Commitment to Telos: A Sustained Critical Rhetoric

Citation
Ono, Kent A. and John M. Sloop. “Commitment to telos: a sustained critical rhetoric.” Communication Monographs, vol. 59, no. 1, 1992, pp. 48-60.

Summary
Ono and Sloop read McKerrow's critical rhetoric as "[attempting] to create a position of critical and political agency for the rhetorical critic. The critic that is described by McKerrow is one who is self-reflective and skeptical, criticizing domination and freedom equivalently, wherever they are found. In this essay, we would like to align ourselves with McKerrow's orientation toward critical theory and offer the suggestion that, while a critic should indeed be empowered with a healthy dose of self-criticism, an effective critical rhetoric should also highlight the critic's role in forwarding her own critical beliefs." (48)

Rather than the continual overturning and undermining that McKerrow calls for, Ono and Sloop want to insist on a commitment to telos "as a sustained critical praxis for those engaging in critical rhetoric." By telos, they mean "the moment when a person's pen is put to paper purposively, when ideas become words and when will becomes action." (48)

Recap: Wander's "ideological turn" suggests that the critic can achieve an end to domination, by recognizing good reason and engaging in right action; there is a telos to criticism. McKerrow does not see an end to domination, and ceaseless critique is the only right action possible. "The trick [...] is to find a way to hold on to both Wander's 'right action' and McKerrow's 'skepticism' without stumbling down the dimly lit hallways of either." (49)
 * Critique of domination as a "'critique of ideologies, perceived as rhetorical creations'" (49, quoting McKerrow) Critic's task to reveal unjust domination of subjects by systems of power and aid subjects with the goal of liberation.
 * Critique of freedom "does not pose itself against anything; rather, it works to invent a critical stance of skepticism" (49)

Ono and Sloop note a possible unintended reading of McKerrow, that in separating critiques of domination and freedom, readers may be tempted to think they are separate enterprises and meant to be applied in separate situations. Instead, they posit that "freedom and domination and their respective critiques are actually two perspectives on the same phenomenon." (50) This is through an acceptance of Foucault's definition of power - a force that flows and defines relationships between subjects, not something wielded by a sovereign. Freedom and domination are thus two "flavors" of power. Seeing these as different is what traps us into thinking that they are separate enterprises, but "if we highlight the unity of domination and freedom, we encourage the critic to work to initiate new relationships, to imagine new ways of constructing the world, and to replace the logic of dichotomies with alternatives." (50)

The problem of going all-in on the critique of freedom is that it is isolating and solipsistic. It gives no answers,and only allows us to be eternally skeptical with nowhere to hang our hat. Instead, it's necessary for the critic to recognize their own situatedness in culture; a different kind of self-awareness that acknowledges the "circumstance, situation, and history of the artifact and its world" (50) (very similar to Mailloux's rhetorical hermeneutics!) Critique of freedom also constrains the critic's agency, positioning the critic as a self-contained and knowing subject, but has as its blind spot the ways in which the critic is themselves within a context. Invoking bell hooks, Ono and Sloop claim "Critics must highlight their contingency, not simply footnote it. They must 'speak in a different way,' not vacillate between terms, such as freedom and domination." (51, quoting hooks)

On the other hand, the problem of going all-in on the critique of domination is that it throws out responsibility. Quoting Rorty, "'Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seem to me invaluable in our attempts to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics.' Rory is pointing to the tension between accepting the poststructural discplacement of an absolute grounding of knowledge and creating a position of 'play,' of aestheticizing being, for the scholar. That is, he is concerned that all too often those theorists who have broken the philosopher's stone have shattered personal and social responsibility with it. Rather than turning their attention to social and political conditions, such theorists have often given up any responsibility except for the creation of the 'self' and the cultivation of the type of play one can engage in if one gives up absolute morals." (52) The deferral of meaning leaves us in a condition to only be able to describe, not transform. This may be a post-critical perspective, but as Sedgwick herself notes, it is not sufficient on its own any more than suspicious reading is sufficient on its own.

-What is the nature of this "play" that Ono and Sloop are describing? The critique of domination's play is undirected, divested of all responsibility. Ono and Sloop are opposed to a non-directed play, "urging the critical rhetorician to choose not to play but to create an end which could guide us in attempting to effect social change." Is that really all play is capable of, thought? Can we instead play in a way that is creative, inventive, that generates new thinking and being?

Ono and Sloop's goal: "To conceptualize and identify an arena for commitment within a critical rhetoric. The critic in our conception maintains a commitment toward telos through which criticism is directed, while simultaneously recognizing the contingencies of this goal. One of the results of this configuration of a critical rhetoric will be the transcendence of the critiques of domination and of freedom; our critic will recognize that all criticism, because it shifts the current relations of power, critiques forms of domination by transforming them into new forms of power. The critique of domination and critique of freedom are effectively one, and are little more than different perspectives about a single discursive struggle." (52)

Commitment to Telos
Section opens quoting Trinh, on a recent trend in filmmaking or self-reflectivity or self-reflexivity, in which filmmakers show themselves at work - a nod to self-awareness, but really just a "small faction." For Ono and Sloop, "The stake that Trinh refers to is the practice of creating subjects through writing, acting, and speaking. These subjects commit to a particular position while entertaining a self-critical awareness. They realize that any self-criticism may take them one place and not the other, but the more places they go, the clearer the stopping points become. The extent to which a self-critical and skeptical rhetoric can be put into practice is necessarily limited by the degree of commitment the critic has toward the work of art being created. Creativity itself necessitates a particular commitment to envisioning and taking inventory of human action." (52-53)

-Critique can be ongoing, but the creative act requires commitment, a fixing in place; per Walter Ong, "writing is a commitment of words to space," and commitments reify belief, bringing them to a state where they can be engaged and responded to by others. Any critic who writes and publishes commits themselves to a telos, even if unconsciously.

