The discursive construction of reality

John Benjamins Publishing Company This is a contribution from Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts Constructivist perspectives Edited by Esperanza Morales-López and Alan Floyd © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com) Please contact rights@benjamins.nl or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com Chapter 3 The discursive construction of reality in the context of rhetoric Constructivist rhetoric David Pujante In this chapter, I reflect on the rhetorical origins of the constructivist tradition and its current revival in this latter discipline I begin with a brief history of the evolution of rhetorical thinking from its origin in antiquity, considering its subsequent conversion into a mere treatise on stylistic resources; this understanding of rhetoric would last for centuries in the West, and would lead it to its decline, until it later recovered during the twentieth century Its development over the last hundred years is summarised on three levels: (1) restoration of the tradition inherited (inventory of tropes and figures of speech), (2) recovery of all five rhetorical operations and their political and social reuse and (3) configuration of constructivist rhetoric This third level is my proposal I define our understanding of the totality of discursive-rhetorical strategies, and the construction of diverse rhetorical speeches, as the way we make conscious our cognitive experiences Keywords: rhetoric, constructivism, constructivist rhetoric, discourse analysis, cognitive frame Und was nun die Wahrheit betrifft, so gab und wird es Niemand geben, der sie wüsste in Bezug auf die Götter und alle die Dinge, welche ich erwähne. / Denn spräche er auch einmal zufällig das allervollendetste, so weiss er’s selber doch nicht / Denn nur Wahn ist allen beschieden  Xenophanes (Diels 1903: 56–57)  Über das Unsichtbare wie über das Irdische haben die Götter Gewissheit, uns aber als Menschen ist nur Mutmassung gestattet Alkmaion (Diels 1903: 103) doi 10.1075/dapsac.71.03puj © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company 42 David Pujante Introduction I believe that behind the complex rhetorical theory that covers the construction of various types of public discourse – a theory that is based on the classic division into the five rhetorical operations: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio or pronuntiatio (Pujante 2003: 75) – lies an epistemological foundation that has been neglected for centuries, and which coincides with modern constructivist approaches The approach we know today as “radical constructivism,” which consists of highlighting and explaining how scientific, social and individual realities are invented (or constructed), exposing the supposed objectivity of the knowledge acquired, is in fact the final stage in a very old approach We can trace the origins of constructivism to antiquity, to the Presocratics such as Xenophanes (Diels 1903: 56–57) and Alcmaeon of Croton (Diels 1903: 103), through Pyrrho, to the Sceptics in general; and particularly to the Sophist thought (the origin of rhetoric) that subsequently inspired the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and later to Giambattista Vico: in this chapter, we will endeavour to trace this historical line clearly down to the present day, to what we will argue is the final stage in modern rhetorical thinking, which we call constructivist rhetoric Although it is not directly related to ancient rhetorical thought (which is the subject that concerns us here), constructivism can also be found in Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Carl G Jung, Jean Piaget, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and many other modern and contemporary philosophers and scientists (Watzlawick 1981) We are aware of modern current constructivist thinking through books such as Paul Watzlawick’s anthology Die erfundene Wircklichkeit (‘Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know?’) (1981), and the series of books that have shown us the thought of the biologists Maturana (Maturana 1996 and 2006) and Varela (Maturana and Varela 1998), for whom, as Esperanza Morales-López summarises in her chapter in this present work: “Cognition is not something separated from corporeality (our natural and physical surroundings) nor from the individual’s subjectivity (emotions) nor from the communication processes (languaging)”; also, the books by the neuroscientist Damasio (2010) and the thinker of complexity and theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra (1975 and 1996) have contributed to this line of thought While the tradition of constructivism has been passed down to us from antiquity, as mentioned above, through fragments of Xenophanes and Alcmaeon of Croton, the thought of Pyrrho (Sextus Empiricus 1996) and the Sceptics in general, the constructivist tradition regarding social discourse comes from the Sophists, who in antiquity were superseded by the thought of the philosophers (Pujante © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 43 2003: 18ff, 2004), but whose tradition was revived by the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Bruni, Salutari, Poliziano and Pontano (Grassi 1986), continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Vico (1725, 1730), then revitalised for the contemporary world by the liberalising figure of Friedrich Nietzsche (Pujante 1997) The epistemological basis of ancient sophistry (constructivism Avant la Lettre) and its historical disrepute In antiquity, rhetoric emerged at the same time as democracy, in order to teach the free citizen to use public speeches to express his opinions on various present, past and future social problems in the best way possible Is it wise to make war on the Persians? Is a man who has stolen an apple so that his children not die of hunger a thief? Is the new wall around Athens worthy of praise? Today they could be formulated as follows: Is the war in Syria wise? Should we expel from Europe the immigrants who have arrived? Has there been enough public spending on education and health in recent years? In other words, rhetoric was created as a tool to establish the discourses that help to make decisions on the future, present or past truth of societies, and the interactions between their creators (human beings) and their surroundings; these discourses are interpretative linguistic constructs of society In the background, there is a problem of epistemology, that is, the means of access to knowledge Early rhetoric made no distinction between practical knowledge (then the property of the Sophists or the rhetoricians) and speculative knowledge (then the property of the philosophers) As Cicero reminds us in De Oratore: […] the subjects that we are now investigating were designated by a single title, the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences being entitled philosophy Socrates robbed them of this general designation, and in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together. (De orat III XVI 60; Cicero 1982: 49) Once the division between Sophists and philosophers had been firmly established, philosophical antiquity gave us