Copyright by Sarah Noble Frank 2017

The Dissertation Committee for Sarah Noble Frank Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Figuring Feminist Histories of Rhetoric

Committee:

Diane Davis, Supervisor

Linda Ferreira-Buckley

Casey Boyle

Joshua Gunn

Michelle Ballif Figuring Feminist Histories of Rhetoric

Sarah Noble Frank, M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2017

Dedication

For Diane Davis, a figure of generosity.

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is made possible by the generosity of my committee members, each of whom has been unwavering in their support. Diane Davis has been a tireless champion of me, and of this project. She is singularly generous, both in thought and in life; she models the ethical commitments that are at the heart of her scholarship. She has read drafts, responded to emails, dispensed pep talks and advice, and advocated for me in every possible way. What follows is for her. This dissertation would not have been written, had I not had the incredible fortune of meeting Michelle Ballif as an undergraduate student in her Literary Theory Course at the University of Georgia. She first introduced me to Rhetoric and Writing, and has encouraged and supported me, often behind the scenes, in the years that have followed. Her thinking inspires and provokes me, and indeed has provoked the questions raised in this dissertation. It is a pleasure to think with her, and I am grateful to her for opening the way. I am indebted to Linda Ferreira-Buckley for her careful and generous engagement with this dissertation. Her thoughtful feedback has improved this project enormously, and I thank her for keeping the project grounded and for asking difficult (and large) questions. Linda’s enthusiasm for this project has often buoyed and sustained my own. Casey Boyle joined the committee for Jeffrey Walker, who was not able to participate in the dissertation defense (but to whom I owe much, especially for his participation in the field exam and prospectus defenses). Casey’s excitement for his v own research and teaching is infectious, and his commitment to his graduate students is unparalleled. He is an inexhaustible source of encouragement and advice, and I have been privileged to get to know him and have him on my side. I met Joshua Gunn as a student in his Subjectivity seminar during the first semester of my Master’s program. During that time, and all the time since, Josh has modeled the difficult balance between play and rigor; irreverence for cultural and political norms with a reverence for the study of rhetoric. I have tried to achieve those balances in this dissertation, and to whatever degree I have succeeded, I owe that success to Josh. I am impossibly in debt to my parents, Kim and Horton Frank, for their support which was literally tireless. They answered late night phone calls, listened to my ideas, ordered dinners, and reminded me who I am and what I can do. And finally, to my friends and Austin family, especially Mary Anne Taylor, Brianna Jewell, Sarah Welsh, Teddy Albiniak, Katie McClendon, and Andrew and Joanna Rechnitz—thank you for everything. Without all of you, nothing.

vi Figuring Feminist Histories of Rhetoric

Sarah Noble Frank, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017

Supervisor: Diane Davis

While feminist revisionary historiography in rhetorical studies is often identified by its efforts to recover neglected women rhetors for the rhetorical canon, the feminist revisionary histories and historiographies of rhetoric produced during the last three decades also, and more importantly, constitute a powerful critical apparatus that has radically shifted epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical standards for historical research in the discipline. Recently, however, scholars have complained that the critical potential of feminist revisionary scholarship is being curtailed as feminist historians increasingly prioritize representation and preservation over disciplinary critique. In response to this contemporary situation, I argue that it is necessary to trace the shifting role of representation in feminist revisionary historiography during the last three decades. This dissertation tracks the role of representation in feminist histories of rhetoric through four groundbreaking methodological metaphors, each of which functions both to critically revise the epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical conditions for feminist historical research, and to institute new constraints on feminist historical discourse. The first chapter, “Voices of the Past,” describes the emergence of feminist the feminist revisionary intervention and, by offering historical context to the inaugural vii feminist methodological metaphors of “speaking for” and “listening,” argues that the feminist commitment to representation as a mode of critique is no longer sufficient to articulate existing disciplinary presuppositions and constraints. The second chapter, “Disorienting Orientations on the Map of Rhetoric,” tracks the methodological shift from the recovery of marginalized women rhetors toward the revision and “remapping” of dominant disciplinary narratives, and shows how the spatial logic of orientation constrains contemporary feminist historical production. The third chapter, “Welcome to the House of Rhetoric,” focuses on architectural metaphors and suggests that contemporary feminist historians ought to rethink the dynamics of power and historical access outside of normative vertical and spatial metaphors, and especially within pedagogical spaces. The text concludes with “Haunting Feminist Historical Methodologies,” where I argue that the metaphor of haunting provides contemporary feminist historians with the necessary epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical resources to both revive the critical potential of revisionary methodologies and to imagine ethical feminist histories that would refuse the constative and performative representational imperative.

viii Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AS IF ...... 1

A Performative Relation Between the “Real” and “Discourse” ...... 7 Traditional/Constative and Revisionary/Performative Historiographies ...... 8 Writing Feminist Histories As If ...... 11

Figures of the Feminist Performative ...... 14 Figures of Negative Deconstruction ...... 15 Reading The Figure of the Palimpsest ...... 17

Countering Representational Demands ...... 21 An/In Excess of Theory ...... 22 The Ethical Imperative of Historiographic Deconstruction ...... 26

CHAPTER ONE: VOICES OF THE PAST ...... 30

A Non-Traditional View of the Rhetorical Tradition ...... 32 Traditional Historiographies of Rhetoric in Context ...... 33 As If The Past Could Speak For Itself ...... 36

Feminist Representatives and Feminist Representations ...... 41 Opportunities and Constraints for Feminist Historiography ...... 41 “Speaking For” Voices that have Gone Silent ...... 44 What to Do With a Past That Does Not Speak ...... 47 Coming to Terms with the Anti-Foundational Critique ...... 48

Can Silence Speak for Itself? ...... 49 The Ethical Politics/Political Ethics of “Speaking For” ...... 51

CHAPTER TWO: DISORIENTING ORIENTATIONS ON THE MAP OF RHETORIC ...... 55

Performative Re-Mappings ...... 61 Reading and Writing Cartographic Histories of Rhetoric ...... 64 ix Neutral Territories ...... 64 Signposts ...... 67 Feminist Re-Orientations ...... 69

Disorienting Orientations ...... 73 A Brief Word on “Instituting” and “Institutions” ...... 74 Mapping Disorientation ...... 76

CHAPTER THREE: WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF RHETORIC ...... 79

The House of Rhetoric ...... 83

Housing Rhetoric in the Archive/The Archive as the House of Rhetoric ...... 85

Digital Archiving and Pedagogical Architectures of Authority ...... 88 Restructuring Authority in the Undergraduate Classroom ...... 90

Hospitable Architectures ...... 95

CONCLUSIONS: HAUNTING FEMINIST HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES ...... 101

Three Returns, Or What it is That I Have Been Doing ...... 101

Spaces That Haunt ...... 109

A Final Word on Becoming Haunted Historiographers ...... 113

REFERENCES ...... 117

INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST HISTORIOGRAPHY AS IF

In the late 1980s and 1990s, revisionary historians sought to challenge traditional presuppositions about what it means, or should mean, to write histories of rhetoric.

Feminist historians, in particular, produced an abundance of research demonstrating the ways that traditional epistemologies, methodologies, and rhetorics had foreclosed possibilities for writing histories of women and other marginalized rhetorical subjects.

During this fruitful period, feminist historians and historiographers offered critiques of traditionalists’ Enlightenment understanding of identity and historical subjectivity

(Biesecker); their narrow historical focus on philosophical rhetoric and public oratory

(Jarratt, Wertheimer); their lack of suspicion and imagination in interpreting existing historical evidence (Glenn, Jarratt); their view of historical rhetoric as constative, transparent, and objective (Blair and Kahl); and their structuring of historical narratives as unified, progressive, and teleological (Ballif, Sutton). Taken together, these critiques served to undermine the disciplinary hegemony of traditional histories and, as a result, they constructed the methodological and rhetorical grounds upon which later feminist histories could emerge.

Importantly, however, early feminist historians did not limit their critiques solely to traditional historical approaches. Particularly as feminist revisionary histories and historiographies gained legitimacy in the field, feminist scholars increasingly turned their critical attention toward feminist revisionary methodologies themselves. This period is characterized by several prominent debates among and between feminist scholars, including the spirited conversation between Barbara Biesecker (1992, 1993) and Karlyn

Kohrs Campbell (1989) concerning feminists’ uncritical use of the identity category

“woman,” and the similarly impassioned debate between Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, and

Susan Jarratt (2000) concerning the usefulness of traditional historical methods for feminist historiography. Both of these debates, and the broader methodological discussion in which they took place, demonstrate early feminists’ commitment to challenging traditional historiographical presuppositions, even where those presuppositions appeared

(consciously or unconsciously) in feminist and revisionary contexts.

While more recent accounts of feminist historiography’s development tend to flatten early feminist methodologies into the primary methodological paradigms of recovery, revision, and gendered analysis, these accounts risk eliding the fundamentally contested nature of early feminist discourse (see Rawson, Tasker and Holt-Underwood).1

The contemporary impulse to offer a unified picture of feminist historiographical methodology is understandable, however, especially in the context of the current disciplinary moment in which, as Michelle Ballif has recently put it, “the impassioned discussion and the metatheorization that engendered these past two decades of historiographical productivity have largely fallen silent.” Since this period of methodological debate, Ballif argues, “historians have gone about their business of doing history, writing history without articulating a fevered sense of exigency about theorizing the doing of history, the writing of history” (“Introduction” 2). It should perhaps go without saying that recent feminist historical activity continues to enrich historical research in

1 Jessica Enoch acknowledges that a narrow focus on recovery and gender analysis creates “historiographic outliers” which often go unacknowledged in contemporary accounts of feminist historiography’s development. Nevertheless, Enoch argues that these “outliers”— “the rhetorical practice of remembering” and “the rhetorical process of gendering”—do not operate “completely outside the two more recognized categories of work (59-60).

rhetorical studies, principally by offering accounts of an ever-widening array of formerly neglected rhetorical subjects. At the same time, though, the reduction in methodological and historiographical debate amongst feminist historians entails an important consequence, the importance of which is only just beginning to be elaborated—namely, that feminist historians have a reduced investment in recognizing and critiquing the traditional presuppositions that continue to underwrite the feminist historical and historiographical project.

Ryan Skinnell makes precisely this point in a recent essay, where he discusses the current state of revisionary methodologies, generally speaking. Skinnell puts an even finer point on the flattening of revisionary methodology, suggesting that contemporary revisionary historiography is primarily characterized by an uncritical “broadening imperative” that serves the documentary and preservative aims of traditional historiography, rather than the critical and progressive aims of earlier revisionary methodologies. Skinnell ascribes this “broadening imperative” to a shift in the exigencies of revisionary history. He rightly points out that the traditional canon which, until the revisionary intervention, had constituted the landscape of historical knowledge in the field,

“has [now] been effectively busted and to good effect” (116). Revisionary historiography, he suggests, “is now the dominant theoretical frame for histories of rhetoric, which means it is normative and therefore significantly less critical of the discipline” (117). While revisionary historiography has retained is primary methodological paradigms of recovery and revision, these programs are currently being undertaken with the implicit (and often explicit) traditional aims of constructing “‘better,’ ‘fuller,’ ‘truer,’ ‘more nuanced,’ ‘more

transparent,’ even ‘more objective’ histories”—aims that are, as Skinnell recognizes, at odds with the critical goals of early revisionary histories.

In my view, the abandonment of historiographical theory and the adoption of an uncritical and implicitly traditional “broadening imperative” within revisionary historiography should constitute a topic of special concern for feminist historians and historiographers of rhetoric. As feminist historians have often noted, the presuppositions that found the traditional historical project are fundamentally patriarchal in the sense that they effectively exclude (or at least radically de-legitimize) the historical possibility of a non-male, non-White, non-heterosexual rhetor. This is not to say that traditional methods do not represent useful or appropriate tools to many feminist historians of rhetoric. As

Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Xin Liu Gale have each argued, traditional historical methods not only support feminist archival practices, but they may also, as Gale argues, serve to grant feminist histories a certain legitimacy within “the male- dominated academy” (362). With Susan Jarratt, Cheryl Glenn, Michelle Ballif, and others, however, I retain a deep suspicion of traditional methodologies, or traditional presuppositions concerning, as L’Eplattenier has put it, “why we study what we study, why we study who we study, and how the theories we have read influence our writing and our perception of the world” (“Argument” 68). It is my position that the presuppositions that ground traditional methodologies—methodologies that value, among other things, unity, completeness, accuracy, and objectivity—remain fundamentally problematic for a feminist

historical research program whose conditions of possibility are established primarily through a critique, and not an embrace, of those traditional methodological values.2

I propose that, especially in light of the contemporary “broadening imperative” in feminist historical scholarship, it is necessary to revive a spirit of historiographical and methodological critique within and about feminist histories and historiographies of rhetoric—particularly a spirit of critique aimed at subverting the continuing influence of traditional values and presuppositions on contemporary feminist historical methodologies.

I suggest that one strategy for reviving this critical posture—the strategy for which I am advocating here—is to develop a both a rhetorical and a deconstructive approach to feminist methodological discourse.

Such an analysis is founded on three critical insights: First, historical methodologies are constituted discursively, regardless of whether methodological discourses are made explicit, as they often are in feminist and revisionary histories, or whether they are left implicit, as they typically are in traditional histories. This is to say that, regardless of the presence or absence of specific methodological utterances within any historical account, historical methodologies represent arguments about the goals and values that ought to inform the writing of histories of rhetorics. Because one primary goal of early feminist histories and historiographies is to articulate and challenge implicit traditional

2 While it is not my aim, here, to critique feminists’ uses of traditional research methods, it is not clear to me that “methods” can be so neatly distinguished from the “methodologies” which presumably inform them. Hui Wu, for example, defines “methodology” somewhat differently from L’Eplattenier, suggesting that “a traditional explanation of methodology is that it is a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed”—a definition that clearly troubles L’Eplattenier’s cleaner distinction (84).

presuppositions, these arguments are necessarily made explicit and textually present in the majority feminist historical research. Second, whereas traditional methodological arguments tend to be constructed constatively, feminist methodological arguments seek to challenge those constative arguments performatively, by developing and deploying performative methodological rhetorics. Cheryl Glenn makes this point in Rhetoric Retold, where she argues that “the [methodology] of regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act,” in the sense that “it does something”—namely, it draws upon the resources of performative rhetorics to challenge the constative knowledge claims that support traditional methodological values (174, 10).3 Third, the performativity of feminist methodological and historiographical discourse is often disclosed figuratively, that is, through the articulation of feminist methodological figures. I suggest that, on the one hand, the rhetorical analysis of these figures may allow feminist historiographers to acknowledge the usefulness of feminist methodological figures in constituting the conditions of possibility for the emergence of feminist histories. On the other hand, however, a deconstructive analysis will allow us to trace the process by which, as Skinnell puts it,

“tropological appeals” to develop critical feminist perspectives have ultimately been consolidated into a “bureaucratic mandate” to “retrieve the excluded.”

Ultimately, I argue that this process of consolidation and assimilation does not merely represent the contemporary state of feminist historical research in rhetorical

3 Glenn writes that, before she could write or publish an historical account of the classical rhetor Aspasia, she “had to come to an understanding of what [she] wanted her map, [her] history to do.” She concludes that, in the end, she “wanted to challenge the male-dominated story of rhetoric by telling a story of Aspasia that illustrated just how the various renditions of her configure an emblem of Woman (and women) in rhetorical history” (Rhetoric 5).

studies, or even of revisionary historical research more broadly, as Skinnell suggests.

Rather, if there is a so-called contemporary “broadening imperative” that characterizes feminist revisionary methodologies, it reflects a general condition in which figurative performative discourse is necessarily assimilated to the literal constative dimension of language, and visa versa. If, in other words, we find that it is perhaps not so easy to distinguish, finally, between revisionary and traditional approaches to writing histories of rhetorics, this will have been attributable to the impossibility of definitively distinguishing between a purely performative and a purely constative utterance—an impossibility that is introduced by J.L Austin and later elaborated and significantly complicated by Jacques

Derrida. If, further, we wish to complicate or even to subvert the “broadening imperative” that characterizes feminist revisionary methodology, it will first be necessary to complicate the constative or representational imperative that marks both traditional and revisionary historical discourses, and which governs the operations of both the traditional “as such” and the performative “as if.”

A Performative Relation Between the “Real” and “Discourse”

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau writes that, “Historiography (that is,

‘history’ and ‘writing’) bears within its own name the paradox—almost an oxymoron—of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them and, at the point where this link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined” (xxvii). I suggest that, not only is imagining the link between “the real” and “discourse” the aim of historical writing in general, but it is also a fundamentally methodological and rhetorical task. Insofar as methodology can be defined, as Hui Wu suggests, as “a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed,” it is

clear that, from a historiographical perspective, the development of strategies to link “the real” and “discourse” represents a central methodological problem for historians of rhetoric. This is particularly true for feminist historians and historiographers, for whom

“the real”—that is, the historical presence of marginalized rhetors—is often difficult or impossible to establish, owing, for example, to a lack of historical evidence supporting marginal rhetorical activities and practices (Glenn, Rhetoric and “Sex”; Swearingen, “Plato”;

Wertheimer, Listening). This situation would seem to doom the feminist historiographical project from the start; but, helpfully, de Certeau introduces the possibility of a historiography that can be undertaken even where a link between “the real” and

“discourse” cannot be established or legitimized in traditional terms. It is possible, he suggests, to write history in the space of an as if, a space that would allow feminist historians to imaginatively and discursively institute historical realities that would otherwise be impossible within traditional historical discourse.

Traditional/Constative and Revisionary/Performative Historiographies We can perhaps more easily understand the concept of a performative feminist historiography composed in the space of an as if by opposing it to the concept of a constative traditional historiography composed on the grounds of the as such—that is, a traditional historiography that seeks to describe the past, as such, using the resources of constative rhetorics. In opposing these two forms of historiographical and methodological discourses, I invoke J.L. Austin’s sense of the constative and performative dimensions of language. In How to Do Things With Words, Austin describes a “constative utterance” as an assertion (usually true or false) that describes existing objects or conditions. Importantly, and as Austin is careful to explain, the accuracy of a constative utterance depends both

upon the demonstrable facticity of the conditions the utterance seeks to describe and upon the correctness of the utterance’s reference to those conditions. Austin writes: “We might say, in ordinary cases, for example running, it is the fact that [one] is running which makes the statement that he is running true; or again, that the truth of the constative utterance ‘he is running’ depends on his being running” (47). As Austin makes clear, in order for the utterance “he is running” to be considered true or factual, the subject the utterance describes must, in fact, be running and, particularly relevant to our current discussion, the speaker must have both the epistemological capacity to verify the facticity of these conditions and the rhetorical capacity to correctly refer to them.

Austin’s example helps clarify the epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical presuppositions that operate in traditional historiographical discourse, and it demonstrates the extent to which these presuppositions limit the field of possible historical utterances. If, for example, we wish to claim (as have Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and others) that “Aspasia was an important intellectual and rhetorical figure during classical antiquity” it would be necessary, at least according to traditional values and presuppositions, to demonstrate the factual link between this utterance and actually existing historical conditions. This demonstration would likely involve the discovery and citation of legitimate (i.e. textual) historical evidence showing that our claims about

Aspasia’s rhetorical contributions are, in fact, commensurate with the past, as such. Just as

Austin would suggest, “the truth of the constative utterance [‘Aspasia was an important intellectual and rhetorical figure in classical antiquity’]” depends on her actually being an important intellectual and rhetorical figure, and it further depends, again, on our epistemological and methodological capacities to verify the facticity of her rhetorical

contributions. However, as Glenn and Jarratt have made clear, we are aware of no existing textual evidence to definitively support such a claim about Aspasia. Nor, in fact, is there definitive evidence to support the rhetorical contributions of many marginalized rhetors— hence my initial claim that the constative nature of traditional historical rhetoric, especially when taken together with other traditional investments and values, forecloses possibilities for feminist histories to emerge within those traditional paradigms.4

In light of the epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical constraints imposed by traditional constative rhetorics, several early feminist historians and historiographers have sought to develop alternative rhetorical strategies for writing histories of marginal rhetorical subjects in the performative space of an as if. I have already noted that Glenn explicitly identifies feminist methodologies as “performative,” in the sense that feminist methodologies (and, therefore, feminist methodological utterances) “do something”—that is, they aim to transform the conditions of historical writing in the field, rather than simply to describe the past constatively, or to describe the past as such. And indeed, of performative utterances, Austin writes that “they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constant anything at all, are not ‘true’ or ‘false’; and the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something” (5, emphasis added). A performative utterance, then, is an utterance that institutes certain conditions, and does not simply describe any already-existing state of affairs. In the terms that Austin offers, therefore, and for the purposes of this argument, we

4 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell explains the lack of evidence to support women’s rhetorical activities when she notes that “for much of their history women have been prohibited from speaking…[and] once they began to speak, their words often were not preserved, with the result that many rhetorical acts by women are gone forever” (1).

might provisionally understand a feminist methodological performative utterance as an historical utterance that inaugurates certain historical subjects and conditions, and that does not claim to simply describe the past, as such.

