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Article Excerpt
Arguably the most politically consequential philosophy over the last hundred years has been a slowly developing critical identity philosophy of language in use. Thinkers as diverse as Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Hans Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe and Judith Butler have analyzed and critiqued the discursive processes through which human subjectivity is constructed, maintained, and transformed, and in so doing have consistently pointed to a convergence between identity philosophy and "critical" rhetoric. (1) Central to this identity philosophy is an appreciation for the thoroughgoing interrelationship between discursive practices and forms of community, phenomena solidly within the traditional purview of rhetoricians, whose ancient political art has always been concerned with the impact of language on society.
Outside of rhetoric studies, scholars familiar with this philosophy are already exploring a variety of important relationships between material and ideational economies. (2) Rarely, however, do those scholars look at the actual discourse mutually recognized as the animating principle in identification and disciplinary practices, choosing instead to focus on identity theories and political histories. Theorists discuss the properties and consequences of identity while sociologists, historians, political economists, international relations specialists and others describe how patterns of identification impact social relations. Almost none focus on the concrete discursive struggles that constitute these relations. (3) Rhetoric scholars, arguably, might find a ready-made role to play as critical political communication scholars after familiarizing themselves with contemporary identity philosophy.
The theory of limit work discussed in this essay is offered as a contribution to the ongoing conversation among the growing number of rhetorical theorists coming to recognize the important affinities between identity philosophy and rhetorical criticism. Most plainly, limit work can be described as the analysis of dramatically rejected speech in order to locate and critique politically consequential discursive constraints. It is a relatively straightforward critical rhetorical approach to identity construction based upon the work of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida that can usefully be understood as a response to William Connolly's plea for an "agonistic ethic" in which "people strive to interrogate exclusions built into ... entrenched identities," (4) or Barbara Biesecker's call "to trace new lines of making sense by taking hold of the sign whose reference has been destabilized by and through the practices of resistance." (5) It is an attitude toward patterns of identification resonating with Burke's notion of the identification/alienation dialectic (based on the assumption that all patterns of identification necessarily create patterns of differences), and an attitude based upon the belief that only through a relentless critical interrogation of discursive limits can the emancipatory potential of identification practices by maximized. (6) For just as the optic nerve simultaneously enables sight yet constitutes a blind spot, so also do patterns of identification require "functional blind spots" for their coherence. Limit work is an approach to identifying those specific narrative or argumentative "blind spots" that, if brought to light, would undermine the fragile coherence of preferred characterizations. The ultimate goal of limit work is to identify the "function" of statements deemed particularly offensive (and that constitute politically consequential discursive limits) through the analysis of patterns of responses to those statements within the broader historical and ideological context in which those statements and responses occur. (7)
To explain how limit work is a fruitful approach to the art of rhetorical criticism wherever there is discursive controversy, I first review Nietzsche's "aesthetic" philosophy of language, its relationship to identity construction and identity philosophy, followed by a brief discussion of more contemporary articulations of "identity ethics" (politicized versions of Nietzsche's thought) such as Foucault's "limit attitude" and Derrida's "deconstructive justice." I then describe a simple critical rhetorical procedure, based on an attitude toward the limiting tendencies of identification processes, to help locate and explain politically consequential discursive limits. Next, I exemplify the utility of that procedure by summarizing three recently completed studies related to national identity construction in 1988 Germany (just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall), 1993 Russia (during Boris Yeltsin's constitutional coup), and 1995 Quebec (during the referendum on independence from Canada). The essay then concludes with a brief discussion of other possible applications for limit work as well as suggested criteria for evaluating the "strategies of remembrance" revealed by that procedure.
Nietzsche's Language Theory: The Aesthetic Basis of Conceptualization
Much of contemporary identity philosophy is traceable to Nietzsche, who was well acquainted with the rhetorical tradition and whose interest in rhetoric was principally prompted by his prior interest in language philosophy. (8) While not a central figure for many rhetoricians today, Nietzsche's thinking has slowly begun to influence critical rhetoric scholarship in the United States through discussions of his "aesthetic" theory of rhetoric, a theory of central importance to limit work. (9)
In a recent essay entitled "Friedrich Nietzsche's Theory of Language and Its Reception in Contemporary Thought," the late Ernst Behler explained the evolution and substance of Nietzsche's aesthetic language philosophy and clarified the central role that rhetoric plays there. (10) Referring to Nietzsche's essays "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" and "On the Origin of Language," Behler pointed out how Nietzsche believed that "our philosophical-scientific formation of concepts oriented toward truth is preceded by an artistic formation of images, metaphors, for which the abstract search for truth is irrelevant and which is dominated by an aesthetic interest instead." (11) This "artistic formation of images and metaphors" provides the foundation for a conception of language, and knowledge, as aesthetic.
After dropping his Schopenhauerian conception of "music as a kind of primordial language, even before poetry," Nietzsche concluded that there was no "language" capable of directly accessing Being. (12) Following Gustav Gerber's theory of language presented in Language as Art, and in light of his conclusions about the possibilities of a "pure" language, Nietzsche developed his own language theory based on metaphor, determining that, "Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things, and only by overlooking what is individual and actual can we arrive at concepts." (13) Concepts, therefore, have an aesthetic dimension because:
Every word becomes a concept as soon as it is supposed to serve not merely as a reminder of the unique, absolutely individualized original experience, to which it owes its origin, but at the same time to fit countless, more or less similar cases, which, strictly speaking, are never identical, and hence absolutely dissimilar. Every concept originates by the equation of the dissimilar. Just as no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other, certainly the concept `leaf' is formed by arbitrarily dropping those individual differences, by forgetting the distinguishing factors, and this gives rise to the idea that besides leaves there is in nature such a thing as the `leaf.' (14)
All concepts, therefore, are based on a poetic construction of sameness, so there is no way for human beings to gain direct access to Being through language, and the fundamentally metaphorical nature of language makes all meaning making rhetorical. (15)
There is a "logic" that follows from such a premise. If all concepts are necessarily limiting inasmuch as they oversimplify and create a negative field of what they are not (e.g. to say "it is x" is simultaneously to say "it is not y"), then every "is" is accompanied by an "is not," and every "us" is accompanied by a "not us." If all identities are discursively negotiated across time, then identity construction is both a process and a product: a process inasmuch as humans must constantly negotiate their being embedded in...
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