The Challenge of the a priori

I arrive to this conversation late – but earnestly– and thank you for not minding that I participate.

For my first post, a pedagogical demonstration seems salient, if only because I am working through some of these same topics with my undergraduate students in ENG 4020 Rhetorical Theory and Practice.

Last week, we read “The Death of the Author” (Barthes, 1968) and “What Is An Author?” (Foucault, 1969) in the context of our unit on Agent/cy. The discussion surrounding these texts often and predictably inspires an impassioned defense of what students have come to understand as the writer, and whom they usually conflate with Barthes’ and Foucault’s Author, in spite of the marked differences between Barthes’ Author and Foucault’s Author; between Barthes’ Author and scriptor; and between Barthes’ scriptor and their own notions of writer. After several sessions of recursive explanation, we finally arrive – as a class – at the profound realization that our defenses for the role of writer (whether that role is actual, imagined, or historically situated) are inherently post-structuralist. They assume an attitude towards text that accounts for standpoint and positioning, and they assume that we assign some agency to the text – to the discourse itself. 

[Erin’s post lucidly shares a similar realization in noting that Barthes’ reader is “the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed” (147), i.e., in realizing the reader as a critical and epistemic destination.]

As they puzzle through metaphorical images of death – i.e., Is it a killing or a getting beyond? A manipulation or a redundancy? – and trade clichés about texts being little more than what readers bring to them, I usually ask them to consider Foucault’s “author-function” in one of two forms:

1. The post-modern fairy tale, such as David Wiesner's The Three Pigs, which illumines their active role in reconstructing not only the expected narrative, but also the deviant narratives and tropes. Who is the narrator as it de/reconstructs its own storyline? Sometimes this activity helps them build empathy towards Barthes’ task, which was more observational than not: What has come of the role of the narrator in the Modern novel?
2. The old and new iterations of the September 11 digital archive, specifically to witness the shifts from preserving public memory according to document types and genres, to collaboratively reconstructing public memory, in turn raising questions about what event is actually being memorialized?

While the actual case studies I use when I teach this class may change, they have consistently caused me to approach these texts as raising problems of origin rather than agency. 

That’s how I would like to reflect on our discussion here. I have artificially constructed a problem for us by assigning a reading “set” of excerpts from On Rhetoric and Institutio Oratoria alongside Barthes, and sprinkling in a few secondaries to help contextualize Sophistic practices and classical dilemmas. But, you know by now I trust you to see through the parameters of this “set.” We are not reading for continuity and coherence, but for gaps. Moreover, we are reading for gaps that will make us more self-reflexive about our reading methodologies.

True, the readings provide an accessible and limited conversation about the notions of origin, agency, and anxiety, and those ideas together constitute a viable strand in rhetorical theory and practice. They may even raise concrete questions that let us know what key terms to gloss so that we can reconstruct their historical contexts.

But we know better than to assume that these are the most authoritative readings or the best ones through which to consider “anxieties of origin and influence” (the topic designating our discussion this week). We cannot reasonably make comparisons about the whole of Aristotle’s or Quintilian’s practice through excerpts, even when we trace them expertly for a single concept. A’s and Q’s rhetorical “systems” function distinctly, even if we can reasonably infer an intellectual geneaology that stems from Aristotle’s lyceum lectures to Quintilian’s progymnasmata.

In sum, these clustered “sets” are merely starting points for your own inquiry, and for noting dis/similarities to be questioned further so that we can learn more about the histories of our theoretical traditions. They are also cases through which we can interrogate reductive historicizations while also grasping on to the basic tenets of what we should be studying if we are interested in studying a particular topic or theorist further.

So, while the titular metaphor in Barthes’ piece is Author-with-a-capital-A, his proofs and your dilemmas seem more steeped in questions of whether discourse is a priori, rather than in questions of who is in control. The former, I think, is the concept over which we fight.

So I will take up my own challenge, which is to extend this idea to the conversation we have created between Aristotle, Quintilian, and Barthes (although I think several of you have already been successful in making this connection in your posts): questions of invention, initiation and origin have been so long and persistently at work in the development of both rhetorical praxis and theory that they may be the uber-dilemmas at work here.

For Barthes, writing doesn’t report or represent the real—it is the real. Frankly, I wouldn’t expect differently from a semiologist, and so I take this as Barthes’ basic premise and the foundation on which we should read the rest of his essay. On the verge of developing a post-structuralist consciousness of text and life, one of two things might happen to the conventional notion of the idealized Author in Barthes’ scheme:

1. he could be made redundant by increasing the importance of a reader in textual criticism; or
2. he could become a scriptor, and hence a performer of a text whose fullest interpretation and destiny is best inscribed on a reader.

We should recognize this as a binarism, and not an ideal one. Barthes' metaphors (death, birth, removal) may signify that the figurehead of the author becomes redundant the minute that we acknowledge that a text is simultaneously written by its writers and its readers; it cancels itself; it erases itself. This is because of the ongoing and active nature of a reader’s co-construction of the text, according to values and beliefs and experiences s/he brings to it.

I imagine Barthes might reason that you can’t have a figurehead and an active reader, so it is one or the other. Hence, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text to an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (147)

While we have a right to be dissatisfied by this limited logical construction, both options show that the role of reading for Barthes has become more a task of “disentangling” than “deciphering.” Again – not necessarily because of the changing roles of author/reader or rhetor/audience, but because of problems of origin.

Here's where I'd like to challenge us: what helps me to transcend the difficulties of discussing Barthes is realizing that meaning may still be a-priori in the acceptance of Author-with-a-capital-A, and it need not be a-priori for the scriptor. For Barthes in this essay, the reader brings meaning to the text, i.e., readers are involved in the continual and persistent co-construction of meaning.

This concept is by no means unique to Barthes. It’s clear from the commonplace arguments framing Aristotle's lectures that even his teachers and critics believed acts of speaking and listening were highly epistemic and highly contextual. They involved knowing a lot about a lot of other things:

“Now, since pisteis not only come from logical demonstration but from speech that reveals character …, we should be acquainted with the kinds of characters distinctive of each form of constitution; for the character distinctive of each is necessarily most persuasive to each” (Rhetoric I.8.5 – Book I, Chapter 8, paragraph 5 in some versions)

And in much of what was not excerpted in our anthology, Quintilian recapitulates Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Cicero’s views on rhetoric, showing how they been circulated and recirculated. He even summarizes past arguments, going so far as to convolute Greek and Roman definitions of the same or similar concepts in order to split hairs. For these reasons, I like to read Quintilian as a meta-theorist. Book V of the Institutio provides a historiography of “authority” by contrasting Greek kriseis with Roman “Cause,” while Book XII opens with a poignant metaphor indicating how Quintilian feels others have failed to deliver what they promise.

“For what can such men produce appropriate to particular causes, of which the aspect is perpetually varied and new? How can they reply to questions propounded by the opposite party? How can they at once meet objections, or interrogate a witness, when even topics of the commonest kind, such as are handled in most causes, they are unable to pursue the most ordinary thoughts in any words but those which they have long before prepared? ” (Institutio II.4.28 – Book 2, Chapter 4, line 28) or (B/H 372)

I have gone on much too long in this post …

-Dr. Graban