Writing Feminist Histories As If It is also possible, along the same lines, to describe the performativity of feminist methodological discourse in de Certeau’s terms, which emphasize rhetorical strategies for imagining the link between “the real” and “discourse,” even (and especially) where this link

“cannot be imagined.” As I have just suggested, traditional historiographical epistemologies, methodologies, and rhetorics foreclose precisely the imagination of a link between the “real” of, for example, Aspasia’s rhetorical contributions, and any verifiable historical discourse that would seek to name her as a legitimate historical subject. That is to say that, because Aspasia’ rhetorical activities cannot be verified as “real” or factual according to traditional evidentiary standards, any constative discourse would find itself unable to secure the validity of its own referential statements. In order for a feminist historian to write the history of Aspasia, for example, it is therefore necessary, as de

Certeau suggests, to “work as if” a historical discourse could refer to Aspasia’s rhetorical practices—despite the fact that those practices cannot be verified according to traditional methodological paradigms. In de Certeau’s terms, therefore, we might further define a performative methodological rhetoric as a strategy for instituting “the real” through the articulation of a performative discourse. As de Certeau suggests, while this performative strategy cannot secure its own commensurability with the past as such, it nevertheless functions to produce a discourse of the past in the space opened by the imaginative space of the as if.

To demonstrate the structure and implications of this kind of performative utterance—that is, an utterance that performatively institutes certain historical “realities” in the space of the as if—it may be helpful to work through a brief example from outside the realm of historical discourse. Take, for example, the popular aphorism, “Dance like no one is watching.” At the level of its statement, this aphorism encourages the addressee to undertake a real activity as if there were no audience present to observe and evaluate the addressee’s performance. Implied in the structure of the utterance is the assumption that, in the performative gesture initiated by the as if, the constraints that threaten to negate or undermine the given activity (the gaze of an audience who watches) are substituted for fictional conditions that institute a more hospitable state of affairs (the absence of a watching audience). A thoughtful analysis of the aphorism “dance like no is watching” demonstrates that, far from functioning merely as a description of already-existing affairs, the performative gesture enacted by the as if institutes, or could very well institute, material conditions for the dancer’s performance that did not exist prior to the utterance’s articulation. Indeed, the aphorism implies that when the addressee performs as if she had no audience to observe her—despite the fact that this state of affairs is offered as a speculative fiction—the performance itself may undergo certain “real” modifications.

Importantly, we can also acknowledge that this performative utterance indicates an epistemological and methodological structure, and does not necessitate any particular modification of the activity. On the contrary, the as if here introduces the possibility of an infinite chain of performative modifications. In other words, the articulation of the as if indicates a structure in which fictional conditions for any given claim or activity are

infinitely substitutable with other possible fictional conditions, each of which would modify the activity in different ways.

Recalling Austin’s definitions of constative and performative utterances, it is clear that the as if in the example above marks a departure from traditional constative discourses whose aims are primarily descriptive or, as historian Dominic LaCapra might say, “documentary.” And as I have suggested, performative utterances depart from traditional constative discourse by articulating conditions that are, at the time of the utterance, merely possible and not actual—but by articulating these fictional conditions, the performative also institutes certain material effects and, in so doing, creates the conditions of possibility for new activities and utterances to emerge. In the example above, the performative gesture of the as if creates the conditions of possibility for the “dance” by instituting a fictional condition of privacy for the addressee’s performance. And while the addressee may not actually be performing unobserved, the utterance implies that the performance will nevertheless (or could nevertheless) be materially and actually modified by the performative institution of these conditions. I argue that the performative utterance of the as if functions similarly in historical discourse. Just as the dancer is, prior to the uttering of the as if, constrained by the watchful gaze of her audience, so is the feminist historian constrained, initially, by the historical contingencies imposed by traditional historiographical values and presuppositions. And, as is the case for the dancer in the above example, I suggest that, for early feminist revisionary historians, the performative gesture of the as if institutes fictional or merely possible conditions for the writing of feminist histories, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for those feminist revisionary histories to emerge.

Figures of the Feminist Performative

In the example I have discussed above, a speaker enjoins an addressee to “dance as if no one is watching.” Borrowing my terms from Michel de Certeau, I explained that this seemingly insignificant phrase, “as if,” in fact indicates a performative structure that institutes, rather than describes, the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of “dance” to take place. I further suggested that this same performative structure characterizes the methodological discourse of early feminist historians and historiographers, who sought to challenge traditional investments in a constative, or “documentary,” historical rhetoric— investments which, especially when taken together with other traditional methodological constraints, have severely curtailed the possibilities for feminist history writing. If, however, early feminist historians are similarly enjoined to “write histories as if,” it remains to show how feminist scholars have completed this utterance. What, in other words, comes after the as if in feminist methodological utterances?

I argue that it is within the performative structure of the as if that feminist historians and historiographers have developed and deployed a variety of methodological figures, each of which institutes (albeit it different ways) the methodological conditions of possibility for the writing of feminist histories of rhetoric.5 Feminist historians have, in this

5 Several other feminist historians and historiographers have noted the constitutive role of figurative language in structuring feminist historical and historiographical methodologies. L’Eplattenier, for example, has observed the role played by figurative language in constituting the feminist historical episteme, and she encourages feminist historians to choose their methodological figures carefully, taking into account the particular complexities of any given historical subject (“Questioning”). Feminist communication scholar Carly S. Woods makes a similar point, suggesting that feminist historians ought to

vein, proposed to write histories as if, for example, one were “listening” to the voices of neglected historical rhetors (Campbell), as if one were exploring and mapping undiscovered territories (Glenn), or as if one were relocating marginalized rhetors to the main floor in the house of rhetoric (Sutton).6 Each of these figures, as I have suggested, performatively institutes a methodological ground for feminist historiography. Figures of voice, that is, write histories as if historically silenced subjects had possessed recognizable forms of rhetorical agency; figures of cartography write histories as if there was a disciplinary exigency to annex what lies outside of the traditional historical range; and figures of architecture write histories as if the continuing hierarchy of authority within histories of rhetoric could finally be flattened or altogether displaced.

Figures of Negative Deconstruction While each of these figures constitutes its own specific possibilities for the writing of feminist histories, all three also, more generally speaking, represent critical “tropological appeals” for “broadening” historical research in rhetorical studies. As Skinnell suggests in his discussion of these appeals, the exigencies associated with broadening histories of rhetoric are most obviously linked with figures of cartography, which appeal explicitly to the broadening of rhetoric’s historical borders and to the expansion of its territory. But

develop figures capable of accommodating an intersectional, rather than a fixed or stable, approach to historical subjectivity (“Immobile”).

6 While these three examples certainly do not represent an exhaustive catalogue of feminist methodological figures they do represent the most ubiquitous in the field of feminist historical studies, both within and outside the discipline of rhetoric. Cartographic figures, in particular, have been recognized as having had the most significant impact on the writing of histories of rhetoric (see L’Eplattenier, Woods, Skinnell).

figures of voice and figures of architecture, among others, also participate in appeals to broadening by arguing for expanded historical access to rhetorical agency and authority. At the core of each of these figures is the recognition that, through the operations of traditional historical discourse, the rhetorical activities and contributions of marginalized subjects have been negated, repressed, and otherwise made supplementary, at best, to the activities of white, Western, heterosexual male rhetors. To “broaden” histories of rhetoric, therefore, requires that feminist historians work, as de Certeau might say, as if what has been negated, repressed, and made supplementary could become present and therefore assume agency and authority within histories of rhetorics.

As Diane Davis, Victor J. Vitanza, and Michelle Ballif have noted, the methodology of

“de-negation”—especially as it expresses itself in feminist and revisionary historiographies—is associated with the strategy of “negative deconstruction,” which Davis has defined as “a trick to keep the privilege shuffling back and forth” between the privileged and supplementary terms in a given binary opposition. Davis writes, that, in response to the “ghastly situation” of women’s negation, “feminists have made a move that has been coined ‘gynocentric,’ inverting the privilege of the established binary and arguing for ‘the superiority of values embodied in traditionally female experience’” (“Breaking”

127). The feminist inversion of patriarchal (or phallocratic) binary oppositions in traditional histories of rhetoric is most evident in earlier feminist historical research, much of which seeks to establish a “parallel history” for women rhetors, rather than to write women rhetors into dominant historical accounts (see Campbell). However, it seems to me that even the revisionary strategy of writing marginalized subjects into dominant narratives—that is, the “broadening” of existing histories of rhetorics—can also be

characterized in terms of a negative deconstruction. Each of the three feminist methodological figures I have identified, for example, characterizes the historiographical negation of marginalized subjects in terms of a binary opposition, where the marginalized subject is, at least initially, figuratively aligned with the supplementary term: figures of voice invoke the binary of voice/silence, and therefore characterize marginalized historical subjects as having been robbed of their capacity for legitimate speech; figures of cartography invoke the binary of inside/outside, and therefore figure marginalized historical subjects as “outside” the borders of the rhetorical territory; and figures of architecture invoke the binary of parlor/basement, and therefore figure marginalized historical subjects as relegated to the downstairs (or, other times, to the attic) in the house of rhetoric. In setting up this series of oppositions, feminist historians have created the conditions for a methodology of negative deconstruction, whereby the possibilities for histories of rhetorics are “broadened” by conferring a preferred status upon a supplementary subject.

Reading The Figure of the Palimpsest In order to further demonstrate how the institution and negative deconstruction of these oppositions functions to “broaden” possibilities for feminist histories, it will once again be helpful to turn to an example, this time coming from a specifically feminist historical discourse: namely, Cheryl Glenn’s figure of the palimpsest which, in Glenn’s research, inaugurates the conditions of possibility for naming Aspasia as a legitimate and important historical rhetor. In the introduction to Rhetoric Retold, Glenn explains that her broader historical project—the project of “regendering” the rhetorical tradition—grew from her specific efforts to write Aspasia into dominant histories of rhetorics. In

undertaking this project, Glenn notes that she encountered several formidable obstacles, which she attributes to the disciplinary (and disciplining) hegemony of traditional methodological presumptions. First, as is well known, we are aware of no surviving texts that are directly attributable to Aspasia; we know of her existence only through secondary sources attributed to her male contemporaries and successors (“Sex” 182). Second, where those secondary sources have been taken up in traditional historical research, that research has interpreted Aspasia, not as “Our Mother of Rhetoric, lifelong companion of

Pericles and influential colleague of famous men,” as Glenn would have it, but rather, for example, as a “harem girl to Alcibiades, the arrogant, dissolute, untrustworthy love object of Socrates” (Rhetoric 1). She suggests that, taken together, traditional evidentiary standards and interpretive methodologies have functioned not only to render Aspasia, as rhetor, absent from histories of rhetorics, but also to foreclose the methodological possibilities for reading Aspasia otherwise.7 To write a feminist history of Aspasia that would nevertheless be legible as a properly historical discourse, therefore, requires Glenn not only to argue for the methodological legitimacy of existing secondary sources, but also to argue for interpretive strategies that account for the patriarchal biases in the composition of existing secondary accounts. Put another way, perhaps, to write the history of Aspasia as rhetor requires Glenn to develop a strategy for reading and figuring the

7 Reflecting on the methodological constraints associated with traditional histories of rhetorics, Glenn writes: “Except for rhetoric, no intellectual endeavor—not even the male bastion of philosophy—has so consciously rendered women invisible and silent” (Rhetoric 2). It is no mere accident, in Glenn’s view, that traditional methodological presuppositions function to erase women’s contributions from rhetorical histories; rather, she suggests, this erasure is attributable to a set of conscious methodological choices, based on pre-existing ideas about the gender and the “distributions of [rhetorical] power.”

imposed absence of Aspasia from traditional historical discourses as if it were concealing a more fundamental presence—a strategy, that is, of a performative and figurative negative deconstruction.

To this end, Glenn offers the palimpsestic text as a figure for reading the rhetorical presence of Aspasia. She writes, “What if I read Aspasia [as if] through the palimpsest of her thoughts, knowing that her words and actions have been inscribed and re-inscribed by those of men?” This figurative procedure, Glenn suggests, might ultimately “help [us] shape—re-member—a female rhetorical presence” (Rhetoric 8). We can perhaps read

Glenn’s figure of the palimpsest as a re-figuration of her insistence—echoing C. Jan

Swearingen—that “invisible and silent are not the same as absent,” an assertion which, for

Glenn, is precisely the condition of possibility for the recovery of Aspasia as an important rhetorical subject in antiquity (Rhetoric 2, emphasis added).8 Insofar as the revisionary project of recovery, even while it operates in relative opposition to traditional methodologies, requires an historical subject to be (or be made) present before she can be recovered, it therefore is necessary for Glenn and other feminist historians to challenge the equation of historical invisibility and “real” or material absence, as a condition of possibility for the writing of feminist histories of rhetorics. It is necessary, in other words, to establish a figurative ground upon which “invisible and silent” subjects can be written (or read) as if

8 In her essay “Plato’s Women,” Swearingen writes that: “Lack of evidence, a common roadblock to studies of [historical] women…is not in the end a conclusive argument against the projects of recuperation and reinterpretation. As was said of the O.J. Simpson trial, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The same thing holds true of Diotima and Aspasia, indeed of any woman—or man—whose shade is glimpsed amidst the fragmentary papyri, shards, and distorted (by modern standards) literary-mythic histories of antiquity” (36).

their presence could be both verified and deciphered. When Glenn proposes to read

“invisible and silent” Aspasia as if “through the palimpsest of her thoughts,” therefore, she challenges precisely this traditional conflation of invisibility with absence. While the palimpsest’s most original text may have been effaced or covered over to accommodate later inscriptions, traces of that primary text nevertheless remain, even if rendered (nearly) invisible beneath these subsequent writings.

The figure of the palimpsest, then, accomplishes several methodological and rhetorical goals within the context of Glenn’s history. First, it figuratively corrects the absence of primary textual evidence recording Aspasia’s rhetorical activities and contributions by figuring this evidence, not as absent, but rather as if it had been merely been effaced or covered over by subsequent secondary accounts. Second, it corrects mis- interpretations of Aspasia that stem from these subsequent writings by suggesting that we develop methods of “reading through” secondary texts, or of reading what is concealed beneath them, rather than simply reading what is inscribed on their surfaces. Third, it legitimizes this practice of “reading through” by “shuffling the privilege” between two binary terms; that is, it performs a negative deconstruction that re-assigns epistemological and methodological privilege to that which has formerly been concealed and thus made supplementary (Aspasia, as the original palimpsestic inscription), at the expense of those unconcealed (and therefore privileged) secondary texts.

Glenn’s figure of the palimpsest demonstrates, therefore, the intersection of the performative gesture of the as if with the resources of figurative methodological discourse.

Further, this figure shows that, in writing (or reading) the history of Aspasia as if through a palimpsestic text, the performative gesture being made is one of negative deconstruction—

that is, of a “shuffling of privilege” between the preferred terms associated with a traditional masculinist history and the supplementary terms associated with what that history has effaced. It is by way of precisely this negative deconstruction that revisionary and feminist methodologies gain legitimacy in the field, such that Aspasia (and other historically marginalized figures) can not only be written, but can further, as Glenn suggests, be written into “an expanded, inclusive tradition” (Rhetoric 2). As I have argued, then, this figure (and the others to which I have alluded here) is not representative of any mere stylistic ornament, but rather represents the conditions of possibility for Aspasia to emerge and be represented as such, or as legible and legitimate within disciplinary discourses.

Countering Representational Demands

I have argued up to this point that feminist methodological figures, along with the performative structure that represents the conditions of their articulation, have constituted the methodological and rhetorical foundation upon which feminist histories and historiographies of rhetorics have gained legitimacy in the field. And indeed, if the general success of the feminist revisionary intervention is any indication, these figurative gestures have been remarkably successful at instituting new methodological possibilities for feminist historiography. As Ryan Skinnell has recently noted, and as I have already suggested, revisionary historical and historiographical methodologies have so successfully challenged traditional values and presuppositions that they have effectively supplanted traditional historical approaches as the standard for historical research in rhetorical studies. Skinnell writes that “Most contemporary histories of rhetoric are revisionary,” and indeed, insofar as “revisionary” histories are defined, as Skinnell suggests, by the

imperative to recover and write neglected historical rhetors into dominant disciplinary accounts, a survey of contemporary historical scholarship appears to support this assertion.9 Perhaps nowhere has the revisionary intervention been as influential as among feminist historians and historiographers, many of whom have argued that revisionary paradigms are essentially feminist in their orientation toward marginalized, silenced, and excluded rhetors—many of whom have been women.10

An/In Excess of Theory However, as both Skinnell and Byron Hawk have pointed out, we would be mistaken to assume that traditional approaches to historical research no longer exert influence on the field. Hawk, in particular, notes that the decades since the initial revisionary intervention have been characterized by an “oscillation between traditional and revisionary approaches” wherein we have witnessed “cyclical calls to theorize history and dispense with theory,” in response to “articulations of present conditions and the state of

9 See, for example, the September 2012 issue of College Composition and Communication.

10 As Elizabeth Tasker and Francis Holt-Underwood put it in their 2008 survey of feminist historiographical methodologies: In the later part of the twentieth century, feminist historical research across all disciplines of the humanities was bolstered by an upsurge in [revisionary] historiography as an alternative to the fact-finding mission of traditional historic research. This broaden approach to historical research made room for feminist historiography, which emphasizes the need for historical recovery (the location of lost or overlooked texts and acts of rhetoric and composition) and revision (the rereading of existing texts, theories, and artifacts) to account for factors of gender. (55)

In suggesting that the “upsurge in [revisionary] historiography” created the opportunity for feminist historiography, Tasker and Holt-Underwood demonstrate the interdependence of feminist and revisionary approaches to historical research in the field.

decadence achieved by either extreme” (109-10, 106-7). This oscillation, which might also be characterized as an oscillation between (revisionary) theory and (traditional) practice, is also evident in feminist historical research, particularly in calls to minimize theoretical discussions and return our attention to the archival research practices that underwrite the recovery of neglected historical subjects (L’Eplattenier; Ferreira-Buckley; Ramsey, Sharer et al.). Importantly, these feminist calls to return to traditional methods and methodologies do not claim to divorce themselves from the progressive exigencies of feminist revisionary historiography—rather, they suggest that “traditional methodology, far from being incompatible with a progressive politics, is in fact the best agent of change,” and they further argue that traditional research methodologies represent tools that are “crucial to revising traditional accounts of history” (Ferreira-Buckley 582). Again, the importance of the archival turn in feminist historical research cannot, and should not, be underestimated.

After a period of intense “theoretical” and methodological discussion and debate, a return to the archives has been necessary to enact the feminist historiographical possibilities opened up by those earlier methodological interventions. And yet, as Skinnell notes, in the absence of theoretical discussion that critiques and expands those existing possibilities, this more “traditional” approach to feminist historical research risks being assimilated into an uncritical “broadening imperative” in which traditional research methods and methodologies, rather than serving feminist-progressive aims as Ferreira-Buckley suggests, instead come to reflect traditional historiographical presuppositions that value, for example, the unity, completeness, accuracy, and objectivity of historical accounts.

