Rhetoric and the Politics of Radical Transformation

• In Event: Reading Texts Rhetorically

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which political theorists who seek to radically transform their readers’ taken-for-granted, "common-sense," understandings of politics and history, of self and other, often deploy rhetorical resources to do so. As Richard Rorty once argued, in cases where one hopes to uproot or overturn a well-established outlook or vocabulary, standard forms of argument often prove to be "inconclusive or question-begging." This is because the proponents of the time-honored outlook or vocabulary always demand that any arguments against it be phrased in their vocabulary. However, attempts to do so are often futile precisely because a new or radically different vocabulary is needed to describe or explain a radically different outlook. As with the duck-rabbit image, getting someone who has always seen the image as a duck to now see it as a rabbit (or vice-versa) requires a gestalt-shift, and conventional modes of argument are often unhelpful in producing such a shift. What is required instead are practices of rhetorical redescription. This is in fact what one frequently finds in works of political theory that attempt to yield a radical change of perspective.

The paper examines the manner in which political theorists deploy the resources of rhetoric to bring about radical transformations of perspective. The turn to rhetoric, moreover, is particularly evident in the opening pages of texts, where "thick" redescription, vivid imagery, and figural language is deployed to unsettle, dissolve, and transform conventional ways of seeing and understanding. Although the paper will discuss several examples of this approach, the analysis will focus largely on three texts, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The "rhetoric" of these texts is of fundamental importance for understanding not just what they say, but what they attempt to do.

Author

• Keith Topper, University of California, Irvine