The Second Persona

Citation
Black, Edwin. "The Second Persona." Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill, The Guilford Press, 1997, pp. 331-340.

Summary
Black calls attention to the lack of moral judgment in rhetorical criticism. He attributes this lack to the liberal scholarly impulse to remain open, rather than closed, since moral judgments "coerce one's perceptions of things." (331) But at the same time, "there is something acutely unsatisfying about criticism that stops short of appraisal. It is not so much that we crave magistracy as that we require order, and the judicial phase of criticism is a way of bringing order to our history." (331) Against a descriptive form of criticism - perhaps of Mailloux's sort?

Yet moral judgments are made all the time, any time we do representation in, for example, the process of telling history. The choices we make on what to include, exclude, emphasize, downplay, are "infected with moral values." (331) A difficulty in bringing moral judgment to rhetorical discourse, however, is that we tend to think of discourse as an object, and we don't tend to make moral judgments about objects. That which is instrumental is thought to be morally neutral, and Aristotle placed rhetoric in the category of instrumental. If rhetorical discourse inspires action, we judge the consequences, but not the discourse itself.

"My purpose here is by no means to challenge this arrangement. Instead I propose exploring the hypothesis that if students of communication could more proficiently explicate the saliently human dimensions of a discourse - if we could, in a sense, discover for a complex linguistic formulation a corresponding form of character - we should then be able to subsume that discourse under a moral order and thus satisfy our obligation to history." (332)

The foundation for this project is the proposition that "language has a symptomatic function. Discourses contain tokens of their authors. Discourses are, directly or in a transmuted form, the external signs of internal states. In short, we accept it as true that a discourse implies an author [...] more specifically, that certain features of a linguistic act entail certain characteristics of the language user." (332)

-A symptomatic, suspicious reading at play, but something we also can't completely avoid - as Sedgwick even acknowledges, I think. Black goes back to Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics to identify Aristotle's thinking about how a character's lines in a play reveal to dimensions of the character: the moral and the intellectual. The moral, ethos, and the intellectual, dianoia. These are distinct but complementary, located in the psyche. Note that ethos was fairly well-developed in Rhetoric, but dianoia was more cryptic and likely incomplete.

A significant difference between Aristotle and the present day, Black says, is that today we understand that people can seem a certain way, but not actually be that way. Thanks to the work of Wayne Booth (real author vs. implied author) and others, we are "have learned to keep continuously before us the possibility, and in some cases the probability, that the author implied by the discourse is an artificial creation: a persona, but not necessarily a person." (333) A further suspicion of the object! Not just what it may be concealing, but that its concealment may be a deception in itself!

"We have to acknowledge that in an age when 70 percent of the population of this country lives in a prepossessed environment, when our main connection with a larger world consists of shadows on a pane of glass, when our politics seems at times a public nightmare privately dreamed, we have, to say the least, some adjustments to make in the ancient doctrine of ethical proof." (333) What is ethos today?

"There is a second persona also implied by a discourse, and that persona is its implied auditor." (331)

Intended or implied audience - who the speaker imagined as their audience when rhetorical critics say things like "'This was designed for a hostile audience.' We would be claiming nothing about those who attended the discourse. [...] But we are able nonetheless to observe the sort of audience that would be appropriate to it. We would have derived from the discourse a hypothetical construct that is the implied auditor." (333-334) Black wants to note two points about this implied auditor: Language choice and discourse can be studied by the critic to link the implied auditor to an ideology. And more than just suggesting a relationship, "It rather should be viewed as expressing a vector of influence." (334)
 * 1) It has been very undertheorized, and
 * 2) What is important int characterizing personae is ideology - "the network of interconnected convictions that functions in a man epistemically and that shapes his identity by determining how he views the world." (334) And ideology has proliferated since the ancient Greek polis.

A Paradigm
Testing the claim with an essay on the metaphor "the cancer of communism." Black notes that this phrase is practically a dead metaphor, a cliche, but also is the exclusive discourse of the Right, and in particular Robert Welch, who continues to make use of the metaphor to cancer. Another uniquely Right-wing topos is the invocation and inventory of perished civilizations, to point to American exceptionalism.

Some ways of reading the communism-as-cancer metaphor: Throughout each of these readings and implications of the metaphor's discourse, "we can find enticements not simply to believe something, but to be something. We are solicited by the discourse to fulfill its brandishments with our very selves. And it is this dimension of rhetorical discourse that leads us finally to moral judgment, and in this specific case, to adverse judgment." (339)
 * 1) "Cancer is a kind of horrible pregnancy," one that develops from within as part of oneself, not from external infection. "One's attitude toward one's body is bound up with one's attitude toward cancer," so "a metaphor that employed cancer as its vehicle would have a particular resonance for an auditor who was ambivalent about his own body. We may suspect, in fact, that the metaphor would strike a special fire with a congeries of more generally puritanical attitudes." (337)
 * 2) Cancer is incurable. What this suggests is not so much a fatalist attitude towards the cancer (though Black notes that Rightists tend to be more cavalier about the prospect of nuclear war), but the immanence of the disease and the body's condition of being in extremis, which in turn justify the "ultimate surgery [...] In such a context, an unalarmed attitude toward the use of atomic weapons is not just reasonable; it is obvious." (338)
 * 3) The state is an organism. But how to balance this with the Right's vocal support for individualism? "It appears that when the Rightist refers to individualism, he is referring to the acquisition and possession of property. [...] So conceived, individualism is perfectly compatible with an organismic conception of the polity. And moreover, the polity's own hideous possession - its tumor - is an expression of its corruption." (338)
 * 4) Cancer would seem to be a natural phenomenon, but our doxa around cancer shows that cancer patients tend to "[assign] culpability either to themselves or to others or to some supernatural agent. [The] study suggests, in other words, that an extraordinarily high proportion of people who have cancer - or for our purposes it may be better to say who become convinced that they have cancer - are disposed to blame the cancer on a morally responsible agent." (338) And so for our purposes, an auditor who would think in this way is one who would likely look to blame the communism-as-cancer on a moral agent. And because many Right-wing-ers tend also to be religious fundamentalists (these days), their habituation to looking for purpose in the universe lends itself to looking for purpose in everything - and thus tend towards a belief in conspiracy theories.
 * 5) The terrifying nature of cancer tends to lead people to either acknowledge the futility of struggling against death, or to "[transmute] the death-concept into a life-concept through an act of religious faith." The former is played out in #2 above, while the latter might be a conversion of Rightists to the Left, if the cancer becomes so visible.
 * 6) Not just culpability, but guilt associated with the metaphor. Is there anyone who can be considered healthy, in this scenario?