Revolutionary Subordination as Nonviolent Performance: Notes Toward an Exhilic Rhetoric

Revolutionary Subordination as Nonviolent Performance:

Notes Toward an Exhilic Rhetoric

Teaching Peace Conference

Bluffton College

May 26-28, 2004

Gerald Biesecker-Mast

Bluffton College

The discipline of rhetorical theory and criticism as we have received it in the Western liberal arts tradition has been for much of its history preoccupied with the control of meaning and the management of reception. From Aristotle to St. Augustine to the latest public speaking or public relations textbook, students of rhetoric have concerned themselves with “observing in any given case,” as Aristotle put it famously, “the available means of persuasion.” Whether studying an audience in order to better craft a message that is compatible with that audience’s demographic profile or examining a popular text to understand how it shapes audience self-understanding through practices of social and cultural identification, students of rhetoric continue to be concerned in one way or another with the question of how persuasion shapes social identity and behavior, as well as with how audiences respond to persuasion.

At best this traditional approach to rhetorical analysis and practice has led to an understanding of communication that seeks what John Durham Peters has called “the communion of souls”; that is, absolute identity between intended message and received meaning. At worst, the traditional approach to rhetorical analysis and practice has encouraged both practitioners and critics of rhetoric to assume a social posture of dominance as the privileged location from which to shape political or organizational change through persuasion. If the continuing priority of some version, however more complex, of Shannon and Weaver’s communication model in the arena of communication studies is an example of the former practice, then the ongoing prejudice toward presidents and other privileged rhetors as primary sources or examples for rhetorical criticism is an example of the latter practice.

While some scholars of rhetoric have argued that persuasion is inherently a violent practice because of its interest in effecting witting or unwitting change in an audience, my own approach will be to suggest that persuasion becomes violent primarily when it seeks to exercise rhetorical power from a posture of privilege and control. The rhetorical tradition, in my view, has largely been obsessed with the question of how to be and stay in charge of the rhetorical situation. Now while a posture of social control via rhetoric may be said to be more peaceful than, say, control through physical violence—and this is an important distinction—as a scholar committed to the historic peace church tradition, I seek to promote peace not merely as an end but also as a means. In other words, when rhetoric serves the purpose of promoting peace by enabling a privileged power to exercise control over subjects, whether that power is the office of the President of the United States or the profit margin of the Ford Motor Company, such rhetoric serves the arbitrary exercise and maintenance of social inequity. In such cases, peace is maintained by convincing audiences to accept without violent protest the exercise of power over their lives and choices by economic and political elites. Unfortunately, much of the rhetorical training that is provided in today’s college curriculum is precisely about enabling professional elites to develop habits of speech that reproduce such social control and inequity. Students of public relations and marketing learn how to enable companies to gain control over the perceptions of their constituencies and customers. Students of political communication learn how to assist political leaders in acquiring or maintaining political power through the management of public perception. Students of organizational communication learn how to develop strategic communication practices that strengthen the efficiency, productivity and competitiveness of a business organization. And future church leaders learn how to maintain status quo denominational bureaucracies by adapting missional visions to constituency prejudices.

The peace associated with such forms of social control may be a respectable goal, but for peace church scholars should be seen as finally outside the perfection of Christ. The peace offered by Christ is not an effect of social control but a gift of God. The peace offered by Christ is not imposed from above but extended from within. Speaking on behalf of and in the spirit of such a peace is served less by the Greek rhetorical tradition with its emphasis on establishing and maintaining political or organizational power and more by the biblical rhetorical tradition with its emphasis on acknowledging and privileging truthful and defenseless weakness.

Hebrew rhetoric and defenseless truth

A number of speech communication scholars have begun to consider the Hebrew alternative to the Greek rhetorical tradition, even though they have not highlighted the relationship between Hebrew rhetoric and peace. James Darsey, for example, has argued that much of the American tradition of public address can be understood more thoroughly by recognizing the biblical prophetic tradition that has shaped aspects of such speech. He defines the biblical prophetic tradition by contrasting it with the focus on cooperation and compromise fostered by the Greek tradition. In the Hebrew tradition, according to Darsey, the primary persuasive mode of prophetic rhetoric is the ethos of the prophet, who claims to be a servant of God and of God’s words.[1] The prophet speaks on behalf of an unalterable and transcendent truth that he is in no position to bargain away in a public discussion seeking something like consensus or agreement. The goal of prophetic speech is regeneration and reconciliation, not compromise, to “speak truth to power”—to use a familiar phrase—not negotiate with it. In his book, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, Darsey applies the paradigm of prophetic speech to everything from abolitionist rhetoric to the rhetoric of anti-communism and McCarthyism, demonstrating that prophetic rhetoric recurs across the entire American political spectrum and throughout American political history. At the same time Darsey laments the disappearance of such rhetoric in contemporary political discourse, which he argues has been almost entirely taken over by the rhetoric of expediency and pragmatics. As he puts it: “it is not the absence of what some writers term ‘civility,’ ‘civil discourse,’ ‘reasonable debate,’ what Matthew Arnold called ‘sweetness and light,’ that is the paramount symptom of our ills.”[2] Instead, according to Darsey, “it is the absence of meaningful incivility, of radical engagement, of what Arnold called ‘fire and strength,’ that is by far more meaningful.”[3] Such radical prophetic speech is dependent on “mystery and transcendence,” which Darsey observes is in short supply in contemporary American public culture.[4]

