Notes
123 IN?M 1. Flight West 1. See, respectively, Lu, “An Essay on the Work of Composition,” “Professing Multiculturalism,” and “Redefining the Literate Self”; Smitherman, Word from the Mother; Kells, Hector P. Garcia; Holmes, Revisiting Racialized Voice; Fox, Defending Access and “Race and Collective Resistance”; Ball and Lardner, African American Literacies Unleashed; Okawa, “Removing Masks”; Miller, “The Nervous System”; Crawford, “Building a Theory of Affect in Cultural Studies Composition Pedagogy”; Mutnick, Writing in an Alien World; Marback, “From Athens to Detroit,” “Corbett’s Hand,” “Detroit and the Closed Fist,” “Ebonics,” and “Police Violence and Denials of Race”; Daniell, “Narratives of Literacy”; Destigter, “Good Deeds” and Reflections of a Teacher Citizen; Kates, “The Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown”; Kopelson, “Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning”; Young, Minor Re/Visions; Hesford, Framing Identities; Stull, Amid the Fall, Dreaming of Eden; Severino, “Two Approaches to ‘Cultural Text’”; Soliday, “Translating Self and Difference through Literacy Narratives”; Kynard, “‘Trying to Bend the Tree When It Is Already Grown’”; Mailloux, Reception Histories; Roskelly and Ronald, Reason to Believe; Flower, Long, and Higgins, Learning to Rival, and Flower’s sections in that book, “An Experimental Way of Knowing” and “The Rival Hypothesis Stance and the Practice of Inquiry,” as well as her CCC article “Talking Across Difference.” 2. At three points in Democracy Matters, West refers to parrhesia. The first instance is in reference to Socrates’ explanation in Plato’s Apology: “There, gentleman, you have the true facts, which I present to you without any concealment or suppression, great or small. I am fairly certain that this plain speaking of mine is the cause of my unpopularity, and this really goes to prove that my statements are true, and that I have described correctly the nature and the grounds of the calumny which has been brought against me” (16, sec. 24a). West’s second mention of parrhesia involves his wishes for the media: “There can be no democratic paideia—the critical cultivation of an active citizenry—without democratic parrhesia—a bold and courageous press willing to speak against the misinformation and mendacities of elites” (39). His third and most extended comment about parrhesia (208–12) suggests how the concept informs political treatises such as Plato’s Republic and James Madison’s Federalist Papers. Although several competing conceptions of parrhesia exist, for my purposes the frank questioning of received wisdom remains the heart of the matter. Michel Foucault, in his seminar “Discourse and Truth,” which was conducted in 1983 at the University of California at Berkeley, traced the origin of the term in Greek literature to Euripides. Foucault’s major objective in this regard was to develop, in his words, “a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy” as distinct from an “analytics of truth” (Fearless Speech [170–71]). Foucault described the function of parrhesia in the ancient Greek world to be opposite that of rhetoric in that the former could entail no deception as could the latter. For a parrhesiastes, the subject of the enunciation (the speaking subject), coincided precisely with the subject of enunciandum, the belief held. Fundamental to the exercise of parrhesia was courage because it almost always placed the speaker at risk. The frank speech of kings, for example, was not considered an act of parrhesia by Foucault because speaking frankly posed no danger to kings (12–24). Foucault also recognized a “crisis of the function of parrhesia” (72), which related to questions of who should be able to use parrhesia, whether frankness alone was the sufficient condition for truth, and how parrhesia should connect, if at all, to mathesis—knowledge and education (72–73). Foucault arrived at his Berkeley comments by way of a long and circuitous process that was reflected in some of his lectures at the College de France in 1982, later published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject. First, he drew upon the work Philodemus and explained that for the Epicureans, the frankness of parrhesia was integral to master-disciple or guide-student relationships (137). Later, Foucault noted that if the proper mission of students is to “build up a relationship of sovereignty to themselves, with regard to themselves, typical of the wise and virtuous subject” (385), then their guides, the ones whose practice of parrhesia is fundamental, should deploy parrhesia in a disinterested yet generous manner. In other words, as Foucault expressed it, “Generosity towards the other is at the very heart of the moral obligation of parrhesia” (385). Still later, after acknowledging...
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