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Street Talk/ Straight Talk 1. Discourse—an order of response, a mode of understanding, for which various rhetorical features mayfunction as symptoms. \et rhetoric is never wholly coextensive with discourse. Discourse and rhetoric control one another, yes—but precisely because of that control, neither is wholly at one with the other. Nevertheless—the relation of discourse to rhetoric isnot the arbitrary relation, negotiable by introspection, of signifiedto signifier; it is the determined relation, negotiable by analysis, of the unconscious to the enunciated. 2. According to the discourse of "Discourse," rhetoric is quantifiable, particular, arrives in delimitable units, while meanings, to quote Quine (8), cannot be "individuated." Consider, then, four modes of rhetoric: Street talk. Brutal, repetitious, vulgar, it marks a subdiscourse of ignorance , rumor, misunderstanding, and outright superstition. It is fixated— now on the aggressive, now on the sexual, now on the cupidinously acquisitive . The rhetoric of an underworld, its raison is lying; in the pursuit of myriad dishonesties and selfishnesses, "getting over," as it most recently characterizes a major factor of its own enterprise. It arises in sexually high dimorphic idiolects: But whether we move in the realm of gossip or of braggadocio, whatever its topic, the verybanality of itsendlessly repeated circuits makes it the mark of the limited, the illicit, a moment away from brute dumbness in one direction, a moment away from the linguistic zero of pure chatter in another. Straight talk. Indicating it with the rhetorical mark reserved for it by "street talk,"it is mellifluous,precise, sophisticated: The subdiscourse it takes for itself is "the learned," the characterization of itself it employs in the acknowledgement of its own truth. It functions to mediate between truth and knowledge, and thus is saturated by both. It functions to resolve disorder, to clarify confusion, to calm and commingle the diverse 2 42 Shorter Views and the disparate, "to inform"—as it often says of itself—where formal differences and divisionshave become unclear, violently erased, violated. Supposedly it is sexless—though this is the same as saying that it is unmarked , male, and materially wealthy. It takes all topics to itself and enchains them in a limitlesslegitimacythat everywhere displaces them and replaces them, now in the shadow, now in the light, of its articulation. Yet both these rhetorical modes cast shadows. Straight talk. Indicating it with linguistic marks drawn from its own rhetoric, it is awkward, obscurantist, and often crashingly irrelevant. It refuses to remain within the recognizable discursive fields of the hearer and, by so doing, fulfills—more or less badly—only the function of intimidation . It uses knowledge to hide the truth. Thus it exists as an oppressive violence in a field in which articulation itself forever strives to mystify the veryviolence of its own enterprise. In its privileging of speculation , it excludes all action and consigns all reference to the exile of the illegitimate. Thus the very hollownesswith which it resonates is one with the lies of a sermon delivered in a church without a god. Street talk. Indicating it with linguistic marks drawn from its own rhetoric , it is clear, concrete, and honest. If it is often unfair, it is factual and calls a spade a spade. Its specific vulgarity is the stuff of poetry—in the sense that good taste is the enemy of great art. Within its compass, you know where you stand. Used with clarity, its wisdom rivals the ancients'. Used with economy, it becomes song. The local inscription of its logic (among the "streetwise") is far more powerful than the vagaries of that "common sense" that it and straight talk both have abjured. And the endlessness of its blasphemies is, finally, both defense against and acknowledgement of the suffering that is the lot of all, but especially the poor, that straight talk has put—along with action—outside the precinct of what may be legitimately articulated. 3. Imagine a discourse, flung down on our coordinate system, traversing all four of the rhetorical quadrants outlined above: To one side of it rises the axial of death. Any utterance within that discourse is on a continuous and uninflected curve that shoots across a deadly locus; it is stopped by and absorbed by death at that terrifying and totalized point of unity. From there, the curve flows toward the axial of life—but a life that is wholly and ideally secure, rich in pleasure, close to immobile: That is to say that, above all things, this particular biotic axial is "safe." The axis of...

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