In Meg Zulick’s analysis of the Book of Jeremiah she stresses the extent to which uncompromising prophetic speech is surprisingly multivocal.[5] Arising out of the crisis of God’s apparent abandonment, the Hebrew prophets seek to explain why and to call God’s people to renewed faithfulness. But such a crisis results in controversy and contention, such as disagreement about whether God’s covenant with Israel is irrevocable or contingent. Competing and contradictory claims show up in the same text without being synthesized into a coherent conclusion. Disagreement and conflict are thus a normal state of affairs for a people who seek to follow God in obedience and to heed prophetic speech. As Zulick puts it eloquently:

The community constructed by this text, like the community that produced it, is no ideal

“communion” but a perpetually conflicted entity, riddled and sparked with differences in both its material and its symbolic relations, and constantly pouring meanings into the ever-present gap between the two. What such a community requires to renew itself is not the suppression of difference but an expression of it in some dramatistic or polyphonic form, drawing heteroglossia into a state of dialogue, of internal awareness, and reinstating a language from which an emergent future can be culled.[6]

The well-known biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann confirms that the rhetoric of the Hebrew scriptures is essentially an agonistic or argumentative discourse, trading in normative claims about dangerous and disputed matters.[7] According to Brueggemann, Old Testament rhetoric is best understood as contested testimony about the God of Israel that responds to an ongoing and unsettled controversy between traditions of speech that stress liberation and debt cancellation on the one hand and those that emphasize consolidation and purity on the other hand.[8] In the ongoing and unresolved dispute over this basic issue, Hebrew texts engage in highly particularistic and polyvalent forms of speech, seeking neither to universalize nor to establish closure, but to restate within a traditional idiom the controversial claims about God received through witness. As Brueggemann’s puts it, “Thus Israel’s religious rhetoric does not intend to reach resolution or to achieve closure,” but is rather “for the very long run, endlessly open-ended, sure to be taken up again for another episode of adjudication, which this time around may have different—but again provisional—outcome.”[9]

Bruggemann stresses the extent to which this Hebrew rhetoric of disputation is generative—making and remaking reality—rather than simply reflecting or abstracting the apparent world. Specifically, Hebrew rhetoric constitutes an alternative world to the one which is assumed or asserted in the conventions associated with privileged or imperial speech. Because this rhetoric was a practice associated with the experience of exile, the Hebrew scriptures offer an alternative home for the homeless. Engaging in the particular speech forms of biblical controversy becomes a performance or ritual that establishes social meaning for Israel apart from the imperial structures that surround and seek to assimilate them. Rather than paralyzing its audience, the disputation is a performance that reminds the people of God who they are and gives them a discursive home. Because speech could create the heavens and the earth, speech can also provide an alternative world to inhabit.

Erika Falk has noted how the Jewish laws of speech found throughout the Jewish scriptures (the Tanach) assume this terrifying capacity of words to create and destroy.[10] By contrast with the Greek rhetorical tradition which tends to see speech as rather benign even if useful tool for human enterprise, Jewish speech laws recognize the ethical obligations associated with the human capacity for speech. Falk criticizes speech communication scholars for failing to acknowledge these laws and the assumptions that shape Jewish rules about speech. According to Falk, the main concern in Jewish rhetorical theory is with the impact of damaging speech, which in Judaism is equated with physical damage. “In fact,” she writes, “it is considered a greater crime since damage done by the tongue cannot be repaired.”[11] A text from evensong on Thursday evening comes to mind: “Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit” (Psalm 34:13).