the dual way of understanding access to knowledge represented by Plato and Aristotle Since then, tradition has divided the Western world into Platonists and Aristotelians Platonists have always considered the truth to lie inside them, and knowledge as something to be discovered within The outside is a world of appearances Aristotelians, by contrast, have seen the world in which we live as reality, and our senses as an objective instrument for discovering it The details that our senses give us are classified and categorised to obtain © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 44 David Pujante knowledge of this reality Both Plato and Aristotle thought in terms of knowledge of absolute truths, truth with a capital T, and went in search of the Truth Before them, the other philosophers, the so-called Sophists (the rhetoricians), remained in the sphere of doxa, or opinion, because they did not seek access to transcendent truths, but instead social ones Protagoras said: “As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they not exist For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge: both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life” (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 465) In this approach, language became the instrument par excellence – the medium through which the world was interpreted, a world restricted to questions accessible to man, naturally “Furthermore, in his dialectic he neglected the meaning in favour of verbal quibbling,” Diogenes Laertius (1925: 465) also says of Protagoras, calling to mind the advent of Heidegger many centuries later One can see the widely different approaches of philosophers and Sophists The latter were also in fact philosophers, as we have seen Cicero would say, and they would also be considered as such by Diogenes Laertius, who also reports that Protagoras was a disciple of Democritus But let us make the distinction between the two groups to continue the tradition; their diverse approaches made Aristotle believe that only demonstration leads to science, while considering that dialectics (the method of rational deduction, as used by his master Plato) and rhetoric (a method of persuasion) had the appearance of philosophy In Plato: In Aristotle: DIALECTIC (PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE) DIALECTIC AND RHETORIC SCIENCE (Method of rational deduction) (Appearance of philosophy) (Demonstration) DISPUTE PROBABILITY RHETORIC (Method of persuasion) This means that, when Aristotle wrote his Rhetoric, he was not interested in the link between truth and speech, but instead focused on the communicability of what the speaker says Moreover, the plane of reference of discourse lies not in things, but instead involves opinions (doxai) or the community’s belief system (písteis) Aristotelian approaches successfully achieved continuity in Western history, reaching their zenith during Cartesian rationalism By contrast, the rhetorical line became increasingly diluted (consequently the approach of Vico, who lived in the centuries when Descartes prevailed, was discredited), and rhetoric became, increasingly, clearly separated from everything that meant reflection and knowledge There was a significant breach, on the one hand, between dialectical and hermeneutical procedures, and on the other between the logical and experimental sciences – a major distinction that brings us to the twentieth century: the arts as against the sciences, the speculative as against the scientific (Gadamer 1960: 293–308) © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 45 This separation was in fact long-standing, and had been noted in Roman times A book by Cicero from which we have quoted above mentions it clearly This is De Oratore, in which the author considers the dire consequences of this separation In it, Cicero advocates a redefinition of rhetoric in the earlier manner (the one prior to the split with philosophy), and he considers it to be the art of thinking and not the art of speaking (which then became the exclusive art of good writing) Cicero thereby distanced himself from the rhetorical masters of his age, for whom rhetoric simply meant learning a set of rules for making speeches In De Oratore, Cicero proposes to restore the link between oratory and philosophy However, as Edmond Courbaud tells us in his introduction to the edition of Cicero’s treatise (in the French translation and with the critical Latin text): […] malgré l’autorité de sa parole, Cicéron n’a eu aucune influence […] Chose curieuse, son influence a été médiocre même sur lui-même, et le Cicéron des discours ne s’est pas assez souvenu du Cicéron théoricien de l’art oratoire  (Cicero 1985: xv) [‘Despite the authority of his word, Cicero has had no influence […] Curiously, his influence has been limited even on himself, and the Cicero of the speeches does not remind us very much of the theoretical Cicero of the art of oratory.’] For centuries, knowledge was in the hands of philosophical reflection with a rational basis, and its key notion, the concept; it distanced itself from the word and the metaphorical processes of language The origin and value of discourse, which recognised and diagnosed social problems by linking thoughts and words, was forgotten Novelty and freedom of thought were no longer considered to be displayed in the condensation of speech (in the tropologisation that occurs in speech acts), and there alone The beginnings of the recovery of rhetoric in the twentieth century The twentieth century saw rationalism and logocentrism (the discourses of truth that rationalism constructed, intending them to be immovable) fall into disrepute Above all, the entire century witnessed the revival of language as the primary object of study in both philosophy (the philosophy of language) and philological fields, with new linguistics and new literary theory (the theory of literature which began with the Russian formalists and continued in schools such as the Stylistic school and New Criticism, until the important post-structuralist period of Derrida’s deconstructionism, and everything that has been termed the Nietzsche renaissance) (Derrida 1978; de Man 1979; Fish (1989); Pujante 1997: 167ff) This whole line of thought had an exceptional precursor: Friedrich Nietzsche © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 46 David Pujante In his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche considered the problem of access to knowledge – what it is possible to know and how the experience of that knowledge is expressed In other words, although it resembles a book by a classical philologist, a study of ancient tragedy, the study of this aesthetic expression in fact leads Nietzsche to an epistemological and ontological consideration that is inseparable from aesthetics Let us briefly explain this perplexing entanglement According to Nietzsche, there are two types of experience – the Apollonian and the Dionysian The Apollonian leads us to knowledge of the world of appearances in which we find ourselves These are a series of unstable, momentary appearances that inevitably come to an end This experience is recounted with the language that we humans usually use – Apollonian