Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation

Chapter 6: The Rest Is Silence

157 Chapter 6 The Rest Is Silence In the previous chapter, I showed how the ethos of the past, embodied in symbolic personae such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, provides the discursive conditions according to which we define our relationship to such historical figures in defining ourselves as inheritors of their troubled social, political, and ethical legacy. The present chapter provides further analysis of the ways in which our symbolic relations with figures from the past engender the political and ethical practices through which we conceive of ourselves. In what follows, I expand on the discursive interplay of past and present featured in the previous chapter by examining the interplay of speech and silence that discloses in greater detail the symbolic formation and transformation of time, memory, and historical experience constitutive of different subject positions and institutional relations. Since antiquity, the topic of silence has posed a dubious significance for the arts of discourse. In her study of women’s rhetoric in Pharaonic Egypt, Barbara Lesko outlines the fundamental principles of Egyptian rhetoric, which contemporary scholars might describe as its “five canons.” The first “canon” of Egyptian rhetoric, she reports, was silence: “When one finds oneself attacked, one holds back and lets the opponent have his say, in the likelihood the opponent or accuser will make a fool of himself, becoming enraged while you exhibit cool, detached self-possession, which in itself should win you points” (1997, 90). Instead of regarding silence as an obstacle or hindrance to rhetorical practice, such pedagogy recommended it as a guiding artistic principle. But what was the symbolic nature of silence in this context? Lesko’s description suggests that silence was defined in Egyptian rhetoric much like it would be defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and Western ontology more generally: in dialectical contrast to the voice, as the contrasting negative phenomenon that merely amplified the rhetorical impact of one’s speech. 158 Being Made Strange Can one apprehend the rhetorical sense and value of this silence, its utility as a basis for rhetorical practice, according to the dominant logic of metaphysics , with its incessant valorization of speech over silence or presence over absence? Foucault once remarked that “silence is one of those things that has unfortunately been dropped from our culture. We don’t have a culture of silence” (1988b, 4). If Foucault’s assessment is correct, then one may attribute such an omission to the predominant metaphysical orientation of Western values and ideals, which have been defined, for centuries, by the demand that one provide a logos of thought, knowledge, and experience— a demand that Foucault characterizes as “the obligation of speaking” (4). Simply put, the founding distinction between sensible and intelligible phenomena in Western philosophy has prevented silence from attaining little more than a negative value in our heritage. For a culture in which the transcendent ethos of speech and presence retain considerable organizing value, encounters with the ineffable, the mystical, or the inexplicable are among the strangest experiences of alterity. The silences of the past characterize perhaps the most ghostly of former persons and events. In his classic essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History ” (1968), Walter Benjamin observes that selective elements of the past remain symbolically lodged in the present, as much a part of an epoch’s defining substance and character, its ethos, as any contemporary phenomena. The present is not simply isolated by the immediate past on one side and the proximate future on the other; styles, values, and experiences of bygone eras may share a profoundly deeper symbolic relevance to the present than its most recent yesterday. The social, political, or ethical sense and value of our symbolic relations with even the most foreign and mysterious elements of the past crucially engender the seemingly transparent and familiar ethos of contemporary subject positions. In this chapter, I interrogate traditional notions of silence in order to explore further how the rhetoric of self and other, present and past, or good and evil discursively produces conditions for political and ethical judgment. The enigmatic status of silence in Western inquiry serves as a lens through which one may scrutinize common assumptions about the relationship between present and past, history and politics, immanence and transcendence. Contemporary scholarship habitually defines the rhetorical properties of silence according to a metaphysical logic that relegates silence to the status of a negative, absence, or lack. Although scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences have exhibited...