Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy. Edited by John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998; pp. vii + 263. $59.00. At century's end, scholars of rhetoric and public affairs are trying to sort out the relationship between the heritage of classical rhetoric—with its characteristic themes of prudence, decorum, and practical reasoning—and the theorists of postmodernity —with their themes of anxiety, pleasure, and indeterminacy. Neoclassical rhetoricians share with postmodernists a rejection of Enlightenment master narratives based on the certainty of progress, the promise of fully transparent communication , and universal standards of moral and political judgment. Neoclassicists and postmodernists have obvious surface differences in style and tone, but differ most of all in their competing views of the res publica— public affairs. Neoclassicists are anxious about the fragility of republican memory, and about the survival of pedagogic practices and ways of reading threatened by the new technocratic university. Postmodernists are anxious, too, but rather than looking back to an idealized republican past, they look to the present, daunted by the task of assembling meaning from cultural fragments. Judgment Calls is a ragged, incomplete text which resists easy paraphrase, but for scholars in search of a starting point for "articulating" the classical and postmodern stances toward rhetoric, I can think of no better introduction. The book makes unusual demands on the reader, not because the essays are badly written—in fact all the essays refute the common perception that postmodern theorists are stylistically challenged—but because the synthesis of the neoclassical and postmodern stances toward judgment is simultaneously affirmed and canceled, as if under the Derridean sign of "erasure." The introductory essay by Sloop and McDaniel provides a brisk and lucid overview of the challenge recent European thought poses to both classical and Enlightenment models of judgment. Baudrillard, for example, teaches us that the © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 507-528 ISSN 1094-8392 508 Rhetoric & Public Affairs basis of social life is imaginary: "We live, suffer, enjoy, and die in a cartoon cool world, where the 'toons' are more real than us" (2). Derrida deconstructs judgment as "madness in the garb of 'good reasons'" that evade their own instability. Foucault "revels in the undecidable, the 'unjudgable,'" as a way of eluding the grip of Power, if only temporarily. Lyotard "finds in the gaps between judgment and justice a revolutionary force—in the unspeakable (différend )" (3). And the mad genius Nietzsche, the Sophistic preacher redevivus, proclaims the gospel of "the rhetoricity that abides between subject and object, self and world, renders all judgments contingent, partial, and consequently shaky" (3). But the quest of the authors of the volume is, finally, to propose another way of answering that very classical question: "How shall I live my life?" Their goal is "to locate and reflect on the profound instability which gives rise to their questioning, and to propose better ways of life in light of such reflections" (4). The instability of the postmodern moment is not, as often caricatured, a self-indulgent play with the ruins of Western culture. Rather, as Sloop and McDaniel put it: "Judgment is the passion of our human enterprise: an activity rhetorically carried out in the face of contingency, with countless uncertainties, and incredible consequences" (4). The first section of the book consists of five theoretical essays. Each interrogates a tradition of moral and political judgment. Michael Calvin McGee writes an audacious rhetorical criticism of the debate between Gadamer and Habermas over the nature of tradition and practical wisdom. His most useful insight is that Gadamer identifies the phronimos as a person, "working sometimes as a teacher instructing the polis about moral lessons available in the tradition, and at other times as a political advisor or leader persuading the polis to a particular course of right action." Habermas, on the other hand, finds the phronimos not in a person or set of traditions or institutions but in actual or potential social consensus. McGee refuses the way of synthesis: a grafting of the rhetorical onto the theory of communicative action, but rather points toward further reflection by the reader. K. E. Supriya, like McGee, uses a set...