I argue that the re-assimilation of feminist revisionary rhetorics and methodologies into traditional paradigms can be productively re-described in terms of the re-assimilation

of performative utterances into the constative dimension of language. Returning to the terms offered by de Certeau, we might also characterize this phenomenon as the re- assimilation of the (performative) as if into the realm of the (constative) as such. While feminist historians and historiographers have worked to subvert traditional investments in a constative history as such by developing a performative and figurative historical discourse rooted in the as if, I argue that this feminist performative discourse ultimately fails to disentangle itself from the values of constative historical discourse. This is to say that, because the goal of feminist historical discourse is ultimately representational, its performative gesture—even though founded in the speculative space of the as if—can ultimately only point toward an as such that has previously, as a result of certain traditional presuppositions and historical contingencies, remained outside our methodological and rhetorical range. This suggests, importantly, that the so-called “oscillation” between feminist historiographical theorization and feminist archival practice does not merely represent the contemporary state of feminist historical research in the field, but rather the condition of possibility for any feminist revisionary historical project. In other words, and as the oscillation between feminist historiographical theorization and feminist archival practice demonstrates, the production of meaningful feminist revisionary discourse (and of feminist historical knowledge) requires both the performative institution of other representational possibilities and the constative articulation of those possible representations.

The re-assimilation of the performative as if into the constative dimension of the as such is not only evident within the distinct but interrelated theoretical and practical discourses I have just described. It is also evident within any singular feminist revisionary

discourse, and it is particularly apparent in the content and structure of feminist revisionary methodological figures. Here again, Glenn’s figure of the palimpsest provides a useful illustration of this concept. As I have explained, Glenn develops the figure of the palimpsest in order to respond to specific traditional methodological constraints which, taken together, have rendered impossible any “traditional” history of Aspasia as a significant rhetor in classical antiquity. For Glenn to write (or read) the history of Aspasia as if through a palimpsestic text is, specifically, to initiate a performative gesture that, in refiguring what it might mean to “read” historical texts, corrects problems related to traditional methods of evaluating and interpreting historical evidence. But Glenn’s figure of the palimpsest does not only seek to figure or represent a critical strategy for reading and interpreting (the absence of) historical evidence; by figuratively comparing Aspasia to the original palimpsestic inscription, it also offers a representation of Aspasia, as such. Indeed, it is only by virtue of figuring Aspasia as the original palimpsestic inscription, and thereby performatively instituting the conditions of her presence within the corpus of existing historical evidence, that Glenn can finally—and constatively—assert the emergence of

Aspasia “as an exceptional hero in a new rhetorical narrative” (Rhetoric 44). Put another way, we might say that the figure of the palimpsest performs a dual gesture: on the one hand, it constructs a performative and figurative discourse that institutes the conditions of possibility for the articulation of “a new rhetorical narrative.” On the other hand, however, it simultaneously constructs a constative discourse that names Aspasia, and that awaits her emergence as “an exceptional hero” within the space that is opened by this new narrative.

The Ethical Imperative of Historiographic Deconstruction I have so far discussed at length the performative utterance as if, and I have argued that this small utterance, whether actually uttered or only implied, marks the conditions of possibility for the emergence of formerly silent and invisible historical rhetors within the rhetorical tradition. The as if, in other words, marks the becoming-possible of what has formerly been impossible, as such, and therefore also marks the possibility of finally producing historical knowledge claims about these impossible subjects. As Michelle Ballif has recently argued, echoing Jacques Derrida, “‘Knowledge,’” or that which can be, and must be, posited in the constative terms of the as such, “is precisely what renders the impossible possible” (“Historiography” 146). It is in this sense, I suggest, that the performativity of the as if is, in the context of any revisionary historiographical discourse, ultimately re-assimilated into the dimension of constative language, such that the inaugurating “dual gesture” of feminist revisionary historiography is immediately and necessarily consolidated into a single representational imperative. To the extent that the performative utterance “as if” anticipates and makes possible the emergence and representation of Aspasia, in particular and as such, it ultimately becomes difficult, if not altogether impossible, to maintain a clean distinction between the constative representational gesture itself and the performative revisionary gesture that institutes the conditions of representational possibility. As Derrida himself might put it: it is precisely

“this small word, the as of the ‘as if’ as well as the as of the ‘as such,’ whose authority founds and justifies every ontology as well as every phenomenology, every philosophy as science of knowledge,” that enables the feminist historian of rhetoric—indeed, Derrida suggests, any historian—to profess any representational claim concerning the past or its subjects

(“University” 53). Importantly, the collapse of the distinction between the constative and performative aspects of feminist historiography has significant consequences for the supposed distinction between traditional and (feminist) revisionary historiographical methodologies. As Skinnell suggests, revisionary historical discourses are defined by the linking of a constative imperative to recover and represent neglected historical rhetors as such with the performative imperative to critically re-vision the rhetorical tradition as if.

When the former is divorced from the latter, or at the point when a rigorous distinction between these two imperatives can no longer be supported, we are left, as Skinnell proposes, with an uncritical “broadening imperative” that more closely resembles a traditional approach to historiography, rather than a properly revisionary one.

Further, and even more significantly, the necessary failure of the presumed distinction between the constative and performative aspects of feminist revisionary discourse—a productive failure that institutes the conditions of possibility for the production of historical knowledge claims—suggests that this traditionally-oriented

“broadening imperative” does not simply represent a temporary (or contemporary) perversion of normal or properly revisionary feminist methodologies. Rather, if there is a

“broadening imperative” at work in contemporary revisionary feminist histories, this is because there is also a more fundamental and structurally necessary constative imperative, or an imperative that any historical discourse make (or make possible) representational propositions about the past—even if those propositions take the apparently performative or figurative form of an as if. If, therefore, we wish to overcome the methodological impasse instituted by this “broadening imperative,” we will need to develop strategies that go beyond the “broadening” of what is possible to know and to represent, historically. It will

not be, in other words, any simple matter of adjusting the frame of representational possibility by, for example, adjusting or altering the terms of our methodological figures.11

We will need, instead, to fully invest in Skinnell’s definition of critique, borrowed from

Judith Butler, as “the practice of ‘posing the question of the limits of our most sure ways of knowing,” which is, as Ballif suggests, to pose the questions of the limits of historical knowledge itself (Skinnell 113).

What is at stake in this deconstructive critique is, as Ballif notes, the

(impossible) possibility of writing ethical feminist histories of rhetoric—histories, that is, that challenge the fundamentally exclusionary nature of any representational historical knowledge claim. As Victor J. Vitanza famously argues, “if we get meaning by way of excluding, by way of saying what something as by way of what it is not, then we have purchased a stable grand narrative and meaning by way of exclusion” (Negation 13). The ethical challenge, therefore, as Ballif has written elsewhere, is to imagine a historiography that would “counter this representational demand” involved in “normative [that is, both traditional and revisionary] historical thinking,” and thereby resist the impulse to “do violence to ‘what was,’—or to what once was or to what never once was—by coopting past events as merely evidentiary to whatever the guiding paradigm, argument, or hypothesis is that prompted the history” (“Writing” 243-44). The ethical imperative that Ballif describes,

11 This is the strategy that is suggested by feminist historians Barbara L’Eplattenier and Carly S. Woods, both of whom suggest the possibility we might develop a more inclusive feminist framework by interrogating, and ultimately replacing, the methodological figure of mapping. L’Eplattenier, in particular, argues that “our metaphors need to be flexible, changeable, and responsive to our subjects so that they help us work systematically through our archival records and present stories with multiple perspectives” (“Questioning” 143).

therefore, is fundamentally at odds with the constative “broadening imperative,” which I have shown to be constitutive of, and not merely a perversion of, feminist revisionary historical discourse. This is, therefore, an ethical imperative to resist the assimilation of the performative as if to the constative as such by replacing the imperative to produce historical knowledge claims with the imperative to write history as the writing of the singular event.

CHAPTER ONE: VOICES OF THE PAST

In order to trace a figurative history of feminist historiographical methodology in rhetorical studies, I begin—as nearly all histories, both traditional and revisionary, do—at the beginning. While this historiographical strategy is, in many ways, at odds with my more general objectives in this dissertation, there is precedent for taking this beginning as a starting place. Indeed, most comprehensive surveys of feminist historical research in rhetorical studies locate the beginning of the sustained feminist intervention in 1989, with the publication of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s two-volume work, Man Cannot Speak for Her.

Elizabeth Tasker and Francis Holt-Underwood, for example, identify Man Cannot Speak for

Her as “ a breakthrough in feminist historic methodology,” in the sense that, for the first time, Campbell moves beyond merely acknowledging the exclusion of women rhetors from the historical canon. Here, as Tasker and Holt-Underwood point out, Campbell finally

“begins to recover…female rhetoric” (57) and, through a careful reading of these recovered rhetorics, to propose both an historical methodology and a critical rhetoric for feminist historical scholars.

As is perhaps well known, despite the significant contribution of Man Cannot Speak for Her to feminist historical research in rhetoric, the text (and its author) have frequently been characterized as overly conservative in their uncritical embrace of traditional research methods. While the most familiar of these critiques comes from Barbara Biesecker in her essay “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of

Rhetoric,” other feminist scholars have also acknowledged the limitations of Campbell’s traditional approach. Feminist rhetorician Christine Oravec, for example, notes in a 1991 review that “Man Cannot Speak for Her reflects the vices as well as the virtues of its

choices.” In particular, she notes, “the study uniformly applies traditional historical and critical methods to its untraditional content,” giving readers the impression that the primary aim of the study is not to challenge exclusionary disciplinary structures, but rather to work within those structures “to gain respectability for women’s oratory and women’s scholarship” (277).

My concern, writing some fifteen years after both Biesecker and Oravec, is that charges of traditionalism and conservatism threaten to obscure the significance of Man

Cannot Speak for Her as an early challenge, not only to the male-dominated canon itself, but also to the methodological and rhetorical presuppositions that have guided processes of historical knowledge production and canon formation in rhetorical studies. In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that, by reading Campbell’s contribution through the performative and figurative lens I have outlined (that is, through the lens of a feminist history as if), we are better positioned to appreciate this important text, not only in terms of its feminist application of supposedly traditional methodologies, but also for its unacknowledged role in inaugurating a performative and figurative feminist methodological discourse.

This should not be understood, however, as a project of recovering or rescuing

Campbell’s text; it is already enshrined in the canon of revisionary histories of rhetoric, and therefore does not need to be rescued or restored to our memory. Rather, if I am concerned about the legacy of Man Cannot Speak for Her, it is only because I want feminist historians of rhetoric to become aware of the performative gesture enacted by this text, a text which has been so significant for feminist revisionary histories of rhetoric, in order to subject that gesture, and the others that have followed it, to a more rigorous rhetorical critique. As a matter of fact, I remain skeptical about the value of Campbell’s methodological rhetoric for

contemporary feminist historians of rhetoric, especially in light of the “broadening imperative” that Skinnell diagnoses. During the last three decades, following Campbell, the methodological discourse of speaking for silenced women rhetors has functioned as the primary figurative mode for conceptualizing and describing feminist historical recovery. As the figure of “speaking for” has become increasingly commonplace in feminist historiographical rhetoric, I fear that we are no longer invested in considering the theoretical and practical problems that attend speaking for others as a mode of performative historical representation. I argue, therefore, that while feminist recovery (or

“speaking for”) remains an important task for contemporary feminist historians, this supposedly “traditional” methodology can be enriched by a revival of discussion about the limits and implications of performative historical representation as a primary mode of feminist critique.

A Non-Traditional View of the Rhetorical Tradition

While later figures emerge in response to and in the context of established feminist methodological discourses, Campbell’s performative and figurative gesture of “speaking for” develops in response to the epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical conditions of traditional historical practice. If we are to begin, as I suggested, at the beginning of the feminist historiographical intervention, it will be necessary to first articulate and discuss the traditional conditions that, in a significant sense, provide a ground for future feminist revisionary critiques.

Traditional Historiographies of Rhetoric in Context “Traditional” historiography, as it has come to be known in rhetorical studies, is the inheritor of the practice of scientific historiography, the development of which is often attributed to the so-called “Historical School” in Germany, which included prominent historians such as Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Wilhelm von Humboldt and, most famously,

Leopold von Ranke.12 As philosopher of History Chris Lorenz puts it:

The “founding myth” of Rankean scientific historiography was its claim to describe

the past ‘as it really was’ (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’) and to be beyond any form of

partisanship; that is, to be objective. This combination of a reality claim—implying a

truth claim of historiography, in contrast to all fictional genres—and an objectivity

claim—implying a claim to intersubjective validity in contrast to all non-scientific

genres—has been characteristic of “scientific” historiography ever since. (394)

In this description, we cannot help but identify a resonance with the description of traditional historiography offered in the preceding chapter. As I wrote there, traditional historical practice in rhetorical studies is founded on an interrelated set of epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical presuppositions—that the past, as such, is made present to the historian through primary historical evidence; that the past, as such, can therefore be apprehended through the study and verification of this evidence; and that the resulting claims about the past, as such, can be transparently and objectively communicated by way of a constative historical rhetoric. As Lorenz points out, taken together, these presuppositions function to constitute historical research and writing as a fundamentally

12 While scientific historiography is most often traced to its development in Germany, scientific approaches were also, and at the same time, being articulated in France (e.g. Fustel de Coulanges) and England (e.g. John B. Bury). See Lorenz, “Scientific Historiography” for a more rigorous account of this development.

scientific endeavor, which would be, as Lorenz makes clear, absolutely distinct from speculative or fictional (that is, performative and figurative) genres, including both literature and the philosophy of History.

It is significant that Lorenz identifies these presuppositions, not as representative of the actual work of producing “scientific” histories, but rather as “claims” that the scientific

(or “traditional”) historian inherits and reasserts in order to legitimize his account of the past. Lorenz argues that, while the scientific study of the past has come to be recognized as the “proper” or “natural” mode of historical inquiry, it in fact emerged from a specific historical exigency and is “connected to the processes of institutionalization and of professionalization of historiography as an academic discipline” (393). And for Ranke and his contemporaries, both in Germany and abroad, the stakes of History’s claim to produce

“scientific” knowledge were high. In the context of the institutionalization of disciplines and departments at the turn of the 20th century, the disciplinary status of an academic subject depended upon a successful claim that the field constituted a science, and not an art (see

Goggin, Authoring a Discipline). “Scientific” historiography, or the objective production of knowledge about the past as such through the discovery and analysis of sanctioned and verified evidence, represents the response to these specific institutional exigencies.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that scientific historiography would be enthusiastically adopted in the emerging discipline of Rhetoric where, during the mid 20th century, practitioners were also experiencing institutional pressure to claim an affinity with either the arts or the sciences. In her history of the discipline, Maureen Daly Goggin notes that “the compartmentalization of science and art was devastating for rhetoric,” which occupies something of an ambivalent place vis-à-vis both science and art, and is

therefore difficult to place within the modern institutional landscape. “The way institutional subjects and space were constructed, arranged, and maintained during the rise of the modern university,” she writes, “in many ways prevented rhetoric from assuming a disciplinary position” (13, 12).

Perhaps owing to the need to make definitional claims vis-à-vis the received categories of “art” and “science,” the question of disciplinarity arose alongside what might be considered an “historical turn” in rhetorical studies. As George A. Kennedy has written, during this turn toward historical origins, rhetoric came to be regarded not as mere artful practice or as the “demonstration of knowledge,” but rather as an “historical phenomenon” about which knowledge can be created using the methods of scientific historiography

(“Present” 278). The treatment of rhetoric as an object of historical inquiry served, as Takis

Poulakos explains, to provide the emerging discipline with certain claims to legitimacy in the context of modern research institutions. Poulakos argues that “A narrative account of rhetoric's stable subject matter across time proved to be an effective response to charges of illegitimacy…[as well as] a successful way of resisting pressures…to turn the study of rhetoric into a positivistic investigation" (1). Further, the “historical turn,” in taking up rhetoric as an object of historical inquiry, borrowed from the discipline of History its well- established “scientific” methods and methodology which had at that time, as we will see, only just begun to be subjected to scrutiny. This double move—the taking up of rhetoric as an object of historical study, coupled with the application of “scientific” modes in inquiry— not only instituted what we might now call The Rhetorical Tradition, but also helped to secure Rhetoric’s disciplinary status.

In doing so, however, this move also exposes the fundamentally rhetorical nature of the traditional historiography of rhetoric. We find that, not only are traditional histories constructed rhetorically, but traditional historiography, or the writing of histories of rhetoric in general, is also constituted by a prior rhetorical claim to institutional legitimacy.

If the supposed “scientific” stance of traditional historiography can be understood as a claim, and not as a realizable methodology, this would also mean that, contrary to appearances, traditional histories of rhetoric are not neutral, but are rather interested accounts serving and reinforcing institutional, cultural, and political programs.

As If The Past Could Speak For Itself If “traditional historiography” in rhetorical studies can, in fact, be understood only in terms of its claim to scientific objectivity, and not necessarily in terms of its actual capacity to apprehend and describe the past, as such, then it would also be necessary to question the supposedly “natural” alliance between traditional historiography and constative historical rhetoric.

A first step in challenging the constative nature of traditional historiography would consist, I argue, in analyzing the performative claims that institute the conditions for a scientific historiographical methodology. This analysis will show that, like revisionary histories, traditional histories must, as Michel de Certeau puts it, “establish a relation between two antinomic terms, between the real and discourse” (xxvii). What distinguishes traditional from revisionary historical discourses, and from feminist revisionary discourses in particular, is not the necessity of inventing or imagining this relation; it is only the nature of the claims that institute this relation, and the epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical techniques used to invent and articulate it.

To this end, it may be useful to point out that the use of figurative and performative methodological rhetorics is not limited to revisionary methodological discourse. In fact, the earliest articulations of methodological figures emerge not from contemporary revisionary historians, but rather from 19th century “scientific” historians who insisted, with striking consistency, that the past as such, along with the primary source evidence that constitutes our knowledge of that past, ought to be allowed to “speak for itself” in any traditional or scientific account. As feminist historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “‘The documents speak for themselves’ was the catchphrase [of scientific historiography],” which meant that the task of the 19th century scientific historian was to undertake “an intensive study based entirely on written documents cobbled into a narrative without interpretations, theories, or conclusions.” Only in this way could the historian claim to fulfill von Ranke’s mandate to

“tell it as it actually was” (32). As Dunbar-Ortiz notes, this view of constative historical production was not confined to von Ranke or to his contemporary community of so-called

“historicists”; the presupposition that the past, as such, “speaks for itself” continues to support and inform modern historical research, even and especially in rhetorical studies.

Nevertheless, it was in the 19th century that this methodological figure, the figure of a past that “speaks for itself,” first achieved wide circulation as a mantra for the professional and “scientific” study of the historical past. One of the earliest explicit appearances of this performative and figurative utterance is attributed to the French historian and nationalist Fustel de Coulanges, who was a contemporary of von Ranke and the German historicists. As the anecdote goes, in the late 19th century, Coulanges stood before his students and delivered a lecture based on his recent book, Histoire des

Institutions Politiques de l’Ancienne France. According to accounts of this occasion,

Coulanges lectured on the role of early French institutions in securing political liberty in

France, and he forcefully condemned the popular notion that democracy was, in fact, imported to Gaul by primitive Germans. At the conclusion of his lecture, Coulanges’ students broke into applause in appreciation of what they had just heard, which they no doubt interpreted as a “scientific” affirmation of the political and cultural autonomy of

French civilization. Famously, Coulanges interrupted their applause to proclaim:

“Gentleman, do not applaud. It is not I who speaks, but history that speaks through me.”13

If we expect Coulanges’ supposedly “scientific” account to be constituted solely by constative statements, this concluding utterance should give us pause. While the precise contents of the lecture are unknown to contemporary scholars, based on what we know of

19th century historicist discourse there is little doubt that Coulanges’ account would have been framed constatively, and that his statements about the role of early French institutions would have been presented as objective descriptions of the past, as such.

However, Coulanges’ concluding statement that “history speaks through [him]” betrays the fact that his constative history is based, not on Coulanges’ actual historical objectivity, but rather on a performative claim that institutes the possibility of such objectivity by absenting the historian (and the historian’s rhetoric) from the scene of historical knowledge production. Indeed, in Coulanges’ formulation, the objective and constative communication of facts about the past “as it really happened,” or as such, can only be undertaken with the aid of a conspicuous performative and figurative gesture, in which historical accounts are produced as if history was “speaking for itself” through the neutral and transparent discourse of the scientific historian.