Among the speech prohibitions in the Jewish rules of conduct are fraudulent or false speech—including lying, flattery and slander—true speech that is damaging to others—including gossip and cursing—and blasphemy. On the other hand, Jewish rhetoric encourages parsimony or the limiting of speech, keeping promises one has made, engaging in discussion of the law, and rebuking neighbors who have broken the law. These rules are assumed to be valid in both public and private spheres. Falk concludes by contrasting Jewish and Greek rhetoric: “Where one aims at ethical community living and social harmony, the other aims at individual influence and power. Where one code respects and is fearful of the power of speech, the other uses it as a tool.”[12]

At this point, I would like to summarize a number of emphases in Jewish rhetoric in general and in the prophetic tradition in particular. This is not an exhaustive list of characteristics but it is an attempt to highlight features drawn from the researchers cited thus far.

1. Hebrew rhetoric is partisan speech that is more concerned with truth than with pragmatics, more interested in speaking for or about God, than with advancing personal or self-interested claims.

2. Hebrew rhetoric seeks more to sustain a disputation than to find closure, more to make a witness than to reach consensus.

3. Hebrew rhetoric acknowledges of the power and potential harm of speech and thus is more concerned with avoiding harm to an audience than with gaining the assent of an audience.

4. Hebrew rhetoric operates from a posture of defenselessness and vulnerability rather than imperialism and control.

5. In all of these ways and more, Hebrew rhetoric offers an alternative nonviolent mode of speech to the Greek imperialist rhetoric that has shaped the rhetorical tradition as it is taught in typical public speaking and communication classrooms.

Exile and Revolutionary Subordination

Now it seems to me that one of the main objections to this approach to rhetoric is that it will not be received as very civil or democratic or polite or properly “public.” It will not do to have students who graduate from our institutions go around claiming to speak for God, especially in contexts where such claims are seen as politically or organizationally incorrect or even offensive. I think this is a fair objection that raises a basic problem for the rhetorical tradition that I am seeking to recover. Hebrew prophetic rhetoric is strong stuff that has the capacity to do great harm, especially in public contexts where audiences are unprepared for challenging speech. One must be careful where one hangs peace flags, for example, to recall the concerns raised in Anne Dalke’s address. The prophetic impulse must be qualified by the Jewish speech codes that are concerned about social and personal damage that may result from disputatious speech. In particular, this may mean that the primary location, at least for now, in which we will seek to recover the prophetic tradition is in the church, although I am also prepared to begin teaching my students about the strident and impatient and prophetic public rhetoric of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth. In other words, I think it important to remind people that the prophetic tradition has a rhetorical history in American public life, exemplified perhaps most vividly in modern memory by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

In order to help students think about how and when to speak prophetically and when to employ a different, perhaps more pragmatic or Greek, rhetoric, I think it important to recall the specific social location from which Hebrew prophetic rhetoric issue: the location of exile or homelessness. Both Walter Brueggemann and Daniel Smith-Christopher have called attention to the role of exile in shaping the prophetic rhetoric of the Hebrew bible. Furthermore they have both argued that exile or non-state existence is the proper location from which Christians should speak today. Exhilic speech or what Smith-Christopher calls “diasporic theology challenges the virtual capitulation to the normative status of nationalism as the only viable context for Christian theology and Christian social existence.”[13] To apply this claim to the project outlined in this presentation, what I am arguing is that diasporic rhetoric challenges the “virtual capitulation to the normative status” of imperial control as the “only viable context” for rhetorical theory and practice. Hebrew rhetoric, in short, provides a model for how to speak when you are not in charge and when you do not seek to be in charge of historical outcomes or developments. But perhaps this sort of disputatious speech is most appropriate when one is seeking to provide a discursive home to a people whose very existence is threatened by the imperialistic rhetoric of the empire. Because the empire strikes back, however, it may be the case that in order to survive and even thrive, prophetically shaped communities need to provide a public script or performance that offers cover for the view toward a new and transformed world that shapes their true, prophetically constituted, self-understandings.

Here I will draw on a much neglected and at times maligned section of John Howard Yoder’s well-known book The Politics of Jesus: the chapter on revolutionary subordination. Yoder argues in this chapter that Paul’s invoking of the ancient household codes that demand subjection from slaves and wives, is not simply a capitulation to conventional wisdom, but an effort to undermine the credibility of the codes by encouraging voluntary subjection to the codes on the assumption that the social and political order they represent is being replaced anyway. In this approach, “subordination means the acceptance of an order, as it exists, but with the new meaning given to it by the fact that one’s own acceptance of it is willing and meaningfully motivated.”[14]

The function of revolutionary subordination as a strategy for dealing with presumed power and conventional structures depends on the existence of a forceful prophetic rhetoric that has already convinced audiences of the falsehood of the violence-prone and inequitable status quo. There must be speech that convinces audiences that there is no need to gain control of the handles of history in order force coherence and liberation: “it is precisely this attitude toward the structures of the world, this freedom from needing to smash them since they are about to crumble anyway, which Jesus had been the first to teach and in his suffering to concretize.”[15]