By telos, "We mean that those who adhere to poststructural views on knowledge and discourse and who are committed to critical rhetoric must demand of themselves, at the moment of placing pen to paper, that they relinquish skepticism and advance their argument for that moment as if the direction chosen by the critic (i.e., a telos) were Truth wit ha capital 'T.' Upon lifting pen, however, the critic must relinquish this 'Truth' in favor of a skepticism, a critique of freedom. We have chosen the term telos, rather than, say, worldview or utopia, because we acknowledge, as we hope others do, that the act of poststructural criticism does not necessarily lead to a pointless criticism that is political only by default." (53) Telos is "simultaneously and admittedly contingent" (53) Even though critique is recursive, that doesn't prevent us from taking a stance - as, indeed, McKerrow's reading of Foucault shows, being non-directed towards a specific political end, but still creative in the direction of his work. Foucault the theorist who denies even contingent telos vs. Foucault the activist, who argues for "not being governed in this way." "A critical rhetoric without commitment would never attempt to reach such a goal, because it would necessarily be too busy attempting to self-criticize to be able to change present conditions." (54)

In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault describes "effective histories," genealogies which are "histories that diagnose the ills of culture and simultaneously present a new perspective through which reality can be viewed." This isn't critique of domination, but rather a shaping of present conditions towards a telos - even in the knowledge that such telos may never be realized. Quoting Foucault: "Knowledge is not made for understanding. It is made for cutting." (54)

"While one may not agree with the notion of effective histories or the use of critical analyses of past discourses in order to effect a present, one can perhaps find less use for an analysis which never attempts movement at all." (54) Knowledge is made for cutting, it does and has effects. YES!

The problem with Nietzschean foundation for critique is that it is no foundation at all, its theoretical and critical choices appear unjustifiable. We cannot achieve the Nietzschean ideal of separate from society and freed from the web of language, cannot be self-creating. Rorty is very aware of this problem and his own self-reflections as a "liberal ironist" show this. But Rorty "does not become a dogmatist in becoming an ironist; he simply accepts that all vocabularies are ways of talking, one having no more concrete justification than any other. Such a reflective critical stance is comparable to the way we would want a critic to view telos, as if no single purpose could be construed as the last." (55) In line with Laclau and Mouffe, that if we expel the possibility of utopia then the critic has no ability to negate and threaten the established order; the critic can continue to say they do not wish to be governed like that, but no substitute is offered as a goal to be worked towards, there is no movement. A contingent utopia is needed as a goal to be worked towards.

A way of doing this: Set sights on a goal and work towards it, keeping the rhetorical question of "How do we shape our message?" in mind. For example, in attempting to reconstitute homosexuality from "they" to "we," choose texts that either demonstrate the contingent construction of homosexuality at present, or take up for critique texts that are apparently non-homophobic to reveal their latent homophobia. How do we want homosexuality to be constituted in a contingent yet ideal community, and what kind of criticism will work towards this telos? Criticism as world-making. ("How to do things with worlds"!)

Rather than engaging other criticisms and theories by testing their methods to get closer to Truth, instead we can examine the implications of the criticism or theory being right. What if this is correct? What then? What changes - not just in what we know, but in what we do? This, I think, is close to what Sedgwick means by being open to possibilities of both good and bad surprise.

Sustained Critical Practice
"A critical rhetoric that calls for a renewed interest in the potential for sustained critical praxis, a praxis that sees the importance of many traditions as wells of committed scholarship. [...] The goal for the critical rhetorician is to get beyond an all encompassing history that promises to bind the present to itself and move to a newly articulated future, conceived out of webs of traditional knowledges. In light of envisioning the future as the transformative stage toward telos, the critic strengthens contingent notions of criticism." (58)

Sustained critical praxis as "an appreciation of ways in which all forms of criticism have been conducted to explain cultural artifacts, always by maintaining commitment toward a compelling end, goal, or state of finality. Sustained critical praxis does not invoke historical studies of culture in an attempt to set one authenticity, rationality, or power over others; studies with such a purpose are forms of imperialism that already have as their goal the disqualification of alternative viewpoints, not their absolute necessity." (58)

"To sustain critical praxis, the critic dons the persona of one who has raised questions about culture and who has attempted to understand them. The critic overtly acknowledges the vectors of criticism that continue to adjust the ways we look at the world. Criticism disappears once again behind itself as it enters a new picture of the world, behind the simulation and ideology of what people recognize as normative truth. The critic simulates, through an involved empathy, the attitude of those who have spoken before her in order to create the world in which, once again, ideas of the present sustain life through a contemporary past and a utopian future. Such a future begins once we acknowledge the cultural relationships that lead us to change our worlds. A commitment to telos is necessary in carrying out such a long and arduous project." (58-59)