13 See Carl L. Becker, “Historical Facts”

It would be a mistake to take the emergence of this performative methodological figure as incidental, or to understand its purpose as merely ornamental to “normal” historiographical discourse. Contrary to what one might expect, the development of this performative and figurative methodological stance proved fundamental, and not at all supplementary, to the disciplinary mainstreaming and professionalization of modern historical inquiry. At the middle of the 20th century and more than fifty years after

Coulanges (echoing von Ranke) introduced the performative figure of a past that “speaks for itself,” we find that this figure continued to circulate among professional historians, commonly deployed both as a shorthand description of traditional historiographical methodology and as a deflection of emerging questions related to the role of rhetoric in constituting historical knowledge.

In a prescient 1955 essay titled “What Are Historical Facts?,” for example, American historian Carl L. Becker recalls “riding on a train to the meeting of the Historical

Association,” where he happened across a colleague en route to the same meeting. In the course of their professional conversation, the colleague, Mr. A.J. Beveridge, an “eminent and honored historian,” “assured [Becker] dogmatically” that the historian, if he wishes to produce legitimate and objective accounts of the past, “has nothing to do but ‘present all the facts and let them speak for themselves’” (334, my emphasis). Becker’s characterization of Beveridge’s methodological reassurances as “dogmatic” demonstrates not only the extent to which “scientific” historiography had come, by that point, to define professional historical inquiry (let us remember, too, that Becker and Beveridge conduct this discussion en route to the meeting of a professional historical association), but also the extent to

which the performative and figurative claim that the past speaks for itself had come to institute the possibility of a truly “scientific” mode of historical representation.

Even if traditional historians of rhetoric do not often, themselves, explicitly figure the past as speaking for itself, their unstated assumptions to that effect do not go unnoticed by revisionary and poststructuralist critics who, in the early 1980s, begin to speak back to the hegemony of traditional methodological presuppositions. In articulating his influential tripartite classification of historiographical approaches in rhetorical studies, Victor J.

Vitanza describes traditional historiography in precisely these terms: “Traditionalists,”

Vitanza proposes, “write as if archival ‘facts’ speak for themselves in a grand cause/effect narrative. They are guided by positivistic principles of inference or hypothesis formation, testing, and explanation” and, perhaps for these reasons, traditional historians “are seldom, if ever, suspicious of language itself” (324, my emphasis). By placing traditional historiography among his tripartite structure of historical classification, Vitanza challenges the hegemony and naturalization of scientific methodologies, and implies that, in fact, traditional historical methodologies represent only one approach, among at least two others, to the necessary task of imaginatively linking “the real” with historical “discourse.”

From this perspective, traditional historiography can no longer be unproblematically aligned with constative historical rhetoric. Even where traditional historical discourse appears to be constituted by constative descriptions of existing objects or conditions, the invocation of the rhetorical past, as such, is a speculative possibility instituted by a prior performative gesture—the claim to write histories of rhetoric as if the past could speak for itself.

Feminist Representatives and Feminist Representations

Up to this point, I have taken considerable time making the case that, contrary to appearance, traditional historical rhetorics are not purely constative, but are rather founded on a performative and figurative claim to epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical neutrality and objectivity. It has been necessary to make this case in order to demonstrate that the strategic deployment of performative and figurative methodological rhetorics does not originate with feminist revisionary historiography, nor with revisionary historiography more generally. Indeed, because the nature of historical inquiry, writ large, denies the historian direct access to the past as such, the necessity of performatively linking

“the real” to “discourse,” as de Certeau puts it, belongs to all historical writing, including traditional and scientific modes. Put another way, perhaps, one might say that all historical discourse emerges not from any given or a priori relationship to the past as such, but rather from a relationship that is imaginatively articulated—and rearticulated—in terms of a performative as if.

Far from discouraging the prospects for historical knowledge production, the performative nature of historical discourse, in general, provides both opportunities and resources to imagine new articulations of the as if, and therefore new possibilities for linking “the real” and “discourse” beyond traditional claims to objectivity.

Opportunities and Constraints for Feminist Historiography Beginning in the mid-1980s, revisionary historians of rhetoric began to push back against traditional claims to a constative or objective historical discourse. James A. Berlin, for example, argues in Rhetoric and Reality that supposedly objective approaches to “truth” assume that “it is possible to locate a neutral space, a position from which one can act as an

unbiased observer in order to record a transcendental object, the historical thing-in-itself”

(17). While Berlin does not necessarily dismiss what he calls “objective rhetoric,” he refuses to prioritize rhetorical objectivity over other possible approaches, including

“subjective” and “transactional” rhetorics, and he insists that the task of the revisionary historian is not necessarily the apprehension of historical “truth,” but rather the investigation of the historical relationships between rhetoric and power (“Revisionary”

52). Similarly, “The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History,” John Schilb takes existing disciplinary histories to task for failing to acknowledge and critique their own status as rhetorical constructions. For Schilb, revisionary historiographical critique would necessarily begin with the question of the constructedness of historical discourse. Both

Berlin and Schilb are among the earliest to suggest that, when it comes to rhetorical productions of truth and reality, “objectivity” is only one possible strategy for linking “the real” and “discourse.”14, 15

While early revisionary historiographies did not, with few exceptions, engage the problem of women’s exclusion from the rhetorical tradition, Berlin and Schilb demonstrate the extent to which the early revisionary intervention nevertheless opened a way in for feminist historical scholars. That is: if histories are not given, as such (or rather, as if they

“spoke for themselves”) and are instead constructed rhetorically to serve institutional,

14 It should be noted that, in 1968—almost twenty years before Berlin and Schilb took up the cause of revisionary historiographies of rhetoric—Douglas Ehninger published an essay titled “Systems of Rhetoric” in Philosophy & Rhetoric. To my knowledge, this essay represents the first call for a revisionary history of rhetoric. 15 This perspective might also be attributed to a handful of other revisionary and poststructuralist historians who worked and published alongside Berlin. See, for example, Susan Jarratt (“Toward”); John Poulakos (“Interpreting”); and Vitanza (“Critical,” “Notes”).

cultural, and political exigencies, that would mean that histories of rhetoric might be constructed differently, such that other voices would be allowed to speak and be heard.

It is in this context that the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition received

Campbell’s groundbreaking text, Man Cannot Speak for Her. As Campbell’s work during this period demonstrates, the early feminist intervention engaged directly with the figures of

“speaking” and “voice” that mark traditional methodological discourse. Importantly, and as

I will show in what follows, Campbell’s own discourse does not call into question the notion that, by virtue of certain strategies of linking “the real” and “discourse,” even silenced historical rhetors might finally “speak for themselves.” However, the strategy that Campbell implements in Man Cannot Speak for Her and elsewhere proposes a new methodology that would “link” differently, thereby reimagining the conditions for feminist representation.

As I have suggested, it is commonly acknowledged that both Campbell’s methods and methodologies are inherited from traditional histories of rhetoric (Biesecker, “Coming to Terms” and “Negotiating”; Oravec). And indeed, Campbell defines “rhetoric” in traditional terms, as “the study of the means by which symbols can be used to appeal to others, to persuade” (2) and, as Biesecker has complained, this traditional understanding functions to limit the potential scope of the proposed recovery project. Campbell further limits her investigation to public, deliberative speech by historical women rhetors, and she establishes an evaluative criteria against which to judge the “significance” of individual rhetorical artifacts: the works she selects, she says, represent rhetorical “masterworks” that, regardless of the effectiveness of their persuasive appeals, nevertheless responded skillfully to the concerns of audience, authority, and cultural exigency. “On occasion,”

Campbell writes, “extraordinarily skilled women persuaders found symbolic means of responding to contradictory expectations, and produced masterpieces” (12).

Nevertheless, we would be mistaken to assume that, because Campbell appropriates traditional methods and methodologies, that her work during this period, including Man

Cannot Speak for Her, did not also constitute a powerful critique of traditional modes of historical representation. Indeed, when we acknowledge Campbell’s critical contribution, we tend to frame it—as do Tasker and Holt-Underwood, for example—as the development and early implementation of feminist historical recovery. This is certainly true. However,

Campbell’s contribution to feminist revisionary historiography goes well beyond the recovery of a few individual rhetors, and in fact has significant implications for the future of feminist revisionary methodologies and methodological discourses. I argue that, by reading

Campbell’s figures of “speaking for” and “hearing” silenced voices, we can gain a greater appreciation for both the opportunities and constraints that are instituted by Campbell’s methodological discourse.

“Speaking For” Voices that have Gone Silent In contradistinction to the traditional figure of a past that “speaks” as if for itself, in the work that appears in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Campbell appears to consider the task of feminist rhetorical history almost solely in terms of “speaking for” silenced historical women rhetors, publishing a flurry of texts that, taken together, establish the principles for a feminist practice of recovering the “silenced voices” of historical women rhetors.16 And

16 See “The Communication Classroom: A Chilly Climate for Women?” (1985), Man Cannot Speak For Her (1989), “The Sound of Women’s Voices” (1989), “Hearing Women’s Voices” (1991), and “Biesecker Cannot Speak For Her Either” (1992).

indeed, for Campbell, it is precisely the silence and absence of women from mainstream histories of rhetoric that occasions her research:

“For centuries, the ability to persuade others has been part of Western man’s

standard of excellence in many areas, even of citizenship itself. Moreover, speaking

and writing eloquently has long been the goal of the humanistic tradition in

education. Women have no parallel rhetorical history. Indeed, for much of their

history women have been prohibited from speaking, a prohibition reinforced by such

powerful cultural authorities as Homer, Aristotle, and Scripture.” (1, my emphasis)

As a result of these prohibitions, Campbell observes, “when women began to speak outside the home on moral issues and on matters of public policy, they faced obstacles unknown to men,” for whom the right to speak has historically been presumed, and whose rhetorical agency has never been in question (1). Women’s rhetorical past, in Campbell’s view, is therefore defined, as she puts it, by the “struggle for the right to speak,” and for the right of women rhetors to be publically recognized (and recognizable) as rhetorical agents in their own time (9).17

For Campbell, the “struggle for the right to speak” is reflected in struggles over the content of disciplinary histories and anthologies. In essays published both immediately before and after Man Cannot Speak for Her, Campbell expresses frustration at the loatheness of the discipline to recognize the contributions of historical women rhetors, whose figurative “voices” remain muted in disciplinary histories and pedagogies (see

“Sound” and “Hearing”). Campbell laments the fact that, even after struggling for and

17 Campbell elsewhere, and later, defines “rhetorical agency” in terms of recognition: “Whatever else it may be, rhetorical agency refers to the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or to write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community” (“Agency” 3).

achieving recognition and rhetorical agency in their own times, exceptional women rhetors continue to be denied recognition as legitimate (and significant) subjects in The History of

Rhetoric. As she puts it in Man Cannot Speak for Her, even “once [women] began to speak, their words often were not preserved, with the result that many rhetorical acts by women are gone forever; many others can be found only in manuscript collections or rare, out-of- print publications” (1). Elsewhere, Campbell makes this argument more pointedly:

“Women were partially or completely silenced for centuries; then the women who dared speak were silenced in turn by rhetorical historians and critics and theorists” (“Biesecker”

158). We might say, therefore, that the exigency for Campbell’s feminist recovery project centers on a tension that emerges between the real and audible voices of historical women rhetors that Campbell has discovered, and the silence that marks the place of those voices in received rhetorical histories.

I argue that the performative historiographical methodology of speaking for those silenced voices constitutes a response to this situation. As I have suggested, the strategy of speaking for does not abandon the presupposition that, by virtue of having been spoken for or represented (in the sense, perhaps of political representation), historical women rhetors will come to speak for themselves, as such, like the subjects of traditional histories of rhetoric. This does not mean, however, that Campbell is employing the performative figure in the manner of traditional methodological discourse, where it is framed in terms of the past speaking for itself. She recognizes that even those women who overcame obstacles and found their voices in their own time are subject to the silencing procedures that attend traditional historiographies of rhetoric. Historical women rhetors, therefore, in the public space of history, can no longer speak for themselves. As Campbell insists in her reply to

Barbara Biesecker, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” unless historical women are to remain forever silent in, and therefore absent from, disciplinary narratives, it is necessary for feminist historians to speak for them and, in so doing, to allow those voices to be heard in our histories of rhetoric.

What to Do With a Past That Does Not Speak Significantly, Campbell does not appear until much later to consider whether, in representing or “speaking for” another, one can represent that voice, as such. When she does approach this question in a 2005 essay, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” she does so, in my view, as means of having had the “last word” in her debate with Biesecker. Still, in this text, Campbell appears to have come to terms, so to speak, with Biesecker’s early anti- foundational critique of feminist historical recovery, and of Man Cannot Speak for Her in particular. In that essay, Campbell appears to concede the impossibility of instituting historical agents, as such, through the performative gesture of “speaking for.” She acknowledges that “agency is invention, including the invention, however temporary, of personae, subject-positions, and collectivities” which, taken together, allow agency to be ascribed to, or “invented” for, silenced historical women rhetors (5). However, and in spite of these significant reconsiderations, Campbell continues to insist on grounding “agency” as a function of the individual, writing: “Whatever else it may be, rhetorical agency refers to the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community” (3). So while, ten years after their historical debate, Campbell indeed returns to reconsider and dramatically revise her ideas concerning the agency of historical subjects, she still neglects to engage with the broader political and ethical problems of representation and exclusion that Biesecker has identified.

This suggests, of course, a present and persistent need to more fully engage with the questions that arise from Biesecker’s critique. In what remains, therefore, I will briefly gloss this critique before turning, finally, to consider with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and

Jacques Derrida the political and ethical limitations associated with feminist revisionary figures of speaking for.

Coming to Terms with the Anti-Foundational Critique In “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of

Rhetoric,” Biesecker critiques the underlying logics that operate in feminist historical recovery generally, and in Man Cannot Speak for Her in particular. She frames her critique in terms of what she calls the “logic of canon formation,” arguing that feminist historical recovery and representation do not do enough to challenge traditional presuppositions and constraints concerning what, and who, can speak in histories of Rhetoric, and therefore necessarily produce exclusionary histories (144).

As a response to the stubborn problem of historical exclusion, and referencing in particular Campbell’s criterion for inclusion in her anthology, Biesecker wonders:

[What] is the problem with a criterion [for inclusion] that applies equally to all…and

asks only that an individual, any individual, ‘generate rhetorical works of

extraordinary power and appeal’? Nothing less than the fact that a system of cultural

representation that coheres around the individual subject, that is both master of

her- or himself and of her or his discourse, is not politically disinterested. (144)

Here, Biesecker touches on an important observation with respect to Campbell’s methodological discourse, and to the figure of “speaking for.” She writes that “systems of cultural representation,” which might also be traditional historiographies, institute

individual historical subjects as a “masters” of their own discourse or, in our figurative lexicon, as subjects who speaks for themselves. By framing the subjects of our histories in these terms, Biesecker suggests, traditional histories of rhetoric produce accounts that appear to be disinterested. If all individual subjects are “masters,” or agents of their own discourse, then all individually produced rhetoric can be evaluated according to a single criterion. And if a subject is excluded from an historical account, it would therefore be because that subject’s individual rhetorical accomplishments did not measure up to the imposed criterion, and not because of any social, cultural, or political constraint. Thus, for

Biesecker, the coherence of systems of representation around individual subjects functions both to mask and to excuse the essential interestedness of a given account.

For our purposes, it is important to point out that, simplified to its most basic articulation, Biesecker’s argument in this passage hinges on the belief that, contrary to both traditional and early feminist revisionary presuppositions, historical subjects do not, and cannot be made to, “speak for themselves.” And therefore, and most significantly, any account that claims, like Campbell’s, to represent (that is, to speak for) those subjects as such is necessarily obscuring its own political interests.

Can Silence Speak for Itself?

If, by chance, one hears echoes of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in my explication of

Biesecker’s critique, this would not be mere accident. Indeed, Biesecker’s response to

Campbell is dedicated to the postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who, the year before Campbell published Man Cannot Speak for Her, had released her well- known essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In that famous essay, Spivak puts into crisis the notion that all (historical) subjects are capable of autonomously expressing and

articulating their own experiences and identities. In other words, she puts into crisis the notion, common to both traditional and early feminist revisionary historiography, that subjects of history “speak for and as themselves,” and even the notion that the historian can adequately and unproblematically “speak for” silenced historical subjects.

In Spivak’s view, the attribution of autonomous agency to silenced and oppressed subjects is only possible as an effect of what she calls a “verbal slippage” in which two distinct senses of “representation” are equivocated or “run together.” Reading Marx’s The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, she notes that Marx (in the original German) distinguishes between representation as vertretung, or the persuasive practice of “speaking for” as a political proxy; and representation as darstellung, or the tropological practice of

“speaking about.”

For Spivak, these two senses of representation are distinct but necessarily complicit in the process of constituting oppressed subjects as political (and rhetorical) agents. They are complicit because, in her view, any practice of “speaking for” a constituency—for example, “women” in the history of Rhetoric— necessarily entails “speaking about” them, or producing descriptions of that constituency, as such. They are distinct, however, because the descriptions produced by the representative are not reducible to the “real” experiences or identities of her constituents. Spivak suggests that this is not only due to practical constraints on objective knowledge production; it is also because, in any performative act of “speaking for,” the representative produces descriptions not only of her constituents

(e.g. as “women”) but also of herself and her own epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical position (e.g. as “feminist”).

Ultimately, and famously, Spivak concludes in her essay that “the subaltern cannot speak” (104). But this does not mean, she insists, that feminist and postcolonial scholars can absolve themselves of the burden of representing silenced subjects.18 She writes:

“Reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work…is undeniably on the agenda.

We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history and sociology.” Nevertheless, she continues,

“the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization. And the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever” (90).

How, then, as Campbell asks in the face of Biesecker’s withering critique, are feminist historians of rhetoric to get on with the task of writing histories of women rhetors and, even more problematically, of those marginalized subjects who, even in their own time, lacked access to discursive centers of power? In the concluding section, by reading

Derrida’s concept of the “pure” event across Spivak’s critique of representation, I consider what are, as Derrida might say, some “impossible possibilities” for future feminist histories of rhetoric, both with and beyond the figure of “speaking for.”

The Ethical Politics/Political Ethics of “Speaking For” As I suggested in the opening chapter, feminist revisionary methodological figures

(including the figure of “speaking for”) are performative, in the sense that they do something: namely, through the performative articulation of the as if, they institute spaces of possibility for previously foreclosed historical representations.

18 Linda Alcoff makes a similar point in “The Problem of Speaking for Others.”

And yet, as I also made clear, from a Derridean perspective, even the performative as if can only institute that which is already, and has always been, possible. As Derrida puts it in “University Without Condition”: “As long as I can produce and determine an event by a performative act guaranteed, like any performative, by conventions, legitimate fictions, and a certain ‘as if,’ then to be sure I will not say that nothing happens or come about.” But, he notes, “what takes place, arrives, happens, or happens to me remains still controllable and programmable within a horizon of anticipation or precomprehension, within a horizon period” (53). Derrida argues that “the event,” or the arrival of that which remains (and must remain) impossibly beyond the reach of representation, “takes place only to the extent where it does not allow itself to be domesticated by any ‘as if,’ or at least by any ‘as if’ that can already be read, decoded, or articulated as such” (53). That which “takes place,” or could take place, in the mode of a constative as such cannot, therefore, properly be called an “event.” And similarly, for Spivak, that which can be “given voice” in revisionary history cannot properly be called “subaltern,” since subalternity is, by definition, without access to historical representation.

It is therefore not enough, in the case of the subaltern subject, to develop methodologies that render impossibility as possibility, silence as voice, the as if as the as such—for, as Spivak points out, and as Michelle Ballif has also noted, to do so is an act of epistemic violence that confronts the predicament of subalternity, and of the event, by rendering the other as the same. As Ballif puts it, “making proper—and thus making present—is achieved through the violence of naming,” or by the violence inherent to subject-constituting discourses, including feminist revisionary historiography

(“Re/Dressing” 92). Epistemic violence, understood as the effacement or erasure of alterity,

does not only attend the inevitability of historical exclusion and silence; it also, and perhaps more importantly (and certainly more insidiously), attends processes of historical inclusion and representation. This, I would argue, is why Spivak insists that the subaltern cannot speak, even (and especially) when she is “spoken for,” and why feminist recovery and representation must not be conflated with historiographical critique.