Paul’s invocation of the household codes was about asking wives and husbands to conform to standard patriarchal performative expectations under the assumption that patriarchy had already lost its grip of power on the social identity of husbands and wives since they had become one in Christ—no more Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. If we are to conform our public speech to Greek and Roman imperialistic forms, we must do it as an act of revolutionary subordination, recognizing that such forms of discursive and political imperialism are doomed to lose their grip on people. When we speak in the Aristotelian tradition of rhetoric, for example, we do so in order to be intelligible, even though our primary loyalties have been shaped by an alternative speech. We speak in the fashion of Greco-Roman pragmatism, in other words, less to gain control of the audience than to give up control of the truth that we have received as a gift.

Put more succinctly, I am arguing that teaching peace can best be served by including both the Hebrew tradition of prophetic rhetoric and the Greek tradition of pragmatic rhetoric in our speech classes, not because they should be seen as two equivalent or complementary approaches, but rather because in the Jewish and Christian traditions the Hebrew tradition should be understood as the primary mode of discourse of the community of faith, with the Greek pragmatic tradition functioning merely as the imperial form to which we submit our bodies and our voices for the sake of vulnerable and uncoercive witness. Because the Hebrew prophetic tradition will have trained us to receive and offer words as generative gifts, rather than imperialistic tools, we may find it possible to utilize Greek rhetorical forms while giving up control over speech outcomes or audience reception.

Here I return to the work of John Durham Peters, who uses the parable of the sower as a metaphor for the rhetoric of dissemination found in the New Testament. He writes:

The practice of the sower is wasteful. He lets the seeds fall where they may, not knowing

in advance who will be receptive ground, leaving the crucial matter of choice and

interpretation to the hearer, not the master…In a larger sense, the whole narrative of

redemption of the Christian Gospels centers on a wasteful act. The son of God dies for

every living creature, most of whom will not accept, appreciate, or even know of the

sacrifice. As a means of spreading seeds widely, dissemination is excellent, but it is not an efficient means of securing a good harvest. Indeed, godlike love—known as agape in the New Testament—is often figured as broadcasting. ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you…that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.’ In this well-known passage from the Sermon on the Mount Jesus invites his hearers to transcend the intense but limited affections of family and friends for a love as indiscriminate as rainfall, one that embraces all humanity alike, including one’s enemies.”[16]

Peaceful Persuasion as Nonviolent Performance

I want to conclude by calling attention to and critiquing a very promising book that has just appeared in the discipline of communication: Peaceful Persuasion: The Geopolitics of Nonviolent Rhetoric, by Ellen Gorsevski. The book calls for bringing the tools of rhetoric to bear in contexts of conflict and violence as well as on behalf of peace movements and causes. This book demonstrates that the conversation in the discipline of communication is wide open for the kinds of interventions called for by this conference.

Gorsevski’s book provides a wonderful analysis of both why there is so much promise in teaching peace through communication while at the same time so few teachers of communication profess to teach peace. She makes promising suggestions for integrating peace across the communication curriculum. And I am attracted to her commitment to enable rhetoric to serve the cause of peace.

At the same time I note that the sort of rhetoric that Gorsevski imagines working on behalf of peace is the classical rhetorical tradition. For example, she wants to “reveal ways to reempower peace rhetoric and use it more strategically to challenge dominant discourses.”[17] And she wants to “enhance our ability to communicate with disparate audiences to persuade people to support peace, to promote nonviolent resolutions to conflicts, and to better coordinate and amass consensus amongst fellow peace and justice activists.” This is a useful, even laudable vision. Yet it finally seeks to make peace a conviction and practice that is assimilated to the imperial discourse of marketing and corporate consumer culture. Perhaps we can acknowledge that such a strategy is a good thing, even though it is outside Christ’s perfection. In the meantime, seeking Christ’s perfection, some of us may want to start questioning the fundamental assumptions about rhetoric and knowledge that arise in the Greek rhetorical tradition in order to see if the disputatious, defenseless, and polyphonic orientation of the Hebrew tradition might not offer a more fruitful approach to speaking peace. Such an approach would include at least the following features:

1. The speaker assumes the posture of a Christian exile rather than as a national citizen.

2. The speech assumes the task of helping a disobedient nation toward the way of peace without thereby identifying the speaker with the nation or the policy with the kingdom of God

3. The speech establishes a speaker’s authority based on subordination, but not obedience, to the national and organizational “powers.”

In short, the Hebrew rhetorical tradition is paradigmatic for a performative practice of nonviolent nonconformity; that is, a habit of speech that assumes exile: seeking the peace of the city while desiring a better country.