language, the language of masks As opposed to experience and Apollonian language, there is the Dionysian experience, which occurs when the veil of Maya, the veil of appearances, is torn away, and we can see behind it This transcendent experience (which may be either of the awful or of an absolute void) requires another language to express it, and Nietzsche concludes that man has only occasionally achieved this special expression, relating it to aesthetic speech, such as that of ancient tragedy With this approach, Nietzsche debunks rational language as a language of absolute truths and further calls for special languages to speak what is unspeakable with rational language (Pujante 1997) Nietzsche was also the first to restore rhetoric as an alternative to the imposition of rational discourse on society when the prestige of rhetoric was at its lowest, on the occasion of a course he taught on rhetoric in Basel in the summer of 1874 (Nietzsche 2000) He thereby recovered two important foundations of rhetoric related to its epistemology: the interpretative discourse of the world, as the only way of understanding both it and ourselves within it, and language as a powerful and mysterious source of that interpretative power – a power which had already been recognised in The Encomium of Helen by Gorgias (2003: 76–84) There is a whole Romantic line of thought (and the last Romantic in that respect is Nietzsche) which emphasises special aesthetic speech, specifically that of the poets, as the truest and deepest Perhaps the paradigm is Hölderlin, to whom the second Heidegger dedicated important reflections (1936) Nietzsche himself considered him his favourite poet from a very young age, wrote about him when Hölderlin was still a poet in disgrace and, as a result of such an unfortunate choice, was reprimanded by his tutor Today, we know that this was a great insight into Nietzsche’s part From Hölderlin, he learned the profound lesson of one who is able to think while poeticising: the word he thinks of is also the basis of the rhetorical thought we are considering in this reflection Hölderlin’s poem Andenken (Remembrance), which is paradigmatic in the peculiar art of that poet’s transitions (which are not logical but instead associative © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 47 transitions, thereby better suggesting the dark and mysterious aspects of speech) contains one of the lapidary concentrations of his thought – the fourth sentence, which Heidegger mentions in Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry: “Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter” (‘But what endures, the poets found’) The poet constructs the only thing that remains, using his special language The twentieth century was very important for the writing of poetry as well as for the theoretical reflection that emerged from it Poetry was considered a way to create new worlds, as well as the linguistic instrument par excellence for reality to acquire some specific significant profiles by means of analogy, metaphor and tropologisation in general: a range of discursive procedures that establish correspondences through language within the events that constitute our experience (Pujante 2003: 170) Since I was very young, I have been interested in the Romantic imagination as a mechanism of knowledge used by the Romantic poets to illuminate the dark areas of the world that operated within rationality (Pujante 1990) This led me to believe that there is a way of thinking through poetic language that is necessary as a complement to rational thought, and which obtains knowledge outside rationality Then came my readings of Nietzsche, to which I have already referred, with his proposal of ancient tragedy as a special aesthetic linguistic expression (albeit a more complex one, due to its inclusion of singing and public spectacles) – the only one which succeeds in conveying the Dionysian experience And of course, as a literary theorist, I have been influenced by all the formalist thought that considers the link between form and content to be indissoluble I summarise this as follows in my Manual of Rhetoric: The problem of the matter/form dichotomy (aggravated by the form/structure dichotomy) is of paramount importance in Russian formalist thinking, in European stylistic thought and in New Criticism (that is, in the major creative movements in literary theory in the first half of the twentieth century) and in the neoformalism of the following two decades For these movements, matter and form are the face and the underside of a leaf – they are inseparable Indeed, the form makes the matter We say what we say because we say it how we say it. (Pujante 2003: 191) However, something which was so strongly advocated by the formalism of the early twentieth century, and which has been maintained by literary theorists in the field of poetry, appears not to have permeated other discourses (Pujante 2012: 175–188) Returning to the famous final line of Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance,” this is essential for an understanding of the transition from the first Heidegger (who was still a philosopher in the traditional sense and a thinker trusting in Apollonian speech) to the second Heidegger, by which we mean the Heidegger who sees that the philosophical limitations in his first period lie in the language he uses He goes on to consider the language of artists, poets and painters, but especially the © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 48 David Pujante poetic language of Hölderlin, as a deeper one, unrelated to the obvious fissures in the logocentric constructions of the Western philosophical tradition down to Kant (Steiner 1978) Nor must we forget the most significant philosopher of language of the twentieth century: Ludwig Wittgenstein While his Tractatus shows the limitations and failings of rational speech: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) (1921: 202– 203), his lessons in aesthetics reject logical-rational explanations for aesthetic experiences A Beethoven sonata cannot be explained with a logical parallel text (a major error that persists in the world of criticism of the arts); we can simply convey the feelings we experience when we play it or hear it, we can only convey our aesthetic experience of the work of art, and nothing else The work is the work, and the Beethoven sonata is the Beethoven sonata If art is a work of art, aesthetics is talking about art, but talking about art explains nothing about art; at best, it sheds light on the aesthetic experience of others Trying to explain a work of art with non-artistic speech leads to failure, because it is a mistake “[…] to think that meaning or thought is something that only accompanies the word, and that the word is not important” (Wittgenstein 1992: 100) On what all these reflections agree? On the hegemony of the word They converge on the common experience that the realities with which we deal are constructs of language: the word makes the thought Because the first instrument for response by humans, in each of the various situations in life in which they find themselves, is not abstract or conceptual thought, but instead language It would be