If, therefore, the feminist historian has a “circumscribed task,” as Spivak argues she does, which she must not simply “disown with a flourish,” it is because in spite of its attendant ethical pitfalls, representation nevertheless remains a political necessity for feminist scholarship. It is because of the necessity of representation, I think, that Spivak proposes a “crucially strategic” task of “subject restoration”—a mode of representation that would deploy “positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest”

(Sipiora and Atwill 300). Here, Spivak refuses to disengage from the positivist project of

“restoring” and “recovering” the voices of silenced and oppressed subjects. However, she insists on keeping the “political interest” of the historian always within our critical view, and on resisting the impulse to conceal the performative intervention of the historian beneath the constative figure of a “self-knowing, politically canny subaltern” (70). This, perhaps, provides a way to imagine what the “circumscribed task” of the feminist historian might be: the development of a mode of representation that is “crucially strategic” and that engages in acts of representation to achieve provisional political goals, but that also remains engaged in thinking and tracing the ethical limits of feminist representational practices.

As Spivak notes in her interview with rhetoricians Phillip Sipiora and Janet Atwill, a

“strategic” deployment of “positivist essentialism” must not be interpreted as giving

intellectual cover to practices of uncritical representation. Rather, she says, this approach should be interpreted as inviting a “persistent critique of what one cannot ‘not’ want. And what one cannot ‘not’ want in a political interest” (300). Indeed, what one “cannot not want,” for both Spivak and Biesecker, will always mark the limit of existing methodologies, a site at which representational projects of “speaking for” must be subject to “persistent critique,” and a site at which other strategies for linking (or unlinking) “the real” and historical discourse must be imagined. The goal of such critique, again, is not to renounce the task of feminist representation, but rather to consider what we might want ethically beyond what has been (and can be) made possible politically by virtue of the performative figure of “speaking for.

CHAPTER TWO: DISORIENTING ORIENTATIONS ON THE MAP OF RHETORIC

In the preceding chapter, I explored the influence that figures of “speaking for” have exerted on the establishment and development of feminist revisionary methodologies. I argued, in particular, that the figure of “speaking for” institutes the possibility of feminist historical representation, and it responds to traditional disciplinary constraints that rendered the recovery and representation of historical women rhetors (as speaking subjects) methodologically impossible.

As I pointed out, in its most nascent stages of development during the early 1990s, the methodological assumptions belonging to feminist historical recovery met with critique, particularly from feminist postmodernists and deconstructionists who expressed skepticism regarding the traditional epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical underpinnings of the feminist recovery project.19 These important critiques, while widely read and cited in the field, were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to challenge the primacy of historical recovery as the mode of feminist historiographical critique. One could perhaps attribute this lack of success to a tension that emerged, in the aftermath of the debate between Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Barbara Biesecker, between the methodologies of feminist historical recovery, which relied upon traditional research methods to locate historical women rhetors and “recover” their rhetorical practices for the rhetorical canon, and gender critique, which attempted to expose and critique the more fundamental conditions for the silencing of historical women rhetors, even (and especially) where those conditions were reproduced in projects of feminist recovery (see Tasker and

19 See especially Biesecker, “Coming”; Jarratt, “Performing”; and Ballif “Re/Dressing”

Holt-Underwood; Enoch, “Releasing”; Ryan, “Recasting”). While practitioners of gender critique sought to interrogate the apparently “given” nature of traditionalist historical inquiry and methodology, practitioners of feminist recovery expressed skepticism towards the emerging critical perspective. Campbell, offers the strongest condemnation of anti- foundational modes of gender critique, arguing that challenges to feminist historical recovery constitute efforts to “silence…once more” the newly restored voices of historical women rhetors (“Biesecker” 158). As I suggested in the previous chapter, the antagonism that characterizes these early exchanges certainly propelled feminist historical inquiry into the disciplinary spotlight, but it also foreclosed opportunities for productive discussion and the exchange of ideas.

From our contemporary perspective, which is in many ways marked by the return traditional historical methodologies, it is nevertheless clear that feminist historical recovery emerged relatively unscathed from its confrontation with anti-foundationalism.

Beginning after the publication of Man Cannot Speak for Her, we observe a rapid proliferation of studies aiming to recover historical women rhetors and, more importantly, we find a radical expansion of potential sites for feminist historical inquiry in rhetorical studies.20 This is to say that, even while feminist recovery appropriated (at times, uncritically) many of the tools and assumptions belonging to traditional historical research, they applied those tools to the critique—and not the preservation—of dominant

20 In their survey of feminist historical research in rhetorical studies, Elizabeth Tasker and Frances Holt-Underwood write: “In the 1990s we find a sharp increase across a variety of genres in publications focusing on feminist historical rhetoric.” They point to Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg’s The Rhetorical Tradition (1990) as symptomatic of this increase, particularly in the area of feminist historical recovery. They note that this collection represents “the first anthology of rhetoric to include historical female speakers and writers in the context of their period and in the company of their male contemporaries” (57).

historiographical paradigms. One of the most effective critiques offered by feminist historical recovery sought to restore women rhetors to the rhetorical canon by expanding traditional notions of “what counts” as historical evidence. Practitioners of feminist recovery argued that historical research in rhetorical studies ought not be limited to the philological study of received canonical texts. On the contrary, the task of “speaking for” silenced historical voices demanded that feminist historians seek new sources of historical knowledge, either in texts that have been neglected by the traditional rhetorical canon, or else in sources that exist beyond the confines of supposedly “traditional” (that is, textual) archives.

Despite the effectiveness of the figure of “speaking for” and its attendant methods of feminist historical recovery, its successes remained in many ways incomplete. Writing soon after the publication of Man Cannot Speak for Her, for example, Campbell expresses frustration at the slowness of mainstream disciplinary histories to acknowledge the contributions of historical women rhetors. She complains that, while she and other feminist historians of rhetoric have gone to great lengths to document the “underrepresentation of women and women’s issues,” mainstream historical scholarship in the field continues to

“perpetuate the highly distorted picture” of a rhetorical history that is exclusively male

(“Sound” 212). “The simple fact,” Campbell argues, is that disciplinary histories will continue to ignore the contributions of women to rhetorical history “until as teachers and scholars we become committed to hearing the diverse voices of our culture” (“Hearing” 45).

As this passage demonstrates, in spite of her frustration with the reception of early feminist recovery projects, Campbell is reluctant to shift her own methodological discourse to reflect changing exigencies in the field. Instead, she remains committed to the figurative

and performative vocabulary of “hearing,” “listening,” and “speaking for” silenced women rhetors, despite the apparent limitations of those figures for a rapidly shifting disciplinary landscape.

In this context, in the mid 1990s, Cheryl Glenn authored a series of important texts that begin to articulate a new methodological figure for feminist histories of rhetoric.21 The figure of “mapping,” as elaborated in these texts, emerges as a response to obstacles Glenn encountered in attempting to write the history of Aspasia of Miletus as a significant rhetor in classical Greek antiquity (“Locating”; “Remapping”; Rhetoric). Glenn acknowledges that the methodological protocols of feminist historical recovery do not, by themselves, provide the tools that would be necessary to account for Aspasia’s contributions to the history of rhetoric. As Glenn points out, there is no primary evidence suggesting that Aspasia either composed or delivered speeches, nor do we know of any document or text that might be attributable to her hand. To write a history of Aspasia’s rhetorical contributions, therefore, is not simply a matter of “rescuing” (and thus “giving voice” to) lost or neglected rhetorical works. Instead, to undertake this history requires the more fundamental tasks of instituting

Aspasia as an object worthy of historical inquiry in rhetorical studies, and of providing a methodological frame capable of orienting feminist scholars toward historical rhetors who,

21 An interesting footnote to this history of the figure of mapping: in Glenn’s dissertation project (which would later be revised and published as Rhetoric Retold), completed in 1989, she frames the question of women’s historical exclusion in terms that more closely resemble Campbell’s. This is reflected in the dissertation title, Muted Voices from Antiquity Through the Renaissance: Locating Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Notably, the figure of mapping is absent from this early version of Glenn’s book-length history, which perhaps supports my claim that Glenn’s cartographic figure emerged in response to disciplinary exigencies, which changed dramatically between 1989 and 1997, when Rhetoric Retold was published.

like Aspasia, resist the representational imperative suggested by figures of “giving voice” and “speaking for.”

Mapping, in Glenn’s formulation, does not altogether abandon the representational imperative at the heart of feminist historical recovery. As I wrote in the opening chapter,

Glenn remains committed to the production of historical knowledge claims—that is, to the institution of Aspasia “as an exceptional hero in a new rhetorical narrative” (Rhetoric 44).

The figure of mapping, after all, is suggestive of a fundamentally representational gesture; the map, at least in the popular imaginary, presumes the territory and seeks to represent

(darstellung) that territory faithfully and, we might even say, constatively.22 However, as

Glenn suggests, the figure of the map also entails the more performative task of charting new methodological paths, which can orient us toward other (that is, not yet realized) historical possibilities. In this sense, the project of “mapping” ought not be understood in the constative sense of reproducing the territory as such. Rather, following Glenn, we ought to understand “mapping” as a performative gesture that institutes the territory, not as such, but as if it was inhabited by women rhetors who might finally come into our view, if one were to deviate from the beaten path.

Unfortunately, in the contemporary disciplinary landscape, we do not often enough acknowledge the performative nature of “mapping,” as a feminist methodological figure.

This lack of appreciation is evident, for example, in Ryan Skinnell’s recent article “Who

Cares If Rhetoricians Landed on the Moon?,” where he suggests an association of the figure of mapping with an uncritical “broadening imperative” that prioritizes representation over

22 As I discussed at length in the preceding chapter, “representation” collapses two distinct activities: representation as darstellung, or the “portrait,” and representation as vertretung, or the “proxy” (see especially Spivak, “Subaltern”).

methodological critique and innovation. Skinnell’s suspicion towards figures of mapping is implied by his own titular figure, which imagines historiographical methodologies as if rhetoricians had “landed on the moon.” He writes:

[R]hetoricians on the moon’ is a generative symbol because it comprises conflicting

notions of (space) exploration. On one hand, the inexhaustible supply of research

subjects suggested by unreachable horizons is exciting; on the other hand,

‘broadening’ threatens to become the grounds on which revisionary historiography

exists rather than a tropological appeal for developing perspectives. (112-13)

For Skinnell, the possibility of “rhetoricians on the moon” illustrates the risks associated with methodological figures of mapping. He implies that, when we conceive of historical research in these terms, we tend to attribute the supposed exigencies of cartography to the work of historical knowledge production. In Skinnell’s view, however, the motivations that compel the cartographer (that is, the exhaustive representation of existing territories) are not compatible with the revisionary historiographical imperative to develop critical perspectives on the rhetorical past.

In this chapter, I propose to resist this facile association of the figure of mapping with the contemporary abatement of historiographical and methodological critique. To this end, and building upon what Glenn has written, I argue that “mapping” should be thought of, not in terms of “broadening,” but rather in terms of “orientation.” From this perspective, the figure of mapping can be understood as a performative utterance that institutes certain methodological orientations, rather than as a constative figure of exhaustive historical

representation.23 Nevertheless, and owing, perhaps to the slippery relationship between the modalities of the performative as if and the constative as such, there is a risk that critical “orientations” will be taken, not as performative acts of institution, but as natural or given. In other words, we risk that these “orientations” will produce new sets of conventions and presuppositions that will foreclose the further development of critical perspectives. I suggest that, as feminist historians and historiographers of rhetoric, we can resist this foreclosure by way of two performative gestures: first, by “re-orienting” ourselves toward and around objects that had previously remained beyond our perceptual horizons; and second, by becoming radically “dis-oriented” as a means of interrogating our relationships to the objects of our historical inquiry, and of opening our histories to what remains impossibly beyond the horizon of any rhetorical map.

Performative Re-Mappings

The signifier “map,” as we all know, is constituted by two distinct but related meanings. “A map” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

A drawing or other representation of the earth’s surface or a part of it made on a flat

surface, showing the distribution of physical or geographical features (and often

including socioeconomic, political, agricultural, meteorological, etc., information)

with each point in the representation corresponding to an actual geographical

position according to a fixed scale or projection. (“map, n.1.”)

23 I should not that even this supposedly “constative” figure would, itself, take the form of a performative: it would be as if we could produce a map that would, as Jorge Louis Borges has imagined, “[coincide] point for point” with the rhetorical territory (“On Exactitude”).

“Map,” however, also carries the sense of an action: “To describe, outline, chart, or represent as if on a map” (“map, v.”).

Reading these definitions carefully gives us a way in to considering the association between the performative methodological figure of mapping and the so-called “broadening imperative” in contemporary histories of rhetoric. In the first (nominative) sense, “map” is disclosed as a nearly perfect metaphor for constative representation. Here, a map is defined as a representation of an object (the earth’s surface) that exists independently of the map, itself. But it is not only its representational function that gives the map its character; in this definition, the “map-iness” of the map (that is, what distinguishes the map from “a drawing,” or from any other representational form) consists precisely in its scientific and objective conformity to that which it would represent, or to its terrain, as such. Of course, the mode of “scientific” representation is not essential to, or given as, the fundamental character of the map, as if we could speak of such a thing. Rather, like so many supposedly

“scientific” endeavors, the concept of cartography as a science emerged during the

Enlightenment, facilitated by both technological innovation and by a broader epistemic and methodological turn toward “scientific objectivity.”

In her fascinating book, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, Peta Mitchell traces the development of cartographic metaphors across multiple discourses, beginning with its emergence during the Enlightenment. She writes: “knowledge in the Enlightenment is represented metaphorically as a territory that can be unproblematically encompassed, mapped, and viewed empirically and objectively. Moreover,” she explains, “ this knowledge can be framed, by the philosopher, in an objective and literal [that is, a constative] language—a language that denies any difference between the word and thing, between

map and territory” (2). Borrowing the terms I introduced in the previous chapter, we might say that, from the perspective of the Enlightenment, the territory discloses and articulates its own truth and, in a sense “speaks for itself,” thus eliminating any distance, as Mitchell suggests, between the object and its representation. In the Enlightenment age of scientific

“exactitude,” the map, as Borges has written, is the territory.”

Importantly, and as Mitchell shows, both the metaphor of mapping and the professional practices of cartography have undergone significant shifts since the 18th century. In terms of its figurative modality, Mitchell argues that the transformation of the cartographic figure in Postmodernity culminates with Jean Baudrillard’s famous statement that, today, “the map that precedes the territory.”24 Or, perhaps, that “the map,” in the postmodern imagination, no longer constitutes a figure of scientific and objective empiricism, but rather functions in the mode of a performative in which the map institutes the territory. As Mitchell puts it, “In a world in which the real is no longer a given, the map becomes a key metaphor for the negotiation (physical and cognitive) required in order to derive meaning from our environment” (3). The metaphor of the map, even today, establishes a relation to “the real.” However, as Mitchell suggests, this relation takes place in the form of an orientation that positions us with respect to our environment, and allows us to get our bearings.

Up to this point I have been discussing “the map,” which is the representation

(whether constative, as in the Enlightenment; or performative, as in Postmodernity) of the territory, or of “the real.” But there is also, as I mentioned, another sense to this term, and therefore another figurative modality that must be addressed. “Mapping,” or the act of

24 See Simulacra and Simulation, 1

“describing, outlining, charting, or representing as if on a map,” gives us an inroad, so to speak, to thinking about how “the map,” as a metaphor for representation, might in turn be enacted performatively and instituted methodologically. What does it mean, I wonder, to

“describe,” or to “outline,” or to “chart”—that is, to write—performatively, as if on a map?

Reading and Writing Cartographic Histories of Rhetoric To investigate this question, I turn back to Cheryl Glenn who, as I have said, first developed this performative methodological strategy for feminist histories of rhetoric. In what immediately follows, I look more closely at Glenn’s articulations of the figure of mapping, paying particular attention to the points at which she resists the constative imperative implied by “the map,” and embraces instead the performative mode of

“mapping” or, as I have put it, of writing histories as if on a map.

Neutral Territories Glenn first articulates the methodological figure of “mapping” (or, more accurately, of “the map”) in her 1994 article “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript.” There, she proposes to restore

Aspasia of Miletus to dominant histories of rhetoric, arguing that writing the history of

Aspasia (and other historical women rhetors) not only “[restores] women to rhetorical history and rhetorical history to women, but the restoration itself revitalizes theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study” (181). At the heart of these

“conceptual foundations,” she suggests, is the traditional presupposition of the neutrality of historical accounts. Glenn cites Carol Blair who, in an essay published two years earlier, had insisted on two foundational principles for revisionary histories of rhetoric: “[First,] that historiographic stances in histories of rhetoric contain embedded, but typically unacknowledged, presuppositions about history and/or rhetoric; and [second] that

historians’ assumptions of these stances has culminated in partial historical accounts that mask their own partiality” (“Contested” 403). Following Blair, Glenn suggests that the project of feminist revisionary history hinges on our acknowledgement of these principles, and on our recognition that received historical accounts are neither neutral nor disinterested but are rather, as Glenn observes elsewhere, constructed to meet

“professional, intellectual, and social needs” and to serve certain institutional objectives

(“Remapping” 287).

While traditional rhetorical histories do not, in fact, constitute a “neutral territory”

(“Sex” 194), these dominant accounts nevertheless construct an illusion of neutrality that has pretended to foreclose in advance the possibilities for feminist critique and revision.

Glenn, however, recognizes traditional justifications for women’s absence from rhetorical history as emerging from a tautology:

[Traditional rhetoricians] had…assumed, a priori, that no women participated in the

rhetorical tradition. We had been willing to believe the tautology that no women

have been involved in rhetorical history because not a single rhetorical treatise by a

woman appears in lists of primary works.... and because not a single women appears

in the indices of the most comprehensive histories of Western rhetoric. (194)

Glenn is at pains to point out the tortured logic evident in this traditional presupposition.

She argues that traditional histories begin, to a certain extent, with the assumption that women rhetors do not constitute worthy objects of historical inquiry. This fundamental presupposition means that, even if records of women’s rhetorical achievements had been preserved by sanctioned institutions, owing to their a priori assumptions about the absence of women from the rhetorical past, traditional historians of rhetoric would likely not have

thought to look for them. And yet, when these same scholars produce their supposedly

“comprehensive” rhetorical histories, they excuse the exclusion of women from their accounts—if the question even comes up—by pointing to back to the perceived absence of women rhetors from the rhetorical archive.

Glenn argues, however, that when feminist historians and historiographers of rhetoric are no longer “willing to believe [this] tautology,” and they therefore come to recognize that “rhetorical history is not a neutral territory,” it becomes possible to develop an “awareness of women’s place on the rhetorical terrain,” despite her absence from mainstream disciplinary collections and narratives (194). The feminist revisionary and performative strategy of “re-mapping,” then, begins here: with an acknowledgement that, despite appearances, traditional histories of rhetoric (our received “maps” of the discipline) do not constitute purely constative representations of the rhetorical landscape as such, but rather institute a certain masculinist terrain by way of a fallacious and tautological—but nevertheless performative—gesture.

It is precisely because traditional rhetorical history is not “neutral territory,” but is rather instituted performatively, that we can entertain the possibility of “re-mapping” the traditional terrain. By writing the history of rhetorical women as if on this map, by surveying and penciling in new paths and territories, Glenn shows that “re-mapping” allows feminist historians of rhetoric to reflect, finally, what we have learned about “the place of women on the rhetorical terrain.” We must, therefore, as Glenn puts it, “being to re- map our notion of rhetorical history” (195).

