OK--the drafty post below notwithstanding, here's the question:
As regards defintions of our 'historical' work from a disciplinary perspective, Brandon suggests a "probability-based relativist-pragmatic one: the better of two arguments, as interpreted by an audience, often becomes socially-constructed meaning and reinforces/determines the course of events."
the question: how is this different than Machiavelli's pedagogical imperative--to show things "not as they ought to be, but as they are"?
I touched on Maciavelli in my last post because he's the subject of a sort of reclamation project--an effort to show that he is not amoral or unethical, that his rhetoric has civic and ethical (and rhetorical, of course!) virtue (Victoria Kahn, Wendy Olmsted come to mind as people working on this, there are others). And taking in the Discourses, the History of Florence, in addition to the Prince, it's clear that he's not just, well, machiavellian. It's clear that his historical work in particular is guided by a genuine ethical sense, an effort to uphold republican virtue as a balancing of interests that is effected through discursive means--legality, enterprise, negotiation. But the Prince, it seems to me, is notable exactly because of some features we've been pointing to in our discussions--it's heavily generic (and thus disciplinary, broadly stated) as part of the tradition of counseling princes. Within that tradition, though it is notable because it argues not out of a set of ideals, but out of a set of observations. And these observations are, I would say, rhetorical in the way that Brandon suggests above--looking at arguments and their effects on subsequent events.
Aside from the reclamation efforts cited above, however, Machiavelli's work historically has been condemned for its immorality, and its concern with ethics has largely to do with a maintaining of power that, without some heavy interpretive work, comes across as potentially discomforting--it certainly would be subject to censure from Platonists and Aristotelians and Ciceronians and Quintillianians (jk), new and old.
Because I would tweak Brandon's formulation in this way--or at least say it's possible to do so, whether we should or not--that the success of the arguments, as judged by the audience, is not determinative of subsequent events, but rather is determined by them.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
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Warning: Stream-of-consciousness writing follows. Please excuse.
ReplyDelete"The better of two arguments, as interpreted by an audience, often becomes socially-constructed meaning and reinforces/determines the course of events. This process is deceptively solipsistic, since the success of rhetoric is judged through subsequent events which it may reinforce or determine."
Does this work together, Daniel? Am I missing a contradiction? I think you are talking about rhetorical success as history (so the historian asks, who won the debate and so what?), while I am talking about the relationship of meaning and events (so the historian asks, how do [communicated] understandings affect and effect history?).
All of this is a stab in the dark beyond "stuff happens." And the motivation behind producing this thesis would be the relationship of speech and meaning to a narrative of events (history). Also, making some division between dominant understandings and marginal/resistant ones would allow us to think critically and in counterfactuals, asking the "what if?" question of the past, through the meanings/understandings of that time.
With your addition, it also gives us a little confidence in understanding why the minor voice, even when it makes more sense from our perspective, has a hard time given the solipsistic nature of meaning-making as it determines-reinforces events that then serve to determine/create/judge meaning.
I might question my own post, too, that the word "often" may be difficult to prove. Descriptively, could we be sure that dominant understandings more often influence the course of events?
Or would we be better off to say something more tied to power than the judgment of arguments--basically, my idea may be too democratic and normative. We maybe should say, thinking about Machiavelli, "Those with power should (and will) use power to control events. What they say often determines events."
The original one may already take this "power" thesis into account, since rhetoric and interpretation already take into account notions of power on their deepest level.
All of this also brackets those things that determine history outside of words. When folks write about historiography in the midst of war, they tend to deny any effect that meaning-creation has on events--that things happen just by the chances of who was where when, or that a supernatural power guides those otherwise meaningless events. That, to me, would be outside of our "disciplinary" concern though, and thus would be outside of the scope of the definition I am constructing.
I guess the question then becomes which happens more often, or which one is "more" determinative. Are we fooling ourselves to think that rhetoric and meaning-creation matters that much?
Finally, is any of this relevant to our discussion, or am I going off the deep end?
I thin this is completely relevant to the discussion--though I do worry that I've pushed the discussion itself off the deep end! But I think your formulations make a lot of sense, and I think the issues you raise in terms of what the historian's response would be are right on, though also part of the question itself--are we bound to answer to these historianical objections? or are we doing something a little different.
ReplyDeleteI had a couple of motivations for my machiavelli musings. One was just to be provocative. But more to the point, it seems at least some of the discussants here have suggested that rhetoric and history are at odds in certain ways, and we've also seen it suggested that rhetorical history itself--if the term is not in fact a contradiction--cannot abide a philosophy of history bound in spirit or progress or other teleologies very easily. But does the question of ethics (for instance, as this constant specter constantly haunting (or is it always already haunting? (sorry--all that's a joke for anybody who had to put up with that butchered jargon at Cs)) does the question of ethics serve as a place where we can see a philosophy behind the work we do?