inconceivable if we were obliged to give a rational answer for any of life’s experiences Life requires a flexibility of response to the experience considered, and faced with conceptual formulation, which would require us to delay, we respond with linguistic formulas that are as rapid and flexible as required by the situation in which the response is requested The ingenium of which the humanists spoke (Grassi 1986: 51) is what gives us flexibility in our response – the ability to find the linguistic formula that best outlines an appropriate interpretation of all new and unexpected individual and collective situations in life Language therefore formulates the realities with which we live and in which we believe, as well as those we enjoy They are realities at various levels, which exist while their constructs are created: we can talk about Beethoven’s music and Cervantes’ Quixote as human constructs, but this also applies to all the discourses that interpret the world in the events related – both historical discourses and those concerning present and future possibility, because there is no possible distinction here between discourses for reality and discourses for fictionality Perhaps the great leap is in the discourses which seek to express the other, the Dionysian, the © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 49 transcendent: the discourses of the mystics, the discourses of the prophets, the discourses of the visionary poets Otherwise, the procedures for construction of discourses, whether they are interpretative of human societies or with a purely fictional intent, are similar – they encounter the same difficulties in expression and differ only in their goals However, it was somewhat difficult (or perhaps impossible) to consider this line of understanding of discourses, and the construction of reality with them, while the concept overshadowed the metaphor, during the long exodus through the desert, mercilessly enlightened by the exclusive sun of reason, and by theology before that When the logocentrism of the epistemological tradition that triumphed in Europe for centuries was finally criticised by thinkers, theorists of literature and the arts, philosophers and philosophers of the twentieth-century history, when the nooks and crannies of those discourses of absolute value were examined, two alternatives were clearly visible: (1) social discourse that constructs social truths and realities of time and space and (2) profound discourse (poetical-visionary, religious, mystical) constructing what remains Whether or not we believe in the second type of discourse (the Sophists never entered this uneven terrain), it is time to engage in tropological construction, and it matters little whether we call the original mechanism ingenium or intuition, because what is important is that ‘the Word happens to us’ (“Das Wort geschieht uns,” Jung 1997: 43) The revival of rhetoric and constructivism: The return to elocutio and the third level of revival of rhetorical thinking I believe that the inevitable encounter between the revival of rhetoric in the twentieth century and constructivism was simply a matter of time, as the constructivist approach is the epistemological cornerstone of ancient sophistry, and the origin of rhetorical thinking It is also the common, unifying feature of this volume, in which the construction of reality through discourses is adopted as a common premise (Salvador 2014) Today, we can speak in terms of three evolutionary stages in rhetorical approaches throughout the twentieth century, which was the century of its restoration During the twentieth century, rhetoric made the transition from being initially a mere source of stylistic explanations for good writing and good speech, its ancient legacy being considered as an inventory of rhetorical tropes and figures, based on the concept of sermo ornatus (Pujante 1999: 159ff), and once again became (in the second stage) a powerful mechanism for the construction of social © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 52 David Pujante And that poetry furnishes many aids to happiness is plain from the fact that the best and character-forming philosophy had its original roots in the gnomic sayings of the poets, and on this account the philosophers, when giving exhortations, their injunctions were always stamped, as it were, with phrases from the poets […] That the rest of the philosophers this is not paradoxical, but we shall find even those accusers of grammar, Pyrrho and Epicurus, acknowledging its necessity (Against the Professors I XIII 271–272)  (Sextus Empiricus 1949: 153–155) In Pujante (2012), I considered that elocutio could no longer be understood simply in terms of a linguistic transfer of what had previously been conceived by the mind, a simplified understanding of the elocutio as a mere operation of linguistic veneering on the content On the contrary, it is necessary to understand the elocutio as a complex operation in which other rhetorical operations converge, which are validated in the culminating act that this level of manifestation represents In the ancient rhetorical tradition (prior to the reductionist era that makes it an inventory for stylistic devices), it was not merely a simple linguistic veneer on what had been conceived by means of the two previous operations (inventio and dispositio), but instead was an act that made all the previous potentialities effective and gave them a material essence Quintilian, who was the great compiler of classical thought on rhetoric, but who was nevertheless quite conservative in his approach, seems to be quite certain that there is a close relationship between the first two operations and the third This appears to be the case throughout his treatise, not only in its definition of the trope (Pujante 1999: 196ff), but also at other times, when he shows us prosopopoeia – an elocutive figure for heightening the emotions (it takes this form in IX.2.31 of the Institutio Oratoria) – as well as a resource in the inventio in VI.1.25 (Qvintiliani 1970; Pujante 1999: 121ff) This example, among others that can be found in Quintilian’s treatise, shows us the permeability between the first two operations and the third: the elocutio The figure of speech in the elocutive field, which we call prosopopoeia, which is traditionally considered the manufacturer of discursive ornamentation (the formal aspects), inevitably forces us to relate it to the content of the discourse as it also appears in the inventio in Quintilian’s treatise The dual area in which prosopopoeia operates in Quintilian, therefore, once again calls into question the concept of sermo ornatus which has been attributed to the thought of Quintilian and to other rhetoricians of classical antiquity, according to the interpretation that has become consolidated over the centuries In other words, it is considered merely as an ornamental quantification of language (an ornamental extra) which constitutes figurative discourse, as well as its counterpart, literary discourse © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 53 The line from the ancient Sophists to Italian humanists, which we meet again in Vico in the Age of Reason, has always made