Signposts In “Sex, Lies, and Manuscript,” Glenn’s focus is primarily on the relationship between “the [traditional] map” and “the terrain” that it claims to reproduce. While she gestures, in at least two places, toward the methodological and performative possibility of

“re-mapping” this relationship to facilitate the recovery and inclusion of historical women rhetors, she does not fully articulate this approach until a year later, when she publishes another essay, appropriately titled “Remapping Rhetorical Territory.” In this essay, Glenn builds upon her earlier observations concerning the non-neutrality of historical “maps,” arguing that revisionary “histories ‘do’ (or should do) something” beyond the production of historical representations of the past, as such (291, 294). Feminist histories of rhetoric,

Glenn argues, must therefore develop methodologies that move us beyond the recovery and representation of historical women rhetors, and toward a critical assessment of rhetorical history itself.

To this end, “Remapping the Rhetorical Territory” implies the question: what would it mean to write feminist rhetorical histories performatively, as if on a map? In response,

Glenn begins to articulate a new figure of “mapping” that goes beyond the production of new “maps,” or new representations of the past as such. Instead, she conceives of

“mapping” as a fundamentally performative and methodological gesture that figures the writing of feminist rhetorical history as if charting a new path through the rhetorical terrain:

Until recently, we could pull a neatly folded history of rhetoric out of our glove

compartment, unfold it, and navigate our course through the web of lines that

connected the principal centers of rhetoric. Whether using Corbett’s, Kennedy’s,

Kinneavy’s, or Murphy’s map, we followed an aristocratic blue line, a master

narrative that started with Corax and Tisias and led directly to Plato and Aristotle,

then Cicero, Quintilian, and St. Augustine, and eventually to Weaver, Richards,

Perelman, and Burke—each rhetorician preparing us for the next, like Burma Shave

signs. (287)

In this passage, two striking observations emerge, each of which shift the feminist revisionary methodological framework towards a consideration of “re-mapping” as a performative strategy for writing histories of rhetoric. First, in this formulation, the map of traditional historiography is redescribed as a path or a “course,” a “line” that cuts through

(but also constitutes) the map of rhetorical territory. Second, and relatedly, Glenn demonstrates that traditional histories have oriented us along this path by planting

“signposts” along the way, each of which marks a site (or a “great man”) that has been deemed worthy of traditional historical inquiry.25

If the composition of histories of rhetoric can be described as the charting of a path as if on a map, the planting of signposts would describe the specific modality of this performative writing. However, in Glenn’s description, however, “signposts” do not only function to mark, or to point to, or to name particular territories. On the contrary, Glenn argues, these signposts operate more like Burma-Shave signs, “each [one] preparing us for the next” and constituting, finally, a narrative of rhetorical history. In his literary exploration of these signs, literary critic Mike Chasar describes the famous advertising campaign designed by the Burma-Shave company: “In this campaign, six billboards were

25 In the introduction to Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians, Michelle Ballif and Michael G. Moran describe this approach as “traditional ‘great man’ canonizing” (3).

sequenced one hundred feet apart on the roadside, each sign containing part of a single jingle, a rhyme always ending with the product’s scripted logo, “Burma-Shave” (29-30). To traverse the road along which these signs were planted was, in a literal sense, to read; and in this sense, the route itself comes to function as if it were a text.

Burma-Shave signs represented an enormously successful campaign. Indeed, when the Philip Morris Company purchased Burma-Shave in 1962, and the signs disappeared from the national roadways, William Zinsser eulogized the experience of travel that Burma-

Shave signs represented: “No sign on the driver’s horizon gave more pleasure of anticipation” (“Goodbye” 65). “Anticipation” is, perhaps, another way of thinking about how it is that one becomes oriented in space, or along a particular route. If we can anticipate what is to come, as Sara Ahmed might say, “then we are orientated.”26 We have our bearings, and we know where we are going. As Glenn points out, traditional histories of rhetoric—which are, for the large part, linear narratives of “great men”—function similarly.

As she describes, each of these “great male rhetors” represents a Burma-Shave sign, each one leading to the next. Taken together, they do not simply mark, but rather performatively constitute the path taken by traditional historians of rhetoric.

Feminist Re-Orientations That traditional historical “maps” are constituted in this manner suggests a way forward, so to speak, for feminist historians of rhetoric. And it is this way, this path, that

Cheryl Glenn seeks to open. Like Campbell before her, who, as I showed in the previous

26 Throughout Queer Phenomenologies, Ahmed delineates her particular sense of the concept of “orientation” from normal usage by referring to the experience of being “orientated.” Where I quote Ahmed, I adopt her original term. However, because I am working from a different tradition than Ahmed, and therefore necessarily take some liberty with the sense that she gives this concept, I use the term “oriented.”

chapter, recognized and re-appropriated the performative gesture of traditional historiography, Glenn takes as her methodological ground the established (although concealed) performative practice of constituting historical narratives through the charting of paths, and the planting of historical signposts.

In Rhetoric Retold, Glenn makes clear that, unlike projects of feminist historical recovery, her goal is to “locate” historical women rhetors—many of whom, with the possible exception of Aspasia, have already been recovered during the course of the early feminist historiographical intervention—within received rhetorical histories (or “maps”).

She writes:

Given what we know about the writing of any intellectual history, given what we

know about the limits of any one methodology, particularly an inchoate one, we

cannot simply measure out the distance between women, chart their places on the

rhetorical map, and travel. Instead, any remapping must locate female rhetorical

accomplishments within and without the male-dominated and male-documented

rhetorical tradition that it interrogates. (10)

By proposing “mapping” and “re-mapping” as guiding figures for a feminist revisionary methodology, Glenn is not necessarily suggesting that feminist historians of rhetoric produce entirely new maps. As she puts it in “Truth, Lies, and Method,” “[the] goal is not to supplant the master narrative of rhetorical history with a ‘mater’ narrative” (388). Because women’s rhetorical activities have unfolded within and alongside (and not apart from) the broader development of rhetorical history, and because the negation of those activities has occurred as a function of the tradition within which they unfolded, Glenn urges feminist historians of rhetoric to understand the histories of women rhetors as “a number of deeply

contextualized narratives.” Only by taking this view, she says, can feminist historical inquiry in rhetorical studies “bring a fuller, richer—different—picture into focus” (388).

And yet, again, the goal of feminist inquiry is not, or is not only, the production of

“fuller, richer” historical maps, but rather about charting paths that will bring new historical objects into view. To this end, and by contextualizing the stories of historical women rhetors within the broader history, Glenn undertakes a historiographical “re- orientation.” I borrow this term from Ahmed who, in Queer Phenomenologies, discusses the performative potential of re-orientation. She argues that to make something new come about “requires a reorientation of one’s body such that other objects, those that are not reachable on the vertical and horizontal lines of [normative] culture, can be reached” (100).

Here, Ahmed takes a phenomenological approach and, in a move reminiscent of Judith

Butler’s own phenomenological turn, applies the concepts of “orientation” and

“reorientation” to the historical processes by which the (queer) body is constituted.27 And yet, as I will continue to demonstrate below, because the performative figure of “mapping” renders the historian as if she were a traveler—and therefore also as a body in space— these concepts also find resonance in the context of our current discussion.

In Ahmed’s work, one’s orientation is “about how we begin, how we proceed from here” (“Orientations” 545). Thus, the concept of “orientation” is irreducibly linked to the way one interacts with, organizes, and moves through one’s environment—in other words, it is linked with the question of methodology, particularly as it is articulated through the figure of mapping. Ahmed writes:

27 See especially Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.”

The question of orientation is a question of ‘how it is that we come to find our way

in a world that acquires new shapes, depending on which way we turn.’ If we know

where we are when we turn this way or that, then we are orientated. We have our

bearings. We know what to do to get to this place or to that place. To be orientated is

also to be turned toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. These are

objects we recognize, so that when we face them we know which way we are facing.

They might be landmarks or other familiar signs that give us our anchoring points.

They gather on the ground, and they create a ground upon which we can gather.

(Queer 1)

We might then say, based on Ahmed’s discussion, that a feminist re-orientation would be constituted in two parts. First, a reorientation would require a “turn” away from the traditional horizon of anticipation, so that objects that were not previously “reachable” can finally be reached. Second, however, and as Glenn recognizes, it would require the

“location” of those objects along a new horizon, such that those objects become the “signs that give us our anchoring points,” and that help us to “find our way.”

I would argue that, when Glenn suggests that feminist historians of rhetoric pursue the “re-mapping” of the rhetorical landscape, she has in mind precisely this kind of project.

She appears to acknowledge that, if we are to chart a feminist path through the rhetorical territory, it will not be enough to simply recover historical women rhetors. We must, rather, commit to both “locating” these rhetors on the rhetorical map and to “charting” methodological paths that will re-orient historical writing, and thereby suggest new directions and new objects for future histories of rhetoric.

Disorienting Orientations

While she does not use the language of “orientation” and “disorientation,” Glenn appears to acknowledge the possibility, and the necessity, of becoming re-oriented in historical space. For Glenn, this means that feminist historians of rhetoric must develop new ways of “reading” the past—ways of reading that are other than what constative traditional historiography has prescribed for us, ways that will “look for the ‘other’ sources of historical discourse in constant tension with the evidence” (Rhetoric 7).28 In developing these performative readings, which institute the possibilities for writing feminist histories,

Glenn writes:

We must risk getting the story crooked. We must look crookedly, a bit out of focus,

into the various strands of meaning in a text in such a way as to make the categories,

trends, and reliable identities of history a little less inevitable, less familiar. In short,

we need to see what is familiar in a different way, in many different ways, as well as

to see beyond the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the unseen. (7)29

To “look crookedly,” in my view, represents a strategy for becoming re-oriented in historical space. And yet, in this passage, we can also observe the limits of re-orientation, as a performative feminist methodology.

These limits reflect the more fundamental problem I described in the opening chapter: that while any performative gesture (for example, “re-mapping” the rhetorical

28 See also Hans Kellner (“After” 32), from whom Glenn takes this idea. 29 This passage bears a striking resemblance to a passage in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenologies, where she is discussing the methodological promise of re-orientation: “The hope of changing direction is that we don’t always know where some paths may take us: risking departure from the straight and narrow makes new futures possible, which might involve going astray, [or] getting lost” (21).

terrain) will undoubtedly produce certain effects and institute certain conditions for historical representation, the performative gesture of the as if is nevertheless subject to the historiographical to represent the past, or an imperative that any historical discourse make

(or make possible) representational propositions about the past. The assimilation of the performative gesture into this constative imperative is traced in the passage above. Here,

Glenn begins by articulating the performative potential of feminist re-mappings that risk

“getting the story crooked.” These histories, she suggests, are precisely those that promise not only to restore women rhetors to the canon, but also, and in doing so, to challenge and revise the conditions (or “categories, trends, and reliable identities”) of traditional histories of rhetoric. However, at the end of this passage, Glenn implies that the goal of such performative histories would be to “see what is familiar in a different way,” and thereby to look “beyond the familiar to the unfamiliar, to the unseen.” The goal of the feminist performative gesture, according to Glenn, is therefore to institute the conditions of possibility to see what cannot, as of yet, be seen, and to represent that which cannot, as of yet, be represented within existing epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical frames or “orientations.” The as if, we might say, supposes the arrival of an as such whose arrival or appearance would be established and given in advance by certain conventions or, perhaps more appropriately, certain expectations.

A Brief Word on “Instituting” and “Institutions” Another way of conceiving of this limit would be in terms of institutionalization, or in terms of the establishment of institutional (or, perhaps, disciplinary) conventions.

Throughout this and preceding chapters I have been saying, following both J.L. Austin and

Jacques Derrida, that performative utterances are, at least provisionally, distinct from

constative utterances in that they “do” things, and do not simply state or describe.30 Put another way, whereas constative utterances offer descriptions of events and conditions as such, the performative institutes conditions as if the saying of the utterance were, in fact, the doing of an action.

I have also written here that, in the performative figure of mapping, what is instituted is a particular (re)-orientation with respect to the rhetorical terrain, which institutes the possibility for the apprehension and representation of new objects of historical inquiry. I argue that while the gesture of “re-orientation” provides the conditions of possibility for feminist revisionary historiography, this gesture also risks establishing new orientations as disciplinary convention.

Sara Ahmed writes about the relationship between what one performatively institutes and the inevitable institutionalization of what has been brought about. She observes:

An institution…should be understood in a double sense: it refers us both to a

beginning and an end; a realization and destruction. If to institute is to open

something, then an institution is also that which has begun; it is both the order

already given to things, and something that disturbs an order of things; a re-

ordering is a new ordering. (“Institutional”)

These insights gain particular value when applied to the performative institution of certain revisionary orientations. As Ahmed suggests, if indeed the institution of these orientations

“opened something,” some new possibility, within the field of rhetorical history, then that possibility has already, as of the moment of the performative saying, been institutionalized.

30 See Austin, How to Do Things With Words; Derrida “Signature Event Context”

It has, in other words, been established as a certain norm or convention that will condition future performative gestures and re-orientations. We might say, therefore, that the risk of

“re-orientation” (or, for that matter, “re-mapping”) as a feminist revisionary strategy is that whatever orientation is instituted will foreclose future “turns,” future “re-orientations,” and will therefore come, as it has for traditional historiography, to offer the only possible horizon for feminist historical inquiry.31 It is for this reason, I argue, that it is necessary to consider historiographical methodology, not in terms of re-orientation, but of disorientation.

Mapping Disorientation Disorientation, in my view, offers up a strategy for intervening in process by which the performative as if is swept up into the constative as such, as well as the process by which “re-orientations” are institutionalized as disciplinary conventions. I should emphasize again that to do so is an ethical imperative that attends all historical production: to leave open a space for what Michelle Ballif has called the “radically other” and what

Derrida calls “the event”—that toward which we cannot orient ourselves, and that which remains beyond the representational reach of both the constative and the performative utterance.

I should note that my use of “disorientation” is, as Derrida might say, a “citation” of

Ahmed’s use of the same term. In some ways I draw upon Ahmed’s sense of the term, as I

31 This risk is associated with the uncritical “broadening imperative” in contemporary revisionary histories of rhetoric (see Skinnell, “Who Cares”). Essential to sustaining disciplinary and methodological critique is the possibility of “turning” otherwise, or of developing new critical orientations. Wherever such a performative “turn” is foreclosed, we should understand this foreclosure as signaling the operation of the “broadening imperative” and the abatement of critique.

understand it; in other ways, however, I am taking the term out of context, in order to consider what historiographical “disorientation” might entail from a Derridean, rather than a purely phenomenological, perspective. When I refer to “disorientation,” therefore, I am specifically not referring to any experience that might later be, once again, established as

“orientation,” or as being oriented. It is, after all, precisely this representational and institutional demand that I would wish us to resist.

As I have suggested, and as both Ahmed and Derrida would likely agree,

“orientation” always entails a horizon, along which objects come into view and present themselves to be “reached” and apprehended, and beyond which other objects disappear:

The horizon is what gives objects their contours and even allows such objects to be

reached. The objects are within my horizon; it is the act of reaching ‘toward them’

that makes them available as objects for me. The bodily horizon shows the ‘line’ that

bodies can reach toward, what is reachable, by also marking what they cannot

reach. The horizon marks the edge of what can be reached by the body. (Ahmed,

“Orientations” 552).

To frame this problem in historiographical terms, if historical objects “give us our anchoring points,” as Ahmed writes, then the horizon is the point upon which these objects are fixed on the rhetorical map, and along which they come into our methodological view.

To be oriented in history, insofar as it involves being directed towards particular historical objects, is also to be oriented toward and along a certain horizon. We might “turn,” as

Ahmed says, “this way or that way,” but regardless of which way we are oriented, our view of the rhetorical terrain—and the historical objects that come into our view—will be necessarily conditioned and limited by the line of this horizon.

As Derrida might say, this is both "for the better and for the worse." On one hand, this horizon orients us within the rhetorical terrain and gives historical objects to be seen and apprehended. In this sense, the "horizon" is the figurative and performative condition for historical representation. On the other hand, as Derrida has explained, any horizon is also a "horizon of expectation" ("A Certain Impossible" 451). This is to say that, being oriented toward a horizon, we can see what is ahead; we can see what approaches us and what we are approaching—what we are, to play on Ahmed's phrase, "reaching (toward)."

As is aptly demonstrated in Glenn’s figurative example of Burma-Shave signs, the foreseeability of what is before us gives us our bearings; it is what allows us to travel, figuratively speaking, through the rhetorical terrain, and it is thus the condition of writing any narrative or representational history, whether constative or performative.

And yet, as long as we are oriented toward a horizon, as long as we can foresee what comes, no ethical "event," in the Derridean sense, can arrive. We will have foreclosed the possibility for receiving the "radically other," an other who must be received vertically, without being foreseen, and without being subject to or conditioned by any institutional convention or horizon. The ethical imperative of historical production, therefore, demands that we consider what it might mean to become disoriented, as feminist historians of rhetoric. Put another way, we would need to consider what it might mean to leave open a certain space on our rhetorical maps, impossibly beyond any possible orientation or horizon.

CHAPTER THREE: WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF RHETORIC

Up until this point, I have been asking what it means, performatively speaking, to write feminist revisionary histories of rhetoric. How, I have been asking, have feminist revisionary historians leveraged the performative dimension of language in order to

“produce [historical] effects” and to institute the conditions for the recovery of women and other marginalized rhetors?

I have argued that, through the development of certain performative methodological figures, feminist historians have responded to the shifting disciplinary exigencies for historical research. Early in the feminist intervention, feminists historians responded to the nearly complete silence of women within accepted histories of rhetoric by “speaking for” and thus figuratively and performatively granting agency to historical women rhetors.

When this early tactic met with success, and women began to “speak” at the margins of the rhetorical traditional, to speak as if they were speaking for themselves, feminist historians and historiographers responded to these new disciplinary conditions with the revised figure of “mapping,” which sought to locate these newly emergent subjects upon the broader rhetorical terrain, as if they constituted possible settlements along a new narrative path. Reading these performative figures has allowed me to trace a certain trajectory of feminist revisionary historiography, showing how performative methodological discourses have, by responding to shifting exigencies, conditioned both the recovery of historical women rhetors and, later, the inclusion and location of those subjects upon rhetorical maps.

Like traditional historiography, which served the interests of the institutionalization and professionalization of rhetoric as a modern academic discipline, these feminist

revisionary historiographies have, as Cheryl Glenn has put it, “done what we needed them to do.” Indeed, in the years since Karlyn Kohrs Campbell inaugurated the practice of feminist historical recovery, disciplinary exigencies have shifted considerably. Traditional masculinist rhetorical histories, at least in some regards, have ceased to function as the standard for historical knowledge production in the field. Whereas, three decades ago, feminist scholars wondered whether it was even possible to speak of “historical women rhetors,” today the primary methodological problem facing feminist historians of rhetoric is not one of scarcity but, rather, one of saturation and abundance (Skinnell, “Who Cares”;

Enoch “Archival Literacy” 217). And yet, in other ways, traditional historiographical presuppositions and values continue to exert a significant, although often unacknowledged, influence on feminist revisionary inquiry, particularly at the level of methods and methodologies.

In terms of feminist historical research methods, as Michelle Ballif and Byron Hawk have suggested, we are witnessing an unprecedented turn toward rhetorical archives as the primary sites of historical invention (Ballif “Introduction”; Hawk “Stitching”). This turn is certainly not new; beginning in the late 1990s, we find prominent historians of rhetoric insisting that our primary methodological focus ought to shift from historiographical and methodological theorization—that is, from the development of theories about what it means to write histories that resist the scientific empiricism of traditional accounts— towards practical training in traditional archival research methods. Linda Ferreira-Buckley, for example, argues in her 1999 article “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault” that a methodological critique of traditional values and presuppositions ought not obviate the usefulness of traditional archival research methods for revisionary historians of rhetoric.

Ferreira-Buckley suggests that these traditional methods, “far from being incompatible with a progressive [historiographical] politics, are in fact the best agent of change” (582).

The proliferation and abundance of rhetorical archives, both materially and digitally, has made available “a wealth of materials” to historians of rhetoric, and these materials, as

Ferreira-Buckley puts it, “demand the attention of any historian who wants to understand the past” (582). What is necessary as a response to the new exigency of archival abundance, she says, is not the continued development of (post-structuralist, or even “continental”) theories of historical knowledge production, but rather “scholarly training” in the practical methods of producing knowledge through traditional archival research.

