Comments on CRTK (Essay Number Two)

Gaonkar's replies to his critics reveal cracks in the first essay but also point up weaknesses in some of the respondents' commentaries.

1. CRTK acknowledges the validity of Leff's claim that rhetoric in its productive/performative sense has traditionally had a hermeneutic counterpart in the form of imitation. Gaonkar successfully finesses this point, however, noting that imitation is still tied to the practical aims of a civic rhetoric. What neither Leff nor Gaonkar acknowledge is the complementarity of "performance" and imitation in the writing of globalist case studies. Just as ancient orators learned from past speeches, so contemporary critics find pedagogical value in each other's case studies. Gross makes the interesting suggestion that the findings from case studies in RS be systematically synthesized; mine is that we learn from people like Campbell, Gross, Krips, Latour, Lyne, McCloskey, how, as critics, they do "their rhetoric."

2. I said earlier that IRRS was insufficiently developed as regards key terms and propositions. Sure enough, these chickens come home to roost. CRTK recognizes the need to clarify its sense of hermeneutics as translation in light of questioning by Miller and others. But Gaonkar's "operationalization" of translation as "practical criticism" (p. 344) raises the question as to why Gaonkar employs the meta-language of rhetorical hermeneutics rather than rhetorical criticism to begin with. The relationship between hermeneutics and criticism remains under-theorized.

3. CRTK qualifies Gaonkar's "thinness" thesis, maintaining at this point that the CRL is "dense" in particular ways and isn't intrinsically thin. Likewise, he expresses some surprise that Miller and Leff (whose readings are otherwise astute, he says) would read him as maintaining the impossibility of rhetoric shifting from a productionist to an interpretive vocabulary. Likewise, he claims now that he's been erroneously criticized for opposing the globalization project. So sensitive is he to the possibility of "misinterpretation" that he attempted to head off my own reading at the pass with an e-mail. Whatever my critique, he said, "Just don't charge me with holding a brief for the so-called 'little' rhetoric. I am completely agnostic regarding the scope of rhetoric. If anything, I point out that it is not possible to delimit rhetoric once rhetoric is conceived as an interpretive method or meta-language" (Gaonkar, Nov. 25, 1997). (6)

Ironic, isn't it, that Gaonkar, the enemy of the ideology of agency, should have his own intentions for IRRS repeatedly misconstrued? As previously indicated (see Endnote 2), it is possible to read portions of IRRS as "meta" to the debate between Big rhetoric and Little rhetoric. Farrell reads IRRS as merely being "about limit conditions and strains on rhetorical criticism that become apparent within the rhetoric of science." 318 Yet even Farrell finds Gaonkar's take on globalization to be "depreciative." (322) I will have more to say about this in my concluding comments.

4. In CRTK Gaonkar usefully clarifies what he wants from rhetoric as a meta-discourse (if it is to become one). Rather than merely showing, formulaically, how a given text is rhetorical (by meeting criteria of persuasion, addressivity, and suasory motives), Gaonkar wants critics to demonstrate the priority of the rhetorical dimension in the text. Critics must avoid "deferring" the text (Gaonkar's "po-mo" way of saying they must truly grapple with it), as Campbell "deferred" in his early essays on Darwin. And for this they need a "thick" vocabulary. Finally, they need to develop "regionally specific" concepts and terms. I disagree with much that Gaonkar suggests here, but I believe all of it is useful.

Four brief rejoinders may be in order.

(a) Showing how an unobtrusively persuasive text is rhetorical can be of immense value, no matter how many people are doing it (Gaonkar says this sort of criticism is ubiquitous).

(b) Showing the priority of the rhetorical dimension assumes some kind of competition between theory-derived dimensions, such as the Marxian and the psychoanalytic. Booth (1979), McKeon (1987) and Burke (1969) make a case for potential complementarity between different ways of seeing the same object, and I would agree.

(c) I'm not convinced that "thick" descriptions of one text should always be our goal. Sometimes we achieve more by "rhetoric of" studies that exhibit recurrent features in multiple texts.

(d) A related point: we often achieve great insights with a limited meta-vocabulary. See for example Elshtain's (1987) distinction between "open" and "closed" narratives in an essay on the rhetoric of Women's Studies.

(e) The "regionalization" of concepts may be useful, but I've also found it extremely helpful in doing my own case studies in RS (e.g. Simons, 1989b; 1993; 1995) to appropriate meta-language from writers in other fields, such as Elshtain.