it clear that the word enlightens the world However, rationalism gave weight to the concept, rather than the metaphor, in a world of discourses of absolute and supposedly objective truths: the achievement of modern scientism and Enlightened Europe It was criticism (which we have referred to extensively) of the logocentric discourses from the early twentieth century onwards, based on the new language and important advances in the philosophy of language, which led to the revival of rhetoric in its three stages outlined above In the late twentieth century, constructivism even reached scientific fields, with the work of Maturana and Varela and of Damasio, among others already mentioned I believe that one of the most enlightened contributions in constructivist reflection on discursive understanding of the world can be found in the work of Hayden White, who in his study Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) establishes a systematic theory of the poetic mechanisms which determine the production of historical accounts, the same mechanisms as those in fiction White constantly reminds us that our relationship with the past is an emotional one, and as such the poetic-expressive dimension is unquestionable and decisive There is always an evaluation on our part, and an isolated discourse is therefore impossible There are also a number of interests, wishes, commitments and fears that force us to adhere to one or another account of the same subject Today we would talk in terms of the cognitive framework as redefined by Lakoff (1987, 1999 and 2002) or the mental model of Van Dijk (2003) As Veronica Tozzi summarises for us in her introduction to the collection of articles The Historical Text As Literary Artifact (White 2003) – which includes articles from Tropics of Discourse (1978) and Figural Realism (1999), White considers a preconceptual level in the histories of Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhart, and the philosophies of history of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce This level is intrinsically aesthetic or figurative, and determines the explicit conceptual level (White 2003: 11) When reading his work, we see how, in White’s approach, the figural acts as the conceptual The figural does not necessarily need to be intrinsic against the supposed explicitness of the concept It may indeed come from the emotional, not from the rational and may therefore escape from control, if by “controlled” we mean the realm of rationality Aesthetic-figurative modes express aspects that are beyond the realm of rationalised expression, as tropological language is appropriate to the subjectivity of human ideas According to Vico, emotive language predates its rational counterpart Each and every one of the tropological and figural procedures, as we know them, come from rhetorical theory and are loaned to the theory of literary © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 54 David Pujante language – a theory which the ancient poets never considered It is therefore difficult to accept the total separation of aesthetic-literary language from other aesthetic-figurative languages (in the case that concerns us here, the tropological and figurative language of rhetorical discourses, that is, of social discourses with persuasive intent) This same consideration of the expressive superiority of aesthetic-figurative discourse was adopted by Nietzsche, who believed that tragic expression was ideal for expressing Dionysian speech, while Apollonian speech was useless for that purpose He thereby opened up the plane of reality toward planes other than the world of appearances (that of the Maya), but also opened it up to the variety of meaning, which always covers more than the specific object, more than the object itself we are expressing, in that it goes from fact to meaning We find a similar case in Jung, when in his letter of 1952 to a young researcher he said: Ich strebe bewußt und absichtlich nach dem doppelsinnigen Ausdruck, weil er der Eindeutigkeit überlegen ist und der Natur des Seins entspricht  (Jung 1997: 375) [‘I consciously and intentionally strive to express the double meaning because it is superior to the expression of a single meaning and adapts to the nature of being.’] Returning once more to rhetorical tone, these approaches represent the choice of the metaphorical (or tropological and figural, with a dynamic meaning) as opposed to the conceptual (the closed meaning) This is another strict separation (the metaphor from the concept) that has proved to be false We must therefore remember Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and their conceptual metaphors, that is, concepts born of metaphorisations (the pre-conceptual determines the conceptual), which are ways of understanding and organising experience The discourses of historians, which are addressed by White, are interpretations that judge the human past, but which also diagnose the future of humanity (as Toynbee does in Civilization on Trial) or which praise or revile the policies of their own time, and therefore fall squarely within the triad of rhetorical genres (epidictic, deliberative and judicial; Pujante 2003: 82) It is perfectly legitimate to apply Hayden White’s reflection and his outstanding practical analysis to rhetoric At the base is the formalist principle of the matter/form relationship as being similar to the top and the underside of a leaf: there is no matter without form, the matter makes the form It is easy to understand that a subject does not make a great work of literature, but instead its specific realisation, Cervantes compared to Avellaneda (the apocryphal author of Don Quixote): “The fable, no; the subject, yes” (to use the terminology of Russian formalism) However, to say that White’s approaches are formalistic can lead to error © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 55 While it must be stressed (once again we take his thought to the rhetorical sphere) that everything that makes up the inventio and the dispositio is manifested elocutively, and that the elocutive level is the only material level, which we use to perform our analysis or to express our interpretation of a given social issue (because the human understanding of the world is only manifested in discursive structures), we cannot say that this is a formalistic approach, because it is not immanentist At the base is the content of experience What enables us to understand human experience is the set of linguistic operations that makes it conscious According to White, the four basic tropes, or four possibilities of prefiguration (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony) are four types of awareness of the experience obtained from living A linguistic process is what makes the contents of our experience (our cognition) conscious Broadening this approach – which is an approach rooted in rhetoric – when engaging in any rhetorical analysis of public discourse, what we have to seek is the relationship between elocutive structures and the inventio-dispositio, that is, the discovery of the ideas of the discourse and its interpretative design of the part of the world that causes it This interpretation takes place