Since the publication of “Rescuing the Archives from Foucault,” feminist historians have enthusiastically embraced Ferreira-Buckley’s call to return to the archives, and often to traditional archival research methods (L’Eplattenier, “An Argument”; Ramsey “Working”;

Ramsey at al., Working in the Archives; Kirsch and Rohan, Beyond the Archives). In this penultimate chapter, I too wish to turn to consider how history is “done,” performatively, in and with archives. However, in enacting this archival turn, I do not “turn” in the same way as does Ferreira-Buckley. Rather, my interrogation of archives borrows from more recent rhetorical scholarship that proposes, as Lucille M. Schultz has written, to “[read] an archive not just a source but also as a subject” of rhetorical inquiry (vii).32 Communications scholar

E. Cram puts it similarly, arguing that “Although communication critics have long been

32 The move to consider the archive as a subject, rather than the source, of our research has been particularly influential within queer scholarship on rhetorical history, archives, and public memory. See especially Cram, “Archival Ambience”; Rawson, “Accessing”; Morris and Rawson “Queer Archives”; Morris, “Politics of Archival Research” and “Archival Queer”; and Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings.

hailed by the archive, concern for the archives as subjects is a recent consideration” that, they believe, gestures toward the future of historical inquiry in rhetorical studies (110).

My consideration of rhetorical archives represents a deviation from the studies I have taken up in previous chapters, where my concern has largely been for the performative writing of feminist histories of rhetoric. Nevertheless, it is my sense that, especially in light of the archival turn—in which, despite recent interventions, archives continue to be taken up by feminist historians primarily as a source and not a subject of historical knowledge production—it is necessary to investigate how archives of historical rhetorics both function and are constituted rhetorically, and even performatively. Drawing upon the work of Jane Sutton, particularly upon her articulation of a feminist methodological figure of architecture, I argue that is necessary to trace, challenge, and deconstruct the received “blueprints” of archival structures. This approach to the question of archives will, following Sutton, call into question the architectural logics that function to reify structures of rhetorical authority, both historically and in our contemporary moment.

In undertaking this investigation, I apply the figure of architecture to two rhetorical structures, each of which obey a particular architectural logic: I turn, that is, both to the archive and to the rhetoric classroom as productive sites at which we might unsettle certain architectures of rhetorical authority that characterize and constitute the “house of rhetoric.”33

33 Sutton also considers how these architectures of rhetorical authority structure material spaces: for example, “the courthouse, the House of Representatives, the schoolhouse, the House of God, the meeting house, and so on” (1-2). While she does mention the “schoolhouse” here, her list excludes the “house” of the archive. This exclusion is attributable to Sutton’s fairly traditional decision to limit her architectural investigation to sites of rhetorical deliberation and “decision making” (2).

The House of Rhetoric

In her book The House of My Sojourn, Jane Sutton provides perhaps the most extensive discussion of the figure of architecture, as it might be applied to feminist rhetorical inquiry in general, and to feminist historiography in particular. Sutton’s project occupies a place of tension between contemporary feminist problematics and the problematics associated with writing rhetorical histories of women’s rhetorics. Insofar as women participate in rhetorical practice, both historically and in the present moment,

Sutton suggest that those women rhetors occupy a certain figurative (or in her words

“imaginary”) structure, which is defined by architectural logics originating in ancient

Greece and retained throughout the history of women’s rhetorical participation. In Sutton’s view, this architectural structure—this “house of rhetoric”—both conditions and forecloses the possibility of women’s rhetorical authority. She writes:

Analogically, I envision the relationship between women and rhetoric as a house, a

structure erected upon principles and design concepts employed in ancient Greece

and how, historically, that structure has allowed women to enter but has, at the

same time, denied them the authority to speak from inside. (2).

Sutton’s goal is to understand the present situation of both contemporary and historical women rhetors by “[examining] the house in terms of its original blueprints,” which is to say in terms of its architectural logics, as those logics developed in antiquity (2). Because women inhabit this structure, and are therefore located inside it, Sutton proposes to conduct this examination, as she puts it, “interiorly,” by examining how the interior of the house is structured. “I am forced,” she says, “to look at angles, planes, and staircases to determine how they facilitate and inhibit those who speak and live in the house” (2). How,

in other words, does “rhetoric,” as it was conceived in antiquity, structure the possibilities for women’s participations?

In Sutton’s view, the received blueprints for the house of rhetoric foreclose women’s claims to rhetorical authority. As Sutton’s visit to the U.S. Capitol shows, while the house certainly, at this point, admits entry to women speakers, both historical and contemporary, those women are too often—like the Portrait Monument of Lucretia Mott, Susan B.

Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—relegated to the basement, and excluded from the main floors where, Sutton believes, rhetorical authority is exercised through deliberation and decision making. It is not, therefore, enough for feminist rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric to simply “[insert] women in [the house of] rhetoric,” for example, through feminist historical recovery. As Sutton shows, this strategy has been successful in gaining entry for women into the house, but it has not secured for them the privilege of occupying its main floors. Therefore, Sutton argues that feminist scholars must instead pursue an

“insertion of a major change in rhetoric’s structure, thereby altering the house so that women are regarded as leaders without prejudice against their nature” (3).

I have reviewed Sutton’s figure of “architecture” here because I believe that, in many ways, this performative figure, which proposes to write feminist histories as if restructuring the house of rhetoric, raises important questions about the relationship between space, institutional structure, and rhetorical authority. As I have already said, I intend to pursue these questions by what of the figure of “architecture” throughout what follows here.

However, I do not propose here to offer a close reading or extensive analysis of

Sutton’s performative figure, at least not the sort that I have undertaken in previous

chapters. This is for the simple reason that, unlike the other figures that I have investigated, the figure of architecture has not, or perhaps not yet, been widely taken up by contemporary feminist historians of rhetoric. Perhaps the failure of this figure to achieve wide circulation is a result of our impressions of the status of disciplinary exigencies; or perhaps it is only that the disorienting complexity of Sutton’s articulation has discouraged other feminist rhetoricians from taking up the figure of architecture and applying it in their own historical research. Either way, it is my sense that a close reading of the type that I have been undertaking would have limited explanatory power for the development of feminist historical methodologies in rhetorical studies. Therefore, in this chapter, I take a slightly different approach to the figure of architecture by suggesting a pedagogical repurposing of this figure that would resituate the question of “the house of rhetoric” in two other spatial environments, both of which constitute spaces that, like the history of rhetoric, inherit a certain architecture and structure of authority. I propose, in other words, to examine how both archives and classrooms (and, finally, how the pedagogical application of archives in the classroom) might help us conceive of ways to revise the architectural principles that function both to institute and foreclose claims to rhetorical authority.

Housing Rhetoric in the Archive/The Archive as the House of Rhetoric

The construction of any archive is a performative act insofar as any archive both institutes and conditions possibilities for historical invention. This function is achieved in two ways. First, an archive institutes historiographical possibilities by virtue of what it includes or, to put it another way, what it houses. Insofar as the existence and availability of archival materials represent both the ground and the limit of historical knowledge

production, to “add to the archive” is not a neutral act aimed simply at “broadening” archival collections. Rather, to revise and supplement archival holdings makes it possible to produce new historical narratives, and it also, perhaps more importantly, occasions a reconsideration of existing narratives and received methodologies for producing historical claims.34, 35 Second, an archive institutes historiographical possibilities not only in terms of what it houses, but also in terms of its own architectural and rhetorical structure, both literally and figuratively speaking. It is this second sense, in which the archive is understood as if it were, itself, a “house of rhetoric,” that interests me in what follows.

In traditional archives, “architecture” can be understood literally as the space of the archive, including its physical organization of materials and the broader environment within which those materials are housed. As rhetorical scholars have widely noted, archival architecture and design is not neutral, but rather conditions one’s engagement with archival materials and qualifies the histories that result from those engagements. E. Cram writes, “Even the most sterile feeling and highly institutionalized archives are not passive holding places for primary documents.” Instead, they argue, archives function rhetorically

34 This is, I would add, precisely why Ferreira-Buckley, Barbara L’Eplattenier, Alexis Ramsey, and others can argue for the potential of traditional historical research methods to affect the goals of revisionary historiography. 35 This argument runs contrary to the position advanced by Sutton, who argues that women rhetors have already achieved entry into the “house of rhetoric” (and therefore into the rhetorical archives and into rhetorical histories), yet they continue to be denied authority within existing architectural logics. In Sutton’s view, the insertion of individual women rhetors into this structure does nothing to restructure or reorganize these architectures of authority (see House of My Sojourn 3). In my view, this argument is particularly fraught because it presumes an equal distribution of authority—or a lack of authority—among all women. While it is beyond the scope of my argument here to pursue this problematic, I would urge future engagement with the question of intersectionality. What would it mean for the “house of rhetoric,” I wonder, if equality of privilege among all women were not presumed, as it is here.

and performatively to institute possibilities beyond the “recuperative ‘scene’ of [historical] discovery” (“Archival Ambience” 111). At the very least, archival architectures—which, drawing upon Thomas Rickert, Cram identifies as “archival ambiance”36—orient the body in the space of the archive; the way that the historian’s body is oriented, as I noted in the previous chapter, directs the historian towards some objects more than others, therefore conditioning the possibilities for producing historical knowledge about those objects.

We might consider, for example, the architectural differences between say, a sprawling institutional archive such as the Harry Ransom Center, located on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and the community-based Lesbian Herstory Archive, originally located in “the cramped quarters of [founders] Joan Nestle and Deborah Edel’s

Upper West Side apartment,” and currently housed in a Brooklyn brownstone (Cvetkovich

241). Each of these archives orients researchers toward its materials and holdings in markedly different ways. As a large institutional archive, the space of the Harry Ransom

Center consists primarily of closed stacks, the contents of which can be browsed using digital finding aids and then retrieved by a professional archivist and viewed in a reserved viewing room. The website warns prospective visitors that some collections are not located in the HRC at all, but are rather housed in remote storage and must, therefore, be requested days in advance. This is in contrast to the Lesbian Herstory Archives where, as Ann

Cvetkovich describes, “Visitors can browse through the filing cabinets at their leisure rather than having to negotiate closed stacks” (Archive of Feelings 241). As one might expect, knowledge is necessarily constructed differently within the space produced by these two archival and architectural logics. While, in the Harry Ransom Center, knowledge

36 See Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric

emerges formally and is limited and conditioned by what the researcher anticipates or foresees, in the Lesbian Herstory Archives historical knowledge is constituted organically and informally in ways that may or may not conform to the researcher’s expectations.

I briefly raise this example to demonstrate the extent to which “doing archival work” means engaging with certain material architectural logics, and to show that these logics exercise significant influence over the historical knowledge that is produced from within them. I have also wanted to trouble the assumption that our disciplinary archives are rhetorical only in the sense that they house rhetorical materials. Rather, archives are rhetorical (and, importantly, performative) in a spatial and architectural sense, insofar as their architectural logics function to institute certain possibilities for historical research.

However, particularly in the case of many brick-and-mortar archives, these possibilities are, in a more general and figurative sense, constrained by fairly normative architectures of authority which, either through explicit regulatory gatekeeping practices or by virtue of their structure and organization, render many archives as inaccessible to those who are not conducting the professional business of archival research. Put another way, in many physical (and particularly institutional) archives, only a professional historian will be “at home.”

Digital Archiving and Pedagogical Architectures of Authority

Before turning to think about the application of the figure of architecture to the space of the classroom, it is necessary to make a few brief remarks concerning my sense of both “feminist historical methodology” and “feminist pedagogy.” While I have, at points, appeared to conflate “feminist historical methodology” with the practices belonging to what would more properly be called “women’s history,” I do not believe that a feminist

historical methodology must necessarily account for the place and position of women, specifically and exclusively. Instead, I follow feminist rhetorician and revisionary historian

Julie Jung in arguing that a feminist revisionary methodology in rhetorical studies would be, as she puts it, “a process of disrupting textual clarity and thereby delaying consensus so that differences and conflicts within discourse communities can be identified, sustained, contended with, and perhaps understood” (xiii). It is my position that a narrow focus on the historiographical problem of women, specifically, functions as a supposed means of reaching a consensus, and thus of shutting down methodological debate and discussion concerning differences within a community of feminist rhetoricians.

After all, any consensus requires a common ground upon which different perspectives might finally reach a point of stasis, and thus be litigated and done with. Not only do I agree with Jung that such consensus is unproductive for feminist historians of rhetoric, I would also argue that, even if we were not skeptical about the value of consensus-building, we would need to be suspicious about any attempt to instrumentalize

“woman,” as a supposedly stable category of identity, as our common ground. Indeed, as feminist rhetoricians and historians of rhetoric have shown, the uncritical invocation of

“woman” as the subject of feminist history threatens to elide differences between women, and to the negate the experiences of women whose complex and intersectional identities cannot be contained in a stable of fixed category—especially a category that, historically, has been fixed under the signs of Whiteness, Western-ness, heterosexuality, and cisgender identity.

In my view, Jung’s definition of feminist revisionary methodology is transportable into the realm of feminist pedagogy, particular in rhetoric and writing classrooms. Indeed,

the pedagogical emphasis on, as Jung says, the “[disruption of] textual clarity” puts this view of feminist pedagogy directly in conversation with the received, historical sense of a

“critical” pedagogical approach.37 Critical pedagogies, as feminist education scholar Carmen

Luke reminds us, refer to those classroom practices that “provide…an agenda for emancipatory education,” beginning with “students’ problematicization of knowledge, language, and lived experience” (28). My sense of my own feminist pedagogy draws upon the critical imperative to problematize what appears to be given in advance, and to ask

(with students) how those supposed “givens” are, in fact, constituted and constructed rhetorically. However, and somewhat counter-intuitively, I would want to work against the emancipatory imperative at the heart of received critical pedagogies. Following feminist pedagogues Elizabeth Ellsworth and Patti Lather, among others, it is my view that emancipatory education risks the perpetuation of relationships of dominance and authority in the classroom. As Lather writes, with a nod to Ellsworth: “too often, [critical] pedagogies have failed to probe the degree to which ‘empowerment’ becomes something done ‘by’ liberated pedagogies ‘to’ or ‘for’ the as-yet-unliberated ‘other,’ the object upon which is directed the ‘emancipatory’ actions” (169). My sense of a feminist pedagogy, then, would be one in which the architectures of authority that structure pedagogical environments should be subject to critique and deconstruction or, Sutton puts it, to a radical “restructuring.”

Restructuring Authority in the Undergraduate Classroom When we think about importing the archive into the undergraduate classroom, we often imagine that archive as an existing or established repository of materials that with

37 As feminist scholar Carmen Luke reminds us, “critical pedagogy” refers to pedagogies that “provide…an agenda for emancipatory education,” which begins with “students’ problematicization of knowledge, language, and lived experience” (28).

which students can engage (Enoch and Jack 518). The archive, in this context, represents a source of materials and historical data from which students can draw, and certainly not a subject of rhetorical inquiry.

I argue, however, that we should reimagine what it means to teach (and especially to teach histories of rhetoric) with archives, such that we begin to understand archives as pedagogical tools that allow students to interrogate the processes by which histories of rhetoric are constituted—processes that, while evident to professional researchers, are often intentionally concealed or obscured in the undergraduate classroom (see Enoch and

Jack 519). Rather than present archives merely as sites of and repositories for historical data, therefore, we ought to engage students in the performative act of constructing archives of historical rhetoric. In making this call, I join a handful of contemporary feminist rhetoricians including Pamela VanHaitsma, Jessica Enoch, and Jordynn Jack, each of whom have argued for the pedagogical value of creating digital archives of historical rhetorics. As

VanHaitsma has recently put it, “digital technologies for archival work make it possible for undergraduates to join in not only using but also building digital archives” (“Pedagogical”

39). She argues that pedagogical engagements with digital archival production allow our pedagogies to “remain attentive to the past, but become relevant to the composing processes of students in our present-day…culture,” where students are both consumers and producers of everyday archives (39). I agree with VanHaitsma’s recommendation that feminist historians of rhetoric (and feminist rhetoricians, more generally) bring digital archiving practices into their classrooms. However, while I appreciate and recognize the need to accommodate contemporary composing practices, I understand the pedagogical value of digital archiving somewhat differently.

Drawing from Megan A. Norcia, I suggest that when students have the opportunity to build archives, they are better positioned to interrogate their own positions with respect to received historical narratives. Norcia argues that students who engage in archival research participate in a “sophisticated historiography” that “[asks] questions about the nature of presentation of the past, establishing authority in relation to a historical object, and considering issues of audience, especially how to contextualize this material for future users” (“Out of the Ivory” 94; see also Enoch and VanHaitsma, “Archival Literacy” 217).

Rather than encouraging students to understand “doing history” as the engagement with established archives and the constative description of the rhetorical past, as such, projects of archival design and construction encourage students to recognize the both the archive and received rhetorical histories as “rhetorical constructions” (see Morris, “The Archival

Turn” 113) and to participate in the performative as if which is the rhetorical condition for historical knowledge production.

As VanHaitsma notes, digital archiving represents a particularly rich pedagogical opportunity for teachers of historical rhetorics, especially insofar as archiving technologies make archival research “more accessible to undergraduate students,” “and even enable the creation of archives” (“Pedagogical” 37, 38). Indeed, the years preceding the emergence of digital archiving as a tool for humanistic and rhetorical study, engaging students in archival research meant taking students into established physical archives. Not only did the physical nature of archival sites represent a logistical inconvenience, often requiring students to travel off campus, it also limited the extent to which students could interrogate the information architecture that any archive (physical or digital) implies. As digital archiving platforms and content management systems have become available on campus

and in classrooms, however, and as these tools have become increasingly accessible and intuitive, it has become easier for undergraduate learners—many of whom, as Daniel

Anderson has reminded us, lack background in archival and digital methods

(“Prosumer”)—to engage, not only in archival research, writ large, but also to engage in the performative act of inventing and constituting digital archival structures and spaces.

Additionally, digital archiving platforms, in particular, provide opportunities for archival collaboration.38 Not only can undergraduate learners experiment with archival architectures, they can also participate in the collaborative project of populating those structures with the artifacts, data, and ephemera that constitute the material of rhetorical histories.

The goal of these collaborative projects is not necessarily the discovery of lost or neglected materials, or even the making available of documents and ephemera that are currently, owing to their current archival locations, inaccessible to a broader audience of students and scholars. Obviously these are not outcomes to be discouraged; however, in most regards, these tasks remain in the purview of professional scholars and historians of rhetoric. Rather, the goal of collaborative digital archiving projects would be, in a significant sense, to position undergraduate students to participate in the business of constructing historical knowledge about the rhetorical past, as if they had the authority to do so.

When undergraduate learners build digital archives, particularly when those archives are collaboratively constructed and populated through open crowdsourcing, it

38 VanHaitsma notes that, while content management systems enable some level of collaboration, digital archiving platforms such as Archive-It and Omeka allow “crowdsourcing through increased collaboration with users and stakeholders from outside the immediate course context” (“Pedagogical” 49).

becomes possible to radically restructure received architectures of rhetorical authority.

One particularly significant aspect of this restructuring, as Enoch and VanHaitsma have implied, is that students come to occupy a place of authority both in the classroom and, as a result, in the “house of rhetoric” more generally. As VanHaitsma observes, students already occupy a space within the figurative architecture of the archive, broadly speaking. Indeed, she suggests, “undergraduate students confront digital archives virtually everywhere they turn, in the academy as well as their everyday lives.” As a result, she argues, “the archive is no longer a professional space solely for specialized scholarly research at protected sites”

(“Pedagogical” 34). And yet, those of us who undertake professional archival research in rhetorical studies are often loathe to recognize these “non-specialized” forms of digital archival engagements, which could be interpreted broadly to include “Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest,” as well as academic archival services such as “JSTOR, Project Muse, Science

Direct,” and even Wikipedia (34). Although these digital archival practices might be admitted, however stubbornly, into the “house of rhetoric,” they are certainly not granted authority within existing structures.

