identify uses language to shove back the restraints of closure, to make a commodious universe, to stretch words out beyond our private universe." (30)

"We must pile time into argumentative discourse." Investing the necessary time and energy to have thorough argument, to make "arguments full of the anecdotal, personal, and cultural reflections that will make us plain to all others, thoughtful histories and narratives that reveal us as we're reaching for the others." (31) Staying with the trouble?

10.
"Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities. Most failures of communication result from some willful or inadvertent but unloving violation of the space and time we and others live in, and most of our speaking is tribal talk. But there is more to us than that. We can learn to speak a commodious language, and we can learn to hear a commodious language." (31-32)