through forms of language and gesture, and does so on several levels: primarily the narrative and the tropological We certainly produce a plot (a narratio in rhetorical discourse, a subject in literary narrative discourse) which explains events as we see them – this is the composition of our consciousness However, according to White, and continuing the tradition of Vico, there is a poetic act of prefiguration of the historical discourse, a kind of infrastructure There are four possible types of prefiguration, which are based on four basic tropes: metaphor (experience in object-object terms), metonymy (party-party), synecdoche (object-totality) and irony (denial of the assertion) These four tropes are four types of consciousness of the experience gained from living We make our experiences (our knowledge) conscious through language Tropes are the mechanisms that enable us to understand this process of consciousness: the mechanisms of figural language So when different historians consider the French Revolution, for example, they are faced with the same events, but historians offer us different ways of relating them, because they have different conceptions of nature, society, politics and history itself, which they convey with their figural characterisations of the whole The narrative suggested by the historian does not therefore lie in the events, which are the same for everyone Events are not inherently tragic, comic or satirical, with the latter understood as construction, as direction of meaning For example, in the case of the events leading up to the massacre at Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, if we use Frye’s five basic fictional modes in the first of the essays in the book he © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 56 David Pujante published in 1957 under the title Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, we can see that the Islamic fundamentalists created a tragic narrative against the editors of the magazine that had created it as ironic (cf my work on Charlie Hebdo in this volume) Giving a series of events a narrative is an essentially discursive operation The details are arranged in a direction of meaning, within a given framework of an understanding of the world This is what I called interpretative design or arrangement in my book on Quintilian, in which I considered the understanding and importance of the second rhetorical operation, dispositio (Pujante 1999: 138) White calls this the integrated pattern of meaning (White 1978: 111) Based on a similar concept, the anthropologist and historian Mendiola Mejía (2003) considers the narratives of the battles that appear in the chronicles of the conquest of America Turning to recent examples of narratives in social discourse, Nespereira García studies them in the case of influenza A in 2009; in the very useful overview that his doctoral thesis gives us about the latest thinking on narrative discourse (2014: 254; see also this volume), he reminds us that Elinor Ochs confirms White’s idea that all narrative must incorporate a moral evaluation of the events described, and consequently that: As narratives have at least one point of view, by their very nature they make judgements […] Stories are very often vehicles that collaborate in teaching the moral values of a family, of a public institution […] or a community in general Messages about truth and morality contribute to the causal explanations that narratives usually construct. (Ochs 2000: 295) The narratio in a rhetorical discourse is the exposition of the discursive cause (the subject of the discourse) The orator sets out the events as he or she considers they have occurred, or how he or she believes they should occur He or she narrates them in terms of their meaning, or in other words, arranges them according to his or her interpretative perspective The credibility and soundness of the approach will be decisive in the degree of verisimilitude for speaker and listener alike The speaker will then go on to consider the subject at length The ways of narrating the elements in this type of narratio are no different from a fictional narrative, except that the latter is alien to civil causes (Cicero De Inventione I XIX; Cicero 1892) Santayana refers to this lack of differentiation when he says: A novelist, working up his own impressions and fantasies, could by miracle write a story that had been actually enacted without his knowledge, by persons exactly like the characters in his book, and in places bearing the names of the places mentioned there, which he thought fictitious. (1946: 20) © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 57 Let us return to tropology It should be clear that, for White, tropological phases are at the heart of discursive construction, and he believes that the four basic tropes are parallel to the models of consciousness used by Piaget, Freud and Thompson It must be emphasised that this conception falls within the classical epistemology of the Sophists Tropes produce the types of images and connections between them that are able to act as signs of a reality that can only be imagined, because it cannot be seen directly According to White, there is a dominant trope in discourses which is a means of capturing reality in language, and in this he is clearly indebted to Vico Its extensions – those of the dominant trope – are the means of narrative, argumentation and ideological commitment The concept of the extension of the dominant trope is very interesting This dominant trope is a specific way of capturing reality in language, and is like the seed from which the stems, leaves and flowers of discourse emerge Its extensions are the means of narrating, arguing and also of ideological implication This tropological prefiguration certainly determines the perspective with which the narratio is produced (which in turn falls within a given ideological framework) and therefore provides all the subsequent argumentation In addition, this concept is based on the inversion we have been discussing: we must first deal with the elocutio (that is, the linguistic manifestation of discourse), in which we are given the keys to the inventio and dispositio Furthermore, the use of the novel aspects of tropes is a psychological defence mechanism against the literal meaning of discourses that are socially acquired or established The appearance of new tropes in the construction of alternative discourses represents a departure from conventional or regressive discourses; it is a fresh alternative approach, toward another conception, toward the illumination of what we consider most appropriate as an alternative for the future in a particular social field This can be seen in the case studied in this volume by Esperanza Morales-López on discourses about environmental-social alternatives to employment and the use made of metaphors in them in the wake of the 15M social protest movement in Spain We have also studied this in Pujante and Morales-López (this volume), where we show the cognitive role of tropes and rhetorical figures, which, based on a given cultural imagination, sought to modify certain stereotypes In this study, we wish to emphasise that neither metaphors nor any