Placing the Self in the Field of Truth: Irony and Self-Fashioning in Ancient and Postmodern Rhetorical Theory

Curiously enough, it seems only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

deMan 1983.211

The identification of speaking the truth and having seen the truth, this identification between the one who speaks, and the source, the origin, the root of truth: there is here, without a doubt, a many-sided and complex process that has had a capital importance for the history of truth in our societies.

Foucault 2012.49²

You are standing in a field. There is a person in front of you and a tree to one side. To make a true statement about the tree to that person, you must use language to form a proposition that makes your experience of the tree intelligible to the person you are addressing. If you say “the tree is an oak” and Marcus perceives a birch, the statement will not be received as true, but if Marcus’s perceptions can be brought under the same linguistic categories as your own, then your statement will be received as true and, inasmuch as it will now be able to be reproduced by other speakers having similar experiences and again received as true, it will become “the truth.” Such is the classic western referential understanding of truth, from Augustine’s discussion of how children learn the names of things (Confessions 1.8) to Hegel’s deconstruction of the empiricist postulate of sense-certainty (see below). A similar paradigm underlies many of our current notions of scientific method, particularly as it is deployed in the social sciences. This scenario, however, begs certain questions. How do we align Marcus’s categories with our own? How do we agree on the nature of an oak, let alone beauty, justice, or national identity? What kind of force, suasion, or manipulation needs to be deployed for such truth to come into being, for experience to be understandable, and for place (topos), a location on a grid of intelligibility, to take place? These are central questions for philosophy and rhetorical theory from antiquity to the present. This paper argues that only a concerted reading of the ancient texts in conversation with their modern and postmodern interlocutors can begin to help us form cogent answers to those questions—can permit us the historical depth and theoretical sophistication necessary to begin to understand our own conjuncture in the “history of truth.”

Truth on the model outlined above is, in fact, the product of a rhetorical situation, that is to say, of the relation between a speaker, his audience, and their pragmatic situation. The truth of the proposition is not dependent on whether the tree in question really is an oak, a birch, or a larch.³ There is no larch, nor even any tree, until such time as the category that renders them intelligible has come into being. The prelinguistic larch qua larch is a nonsequitur. My perceptions, as the Stoics recognized, cannot have the status of truth, nor can referential truth exist until the data that constitute those perceptions have been raised to the level of universalizing, and hence linguistic or “sayable,” categories (cf. Frede 1994.110–11, Nussbaum 1994.327, and Hankinson 2003.65). Moreover, if we are to be assured that those perceptions are not the products of a private delirium, they must be received as true by at least one other speaker who has correlated his or her own experience with those categories and therefore provided “confirmation.” This is how truth works.

None of this is to say that the experiences in question—our perceptions of the oak, the birch, or the larch—do not play a decisive role in the rhetorical constitution of truth or that they are somehow unreal. On one level, we have res (“things”) and we have verba (“words”; cf. Frede 1994.116–17), and their nonidentity is the condition of the possibility of language itself. Things do exist, and the fact that the “word” is not the “thing...