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Reviewed by:
  • Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation
  • Deborah Eicher-Catt
Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation. By Bradford Vivian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004; pp xiv + 229. $55.00.

If the reader is willing to bracket Western assumptions about the nature of rhetoric in its representational capacity and to entertain, instead, a conception based upon "discursive differences," then Bradford Vivian's book will prove to be an interesting, although somewhat repetitive, read, especially for those familiar with the idea of rhetoric as epistemic. Problematizing ethos as the defining feature of rhetoric, he appeals to classic examples and postmodern ideas from Derrida, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Maffesoli to deconstruct its contours. His goal is to dissociate rhetoric from its conventional affinity with "ideal forms" and a presumed priority of speaker intention as the "governing principle of speech" (81). Such affiliations, he argues, casts rhetoric in its "active voice" (81), a voice that merely propagates Western ideals of rhetoric as representation. Vivian's aim is to advance Hayden White's notion of rhetoric in the "middle voice," that is, [End Page 328] one "defined neither by the supposed truth of character nor that of custom . . . but by the self-enactment of discourse" (77). He recognizes, citing Foucault, that rhetoric gives life, power, and ethos to discursive formations. Vivian claims that he is not advocating the end of rhetoric in its traditional form, but wants to offer an account of it that acknowledges how "socially and intellectually prejudicial values of representational thought" (xii) are discursively formed and legitimatized. For that he needs a nonrepresentational form of rhetoric, offered by the middle voice, which provides a way of investigating the constitution of human being as a discursive performance. Given the book's scope, it is meant to enliven contemporary academic debates concerning the political subjugation of those whose voices have not been typically acknowledged.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 ("Beyond Representation") and part 2 ("Being Otherwise") lay out his central questions and begin to speak to his theme, namely, rhetoric in the middle voice. Part 3 ("Rhetoric and the Politics of Self and Other") offers two case studies, one on the discourse surrounding Thomas Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings, and the other an analysis of Malek Alloula's The Colonial Harem. Both are meant to exemplify a reading of discourse in the middle voice and supply an interesting read. The first focuses on the interplay between past and present discursive conditions as they engender conceptions of ethical conduct. The second examines the interplay of speech and silence as discursive conditions that reveal "the symbolic formation and transformation of time, memory, and historical experience constitutive of different subject positions and institutional relations" (157). The book concludes with the chapter "Rhetoric in a Nonmoral Sense." Here Vivian claims his book offers three contributions to our understanding of subjectivity. First, the book frames subjectivity as rhetorical. This presupposition is not new, of course, to anyone working within the theme, subjectivity and human agency. Second, the book announces how discursive formations, maintenance, and transformations are accomplished through an "identity politics," but a politics, he says, unlike most investigations, that does not "preserve the priority of identity as an analytic category" (185). He ignores scholarship that seeks to account for ethics as a constitutive concept provided by feminists such as Margaret Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics; Eve Cole and Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Explorations in Feminist Ethics; and Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries, which all focus on dismantling essentialist categories of human agency, difference, and identity. Third, he believes the book contributes to our understanding of the political nature and function of discourse within civic and political affairs through the concept of difference rather than identity. Seeming to advance an either/or logic between identity or difference politics, Vivian appears to sway a bit from his "middle voice" by appealing to one over the other. Contradicting a purported both/and [End Page 329] logic, he claims that the contours of ethos must be explicated "in terms of difference rather than identity, multiplicity instead of unity, and mutation instead of essential continuity" (15). While "affirming the merit of otherness...

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