other rhetorical processes of discursive construction can be studied in isolation in the text (an ageold error of understanding of the sermo ornatus), but must instead be embedded in a cultural imaginary which they reinforce or modify When we place ourselves within the perspective of constructivist rhetoric, twinned with the lines of thought that have been considered in this chapter, it becomes clear how Western thought has constructed the various social, religious and political discourses which have maintained the modi operandi of human societies © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 58 David Pujante A perspective like the one advocated here allows us to illuminate both the discursive past and the present, both how the fathers of the church discursively construct the subject of virgins (for example), and how new urban or personal identities or those related to eco-social alternatives are being constructed today Indeed, just as the different tropological and figurative constructions give us important clues about new social discourses and the social identities that they construct, we can analyse imperative constructions over the centuries in our Western societies, such as the example of virginity mentioned above This brings to mind the beginning of John Chrysostom’s treatise On Virginity, on the use of litotes to construct his idea of virginity and Christian virtue: I not call the virgins of heretics virgins: first because they are not chaste […] Because those who flee from vice are not crowned for this, but only avoid punishment […] Whoever kills another person, says the law, will be hanged; but they not add: Whoever does not kill, will be honoured. (Vizmanos 1949: 1175) It is interesting how Chrysostom uses a gradation between the absolute positive and its opposite, with intermediate litotes: “whoever kills” = “evil criminal,” but “whoever does not kill” # “virtuous.” He who kills is evil, but he who does not kill is not necessarily good and virtuous This entire gradation uses litotes to make a distinction between Christian and pagan virtue The connection between rhetoric and discourse analysis Rhetoric deals with a type of discourse, a social discourse with a persuasive intention, which forms part of the wide range of discourse genres that are the subject of discourse analysis As Wodak states: The manifold roots of CDA lie in Rhetoric, Text Linguistics, Anthropology, Philosophy, Socio-Psychology, Cognitive Science, Literary Studies, and Sociolinguistics, as well as in Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics […] CDA is therefore not interested in investigating a linguistic unit per se but in studying social phenomena which are necessarily complex and thus require a multidisciplinary and multi-methodical approach.” (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 1–2) If rhetoric has undergone a major renovation during the second half of the twentieth century, in the field of discourse analysis, the research conducted in both America and Europe from the second half of the twentieth century onwards must be taken into account as well Firstly, there is American anthropology’s interest in communicative interaction, as embodied in the subdisciplines of linguistic anthropology (Hymes 1974; Duranti 1997) and interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 59 1982), which are concerned with the construction of socio-cultural identities by analysing how people communicate on an everyday basis Apart from this tradition, there are the reflections by the sociologist Goffman (1974) on the construction of the individual in the micro-social space of interactions within social groups This tradition could be placed at the beginning of discourse analysis in its strictest terms, although this research is confined to the study of socio-cultural identities and interest in oral interaction (Maingueneau 1987; Morales-López 2004) Secondly, another important area for discourse analysis was Europe in the 1960s and 1970s According to Macdonell (1986: 1–4), there were two reasons for the changes in the view of how meaning is constructed during those two decades The writings of Voloshinov (1929) and Bakthin (1989) were very influential, as they showed that discourses are always linked to different institutions and their contexts; they are not homogeneous, and differ depending on who utters them; their distribution is also not homogeneous, but instead hierarchical Meanwhile, the influence of Foucault’s publications led to a recognition that any discourse offers a certain epistemological perspective; a discourse must also be considered and analysed in relation to many other discourses Maingueneau (1987: 10) adds another contributory factor in the rise of discourse analysis: this discipline is able to fill the gap left by philological research, by focusing not only on the linguistic analysis of texts, but also on an interpretation of their meaning This new research perspective, focusing on the study of discourses and not oriented exclusively toward the language system as a whole, is the prelude of the demise of structuralist hegemony As Macdonell (1986: 9) points out: “[…] work on discourse since this time has not rejected any idea of system, but it has rejected the belief that a single and general system lies behind all discourses.” The study of language as a whole made way for an analysis of the various discursive manifestations that are created in different ideological spaces From the socio-political point of view, the student movement of May 1968 also had an impact on discourse analysis The demonstrations and slogans that were created challenged the concept of the truth of institutional discourses, and revealed the hidden mechanisms of those institutional powers to impose their own truth Althusser’s study (1970) highlights this epistemological change; likewise, Pêcheux’s semantic-lexical study (1975) also shows how words change their meaning between one discourse and another Britain’s Norman Fairclough is one of the European discourse analysts who have studied the relations between discourse and the social dimension in the most depth, in the wake of Foucault and also of the semantic-social approach used by Halliday In one of his first books, this author (1989) considered the relationship between the study of discourses and social conditions (of both an immediate and © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 60 David Pujante more remote nature) that generate them to be fundamental, and argued that when studying discourse it is also necessary to consider its networks of interdependence, which this author calls orders of discourse and social orders The society in which discourses are created is divided into different social orders, as spheres of action and situation: the sphere of institutions and organisations in general These institutional spheres generate an organised series of discourses (or discursive practices), which he calls “orders of discourse,” which in turn create different types of discourses and genres In his work on discourse analysis, the author also focuses on the power relations and ideological conflicts arising from those relationships He argues that discourse is one of the major means, if not the primary one, which social agents use to exercise this power In this regard, social practice does not merely “reflect” a reality which is independent of it; social practice is in an active relationship to reality, and it changes reality, commonly through hidden agendas (Fairclough 1989: 5, 37 and 40) For this dialectical relationship between discourse and social structures, his argument is no longer only a linguistic and semantic-pragmatic analysis of discourse, but also what he calls critical discourse analysis (CDA), a methodological programme that he believes has three stages: (1) description of the formal properties of a text; (2) interpretation, concerned with the relationship between text and interaction, that is the text as the product of a process of production; and (3) explanation, centred on the relationship between interaction and social context Thus, discourse is a process that involves a text, its interaction and its context (Fairclough 1989: 25; other references Fairclough and Fairclough 2012) Other researchers also adopt this programmatic approach, such as Wodak van Dijk, Chilton, among others (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Wodak et al 1999; Wodak and Chilton 2005; Wodak and Koller 2008; van Dijk 1998, 2003, 2008 and Chilton 2004) Van Dijk and Chilton include the cognitive dimension in their theoretical and methodological approaches, in a perspective that is not covered by Fairclough and Wodak (see Morales-López 2011 for further information) In the sphere of the Romance languages, a leading researcher in this Critical Discourse Analysis group is Adriana Bolivar (2001, 2009 and 2016, among others), for her work on the political discourse of Hugo Chávez in particular The research by this group has made an important contribution to the study of the ideological discourse, by providing theoretical and methodological research tools for other younger researchers in a wide range of discourse genres and diverse ideological situations The critical dimension in research in the social sciences (a dimension that has its origins in the Frankfurt School, as explicitly pointed out by Wodak and Meyer 2009: 8–10), has been widely consolidated as a methodological © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved Chapter 3.  Constructivist rhetoric 61 perspective in the analysis of European discourse, thanks to the contributions by this group We believe that the theoretical and methodological contributions of some members of this group are highly relevant; for example, the study of the various strategies used by the Right in Austria (Wodak et al 1999); analysis of parliamentary discourse on immigration (van Dijk 1993; Wodak and van Dijk 2000) and the strategies used by the European press when referring to migrants (Van Dijk 1987) Having monitored the research undertaken over the years, we believe that within CDA it is necessary to explore new more constructivist avenues, which will provide a unified perspective of the construction of meaning, combining the demonstrative and the tropological dimension of knowledge, and revitalising the dialectical relationship between the construction of meaning and the activities of social actors who act (individually and/or as spokespersons for social groups) in specific socio-political and socio-historical contexts For this reason, we also feel close to the constructivist approaches to discourse analysis that have emerged from anthropology and ethnography, and to Goffman’s micro-sociology A final word Constructivist rhetoric therefore represents the recovery of the epistemology of sophistry, connected to contemporary constructivist thought: discourse makes reality social This construction is based on the cognitive experiences of human beings, who become conscious through the linguistic configuration of that experience Rhetorical discourse can therefore be understood as an interpretative discourse of the various social causes, and is carried out in order to persuade, and to solve the various problems that societies face The process of persuasion is always aimed at others, but primarily at ourselves (self-application of the rhetorical device) It is a serious struggle to understand the events that take place in the world in which we find ourselves, and to place ourselves consistently in this world through a discourse: “We speak worlds” (Steiner 1997: 118) When we project our self-conviction and try to persuade others of our ways of seeing and understanding the world (the essence of the rhetorical exercise), that persuasion intersects with the self-persuasion of others, since the first process, our own, of discursive accommodation to the world, is repeated in other individuals, who confront everything we say with what they themselves believe and think Persuading someone of something is not a direct, simple, autonomous act It is entangled in otherness, in the beliefs and knowledge of others The act of persuasion becomes an act of confrontation with what is previously known and © 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved 62 David Pujante believed by the other or others, and ultimately all persuasion ends in the personal act of freeing oneself from the previous to accept something new It is an act of conversion, and is a profoundly ethical one References Albaladejo, Tomás 1989 Retórica Madrid: Síntesis Althusser, Louis 1970 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards and Investigation)” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, by Louis Althusser (Translation by B Brewster), 85–126 New York: Monthly Review Press Anceschi, Luciano 1984 L’Ideal del Barocco: Studi su un Problema Estetico Bolonia: Nuova Alfa Bakhtin, Mikhail 1989 Teoría y Estética de la Novela Madrid: Taurus Bolívar, Adriana 2001 “El personalismo en la democracia venezolana y cambios en el diálogo político.” Discurso y Sociedad (1): 103–134 Bolívar, Adriana 2009 “‘Democracia’ y ‘revolución’ en Venezuela: un análisis crítico del discurso político desde la lingüística basada en corpus.” Oralia 12: 27–54 Bolívar, Adriana 2016 “El discurso de la afectividad en la interacción política.” In Oralidad y análisis del discurso Homenaje a Luis Cortés Rodríguez, ed by Antonio Miguel Bón Hernández, María del Mar Espejo Muriel, Bárbara Herrero Moz-Cobo and Juan Luis López Cruces, 61–79 Almería: Universidad de Almería Capra, Fritjof 1975 The Tao of Physics Boston: Shambhala Publications Capra, Fritjof 1996 La Trama de la Vida Una Nueva Perspectiva de los Sistemas Vivos Barcelona: Anagrama 1998 Chilton, Paul 2004 Analyzing Political Discourse Theory and Practice London: Routledge Cicero 1892 De Inventione Book I Translated and with an introduction by E. N. P Moor London: Methuen & Co (https://archive.org/stream/deoratorebook1tr00ciceuoft#page/ n5/mode/2up) Cicero 1982 De Oratore book III Translated by Harris Rackham Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press-William Heinemann LTD Cicero 1985 De l’Orateur Translated by Edmond Courbaud Paris: Les Belles Lettres Damasio, António R 2010 Y el Cerebro Creó al Hombre ¿Cómo Pudo el Cerebro Generar Emociones, Sentimientos y el Yo? 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