Incorporating digital archiving into undergraduate classrooms, and encouraging students to engage with professional-quality platforms like Omeka, promises to restructure these received architectures of authority. Indeed, as Enoch and VanHaitsma write, “the end result of undergraduate digital archiving projects is that students are invited ‘into the scholarly community,’ where they find ‘they have much to contribute” (“Archival Literacy”

418). VanHaitsma similarly notes elsewhere that “digital technologies for archival work make it possible for undergraduates to join in not only using but also building digital archives” (“Pedagogical” 39). Recalling Sutton’s imperative to restructure the “house of

rhetoric” in such a way as to grant authority to historical and contemporary women rhetors, we find that digital archiving projects represent a potential site to restructure the architectures of authority that operate in the space of the classroom, and the space of the institution more generally. Indeed, by engaging in the process of building digital rhetorical archives, students are positioned to revise both the blueprints of rhetorical history and the structures of institutional and disciplinary authority.

Hospitable Architectures

While digital archiving is valuable, as an historiographical practice and a pedagogical project, it does not escape the ethical imperatives that I have discussed in the previous chapters, which attend all projects of composing performative rhetorical histories: how to avoid (fore)closing the performative aspects of one’s text, such that they are swept back up into the constative imperative to represent the past, as such? How to construct digital archives and digital archival architectures that resist institutional demands to function as a source of constative discovery? How to write rhetorical histories that remain open to the radically other, and to “the event”? And, perhaps most challengingly, how to implement this ethical imperative in our pedagogical practices?

Following a certain queer archival gesture that interprets archives as subjects, rather than sources, of rhetorical inquiry, I have insisted that archives do not merely house materials, but that they also function as if they were, themselves, houses of rhetoric.

Thinking again of Jane Sutton, we might say that archives function according to their own architectural logics, which are different from the logics of the ancient Greek house, but which nevertheless necessarily function to “facilitate and inhibit those who speak and live in the house.” I have wanted, in what has come before, to follow Sutton’s lead in tracing

these architectural blueprints, and thereby to suggest some ways that the archive—and particularly the digital and pedagogical archive—functions to institute “major changes” to normative rhetorical architectures. Such a restructuration constitutes progress for feminist revisionary historiographies of rhetoric. And yet, even these restructured architectures and revised blueprints do not entirely fulfill the ethical imperative, as described by Jacques

Derrida. In what remains, therefore, I will briefly outline Derrida’s discussion of

“hospitality” as a stance that responds to this imperative by welcoming whatever is to come into our house.

I have already written fairly extensively about Derrida’s understanding of the “pure” event, as that which arrives vertically without expectation, cannot be subjected to any convention, and takes place beyond the performative as if in the space of a more radical

“perhaps” (“University”). It will not be necessary to rehash this territory here; I would, however, like to say a few words about “hospitality” as a figure for this event, before turning to consider how we might construct, or at least conceive of, hospitable digital archives.

In his essay “The Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Derrida describes the ethical imperative of hospitality:

You spoke of the event as not only what comes to pass [arrive], but as the arrivant.

The absolute arrivant must not be merely an invited guest, someone I’m prepared to

welcome, whom I have the ability to welcome. It must be someone whose

unexpected, unforeseeable arrival, whose visitation—and here I’m opposing

visitation to invitation—is such an irruption that I’m not prepared to receive the

person. I must not even be prepared to receive the person, for there to be genuine

hospitality: not only have no prior notice of the arrival but no prior definition of the

newcomer, and no way of asking, as is done at a border, “Name? Nationality? Place

of origin? Purpose of visit? Will you be working here?” The absolute guest [hôte] is

this arrivant for whom there is not even a horizon of expectation, who bursts onto

my horizon of expectations when I am not even prepared to receive the one who I’ll

be receiving. That’s hospitality. (451)

“Hospitality,” then, represents an unconditional openness to what comes. And yet, as I will discuss more fully below, a “pure” hospitality (which would also be “the event,” as such) is necessarily an impossible possibility. And this is particularly true, as I have argued, when we think about writing histories of rhetoric—even histories composed in the mode of the performative as if. As Derrida suggests, insofar as the event, the arrival of “the stranger,” is instituted and conditioned by the performative as if, that event cannot be properly said to have taken place, or to have “arrived.” If we are to write ethically, to archive ethically, we must invent strategies for engaging with this dilemma, and of considering what it might mean to construct a more hospitable “house of rhetoric.”

Perhaps the impossible possibility of producing something like a “hospitable” digital archive, in the Derridean sense, is illustrated by collaborative archival and pedagogical projects. This is, at least, what James J. Brown gives us to think in his excellent book Ethical

Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software. There, Brown discusses the possibilities for ethical orientations that are instituted by what he calls “networked life,” or

“life in a networked society” in which “information and bodies constantly move and collide,” thus essentially foreclosing the potential of ever “getting offline” (1). A networked life, Brown argues, “means never really getting to decide any thoroughgoing way who or

what enters your ‘home’ (your apartment, your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat),” and this condition of being networked leaves us impossibly open to the arrival of unexpected guests (1).

Of course, as Derrida would remind us, “pure hospitality,” or an unconditional openness to the arrivant, to whatever arrives or befalls us, is precisely the impossible possibility of the event—impossible because, as Brown notes, neither we nor our machines can resist putting in place “procedures [to be] enacted in the face of networked arrivals”; and yet impossibly possible because, at the end of the day, “the concept of the invitation is mostly a pleasant fiction” (1). The other, Brown insists, arrives, resisting all attempts to filter and exclude this alterity from one’s networked perception.

The unconditional arrival of the other immediately implicates us in an ethical predicament, which is articulated by the following question:

How does software navigate between the unconditional welcome granted by a

network connection, an invitation extended to a faceless foe, and the measured,

conditional gestures that inevitably emerge in response, the gestures that begin to

determine who or what is friend and foe? (4)

I argue that the same question could be asked of digital archives, of the process of constructing digital archival architectures in a “networked” world. A “networked” archive would be necessarily collaborative and open-source, such that there would be no controlling who arrived, so to speak, to contribute to the archive; nor would there be any

“conventional fictions” that would filter or control what might be contributed.

Of course, as K.J. Rawson has shown in his undertaking of The Digital Transgender

Archive, the necessity of filtering what comes into the archive, or what comes to be housed

in the archive, cannot be avoided. Indeed, as Rawson explains in a recent interview:

“Essentially, you can look at every aspect of the archival process from acquiring materials to selecting which materials go into an archive, to describing those materials, to making those materials accessible—every single stage of the archival process is governed by a logic,” and this is true even in a self-consciously queer archive (“Rhetorical Work”). These architectural logics, Rawson says, are often invisible to the researcher, but they are nevertheless “tremendously impactful in terms of how we understand what is in a collection and what isn't in a collection.” Rawson shows that it is possible to resist (or, perhaps, to “queer”) these governing architectural “logics,” for example by foregoing normative descriptive vocabularies in favor of the Homosaurus, which he describes as “an international LGBTQIA thesaurus of queer terms.” These kinds of resistances are useful, of course, particularly in revising received archival “blueprints” and thereby effectively restructuring the architecture of rhetorical authority so that transgender individuals and communities can be represented in a digital archival space.

Nevertheless, these “logics,” which are architectural logics functioning to structure both the archival “house of rhetoric” and our points of access into it, represent precisely the kinds of “conventions” that, as Derrida would insist, foreclose the possibility of any archival hospitality, in a proper sense. And yet, that an hospitable archive is only impossibly possible does not exempt us from his ethical imperative. We must, as Brown suggests, “wire” ourselves and our archives to indeterminable and hospitable networks, and therefore to the possibility of alterity. And, as a corollary, we must constantly interrogate the procedures that are put into place in the form of certain laws, a certain performative as if’s, which may allow us to welcome certain others into our in the normal sense of hospitality,

but which will also foreclose the possibility of receiving the arrivant, along with any occasion for a truly ethical decision.

Perhaps this predicament calls us to consider, therefore, in both our historical and pedagogical practices, how the architecture of “the house of rhetoric” might itself be “re- wired” and integrated, hospitably, into our networked lives.

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CONCLUSIONS: HAUNTING FEMINIST HISTORICAL METHODOLOGIES

In what has come before, I have wanted to trace the performative contours of methodological discourse, as it is articulated in feminist revisionary histories of rhetoric.

I have wanted, in particular, to show that feminist historians of rhetoric have leveraged the performative through the development of methodological figures, each of which institutes conditions of possibility for historical representation by figuring that task as if it were being done otherwise, according to another logic and another rule than the one that is given by traditional historiography with its insistence upon scientific and objective forms of representation in which the subject appears to “speak” autonomously, or to otherwise give itself to be known and apprehended, as such. In doing so, I have ended up tracing a sort of figurative history. Indeed, it is possible to read what has come before as if it were a history, or as if I had been telling the story of a certain feminist revisionary historiography of rhetoric. I say “a certain feminist historiography,” because

I remain acutely aware of the ways in which my own history functions, like all historical discourse, to institute that which it describes. What has come before would therefore not be a history of any as such, although like any history must, it has made (or, at least, pretended to make) claims on and about the “real” of feminist histories of rhetoric.

Three Returns, Or What it is That I Have Been Doing

Along the way, and in each of the preceding studies that constitute this speculative history, I have tried to demonstrate (at least) three possible approaches to the figurative and performative discourse belonging to feminist revisionary historiographies:

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1. It is possible to read each of the performative figures I have been discussing as if it were an event, in the usual sense, in a certain history of feminist historiographies of rhetoric. Reading in this mode, we can approach feminist performative figures as if each one constituted an instance of agentive speech, issuing from a subject/historian who is presumed to be a self-conscious “master,” as Barbara Biesecker has said, of her own discourse (“Coming to Terms” 144). The subject/historian surveys disciplinary conditions, identifies exigencies for rhetorical interventions, and designs a figurative and methodological response to those conditions. It is as if this subject/historian were, indeed, not only an agent of speech, but also the agent of history. Her intentional, agentive, and rhetorically skillful responses to given “rhetorical situations” is the causal engine that propels the linear advancement of feminist histories of rhetoric.

On one hand, this account of feminist methodological discourse appears to be rather conservative, building upon several of the discipline’s most cherished conceptual foundations: the self-consciousness of the speaking subject, the given-ness of rhetorical agency in the apparent capacity to affect change through persuasive speech, and the stability and determinacy of the rhetorical situation. This is certainly true. We should note, however, that even this conservative approach initially appears to improve upon

“scientific” forms of historiographical conservatism, many of which are evident in traditional historiographical claims to “write as if archival facts speak for themselves in a grand cause/effect narrative” and, as Victor J. Vitanza puts it, to be “guided by positivistic principles of inference or hypothesis formation, testing, and explanation” that would presume the adequateness of historical discourse to historical fact. To see historiography in terms of the rhetorical situation, and to understand histories

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themselves as arguments in response to particular institutional, cultural, and political exigencies is to suggest that the goal of historical discourse is not necessarily to establish a single or “master” narrative that would constatively describe the past as such, or as

Leopold von Ranke would put it, “as it really happened.” Instead, the goal of historical discourse is here presented as if it were possible to produce a virtual infinity of historical claims which, even while necessarily appealing to the supposed “truth” of the past, constitute performative responses to the rhetorical situation, traditionally conceived.

On the other hand, as I have just suggested, this account of feminist methodological discourse relies on what is, by disciplinary standards, a strictly traditional or conservative account of the rhetorical situation. Indeed, particularly in its presumption of an intentional, agentive, and self-conscious subject/historian, this account reinforces the views of Lloyd Bitzer, who defines the rhetorical situation in terms of an intentional speaker addressing situations that are knowable and determinable in advance of any utterance. For Bitzer, the speaker’s capacity to grasp the totality of these situational contexts is essential to the production of persuasive speech.

He writes, “If it makes sense to say that situation demands not only a response, but a fitting response, then situation must somehow prescribe the response which fits” (10).

Not only does Bitzer presume the a priori and given status of the rhetorical situation, but he also presumes the agency of the subject insofar as she is capable of grasping the totality of a situational context: “To say that the situation is objective, publicly observable, and historic means that it is real or genuine—that our critical examination will certify its existence” (11). In Bitzer’s terms then, if feminist methodological

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discourse has indeed provided “fitting responses” to shifting disciplinary exigencies, this could only be due to the historian’s capacity to have known and “certified” the existence of external situations and conditions. In this sense, we find ourselves back in the predicament of an historical scientism, founded on both the objective existence of real conditions as such, and the capacity of discourse to accurately and faithfully apprehend and respond to those conditions.

2. In order to circumnavigate the trap of Bitzer’s empirical trap, one might read feminist methodological discourse in another way, which would emphasize the performative nature and functions of feminist methodological figures. In a certain way, this reading might be said to reflect a reinterpretation of Richard Vatz’ argument with

Bitzer over the relation between the rhetorical subject and the conditions to which she, ostensibly, responds. While Vatz does not, of course, invoke the explicit language of performative rhetoric, his argument nevertheless suggests the capacity of the subject— who, it should be noted, remains in this view a self-conscious rhetorical agent—to institute, and simply respond to, rhetorical situations. “Fortunately or unfortunately,”

Vatz writes, “meaning is not instrinsic in events, facts, people, or ‘situations’ nor are facts

‘publicly observable’” (156). Rather, he argues, “meaning [is] a consequence of rhetorical creation,” which means that the paramount concern of rhetorical criticism is the question of “how and by whom symbols create the reality to which people react” (158).

I have suggested, in each of the preceding case studies, that feminist methodological discourse functions performatively to institute certain conditions and situations, which in turn condition possibilities for the production of historical meaning.

In making this claim, one goal has been to emphasize the rhetorical dimension of

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historiography, even at the level of its methodological discourse. While this point has been well-rehearsed during the three decades of revisionary critique, it is my sense that, along the way, feminist revisionary historians have ceased to interrogate the rhetorical dimensions of their research, often preferring to merely nod to this truth, before proceeding to make unproblematized constative claims about the rhetorical past, as such. To neglect a rigorous engagement with the rhetorical nature of historiographical work, especially when one uncritically adopts a more traditional or scientific stance, is to devalue rhetorical inquiry with respect to other modes of investigation that have stronger claims to the apprehension of reality. Vatz makes this point well: “If you view meaning as intrinsic to situations, rhetorical study becomes parasitic to philosophy, political science, and whatever other discipline can inform us as to what the ‘real’ situation is” (158). My project of reading the performative elements of feminist methodological discourse would challenge this view. The stakes of such a challenge, in my view, are nothing less than the possibility of continued methodological critique; by insisting that feminist performative figures institute and do not merely reflect reality, we invite the possibility that, through careful and rigorous critique, feminist methodologies—and, thereby, feminist histories—can be instituted otherwise.

Still, however, Vatz does not significantly disturb Bitzer’s positioning of the subject as a master of her discourse. In Vatz’s view, in the process of performatively instituting events and conditions, the historian must necessarily make “rhetorical choices” (159) about the conditions she will bring about. In this sense, the subject Vatz describes may possess agency even in excess of what Bitzer has described. Whereas, for

Bitzer, the subject is herself subjected, in a certain sense, to the given-ness of rhetorical

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situations, for Vatz the agency of the subject appears virtually limitless. Because, in

Vatz’s view, the storehouse of historical “facts” can never be exhausted, one must always make choices about what one would like to communicate and, therefore, about the reality that one would like institute (156). Importantly, Vatz does not pause to wonder about the intentional rhetorical capacity of the subject to institute exactly what she wishes. We might also say, therefore, that Vatz does not wonder about the potential for failure in a performative or instituting utterance; he does not, in other words, question the presumption that the subject is capable of saying what she means to say, or doing what she means to do.

This presupposition is attended by significant consequences. If we do not leave open the possibility of performative failures and excesses, then whatever we might performatively institute will necessary be guaranteed by certain conventions. Put another way, perhaps: the instituting power of the performative is limited by the horizon of what could be, such that any performative utterance must ultimately point toward the arrival of something that, in uttering the performative as if, has already been expected and foreseen. In this sense, while Vatz puts his faith in a nearly omnipotent rhetorical agent, this agency to institute whatsoever one wishes is necessarily conditioned by what might actually, possibly, appear as such.

3. There is, however, a third level on which one might read feminist methodological discourse, which would call into account both Bitzer and Vatz’s views of the subject’s relation to her discourse. On this level, we are called to consider what we might call, with Derrida, a “pure” performative (Acts of Religion 270), which would in turn lead us to consider the ethical implications of a performative historiography that

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would institute events and conditions only according to certain received conditions or laws.

In her response to Bitzer and Vatz, Barbara Biesecker gestures toward this “third way.” To understand what Biesecker is up to in her response, and to relate her objectives to our present discussion, it will be helpful to return briefly to Michel de

Certeau’s comments on the work of historiography:

Historiography (that is, ‘history’ and ‘writing’) bears within its own name the

paradox…of a relation established between two antinomic terms, between the

real and discourse. Its task is one of connecting them and, at the point where this

link cannot be imagined, of working as if the two were being joined. (xxvii)

For de Certeau, as I have suggested, historical meaning is produced neither on the basis of any real to which we might have direct access, nor on the basis of any purely subjective discourse. Rather, he argues, meaning is produced by “working as if the two were being joined,” or by performatively instituting the possibility that discourse might refer directly and adequately to reality.

Biesecker, I think, would agree, at least provisionally. In “Rethinking the

Rhetorical Situation” she argues that meaning arrives in any rhetorical situation, not as a function of any rhetorical agent, but rather as a function of the rhetoricity of the text itself. “All texts,” Biesecker writes, “are inhabited by an internally divided non-originary

‘origin’ called différance” (120). Following Derrida, Biesecker argues that, in order to produce meaning, “The divisiveness of that ‘originating’ moment is, so to speak, covered over or…finessed into a unity by the writing and speaking,” and specifically not by any conscious or agentive rhetor. “In fact,” Biesecker concludes, “the finessing of the non-

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identical into an identity is…precisely the activity that makes signification happen”

(120). Différance is a neologism that refers to the differential and deferred meaning that is produced by virtue of a certain “spacing” between signs, and by virtue of the non- identity of any sign with itself (117). In its simplest, and perhaps overly simplistic, formulation: a sign means only by virtue of its non-identical and differential relationship both to other signs, and with itself (115-16). We might say, therefore, that the “real” comes to represent reality, as such, only insofar as the “real” is not “discourse,” and visa versa—and even more radically, only insofar as the “real” is not identical to itself.

Indeed, as de Certeau implies, the non-identity of these terms, both in relation to each other and within themselves, is the very condition for writing histories of rhetoric. If there was not a certain spacing between these terms, and therefore a deferral of any final historical meaning, then the “real” would give itself to be known, as such, beyond any mediating “discourse.” There would then be no need to undertake the work of historiography.

From Biesecker’s perspective, however, the work of historiography—which is, as de Certeau suggests, the work of smoothing out the differential rupture between the

“real” and “discourse”—is precisely what is necessary to produce any historical claims to

“truth.” She writes: “The transitory character of one’s choice of foundational terms is precisely that which any text cannot admit if it is going to make anything like ‘truth’ appear” (120-21). Any text, including any revisionary or traditional historical text, can therefore only point to the “truth” of an historical as such insofar as the text itself it works to conceal the transitory nature of both the “real” and “discourse.” For Biesecker, as for Derrida, “the divisiveness of that ‘originating’ [non-identity of the sign] is, so to

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speak, covered over or…finessed into a unity by the writing and speaking. In fact,” she notes, “the finessing of the non-identical into an identity is…precisely the activity that makes signification happen” (120). However, and finally, the divided nature of the text cannot help but expose itself; as Biesecker makes clear, any text necessarily performs its own non-identity and provisionality, “despite all efforts to conceal it” behind the as such, or the “truth” that the text performatively institutes. The task of deconstruction, as

Derrida might say, is precisely to trace the movement of that involuntary disclosure, by which the text functions to deconstruct itself.

In terms of our present discussion, I would note that feminist performative figures, like any text, comes to produce historical meaning through exactly this movement of différance. And indeed, as I have wanted to show, these performative figures may represent particularly useful sites for tracing this movement, and for showing how feminist historical discourse is produced by its finessing of the irreducible spacing between the “real” and “discourse,” between the as such and the as if. I would argue that the tracing of this finessing movement, which again cannot help but expose itself in the text, represents an ethical imperative for feminist historian and historiographers of rhetoric. It is this ethical imperative that I will discuss in the remainder of these concluding remarks.

Spaces That Haunt

I have been trying to demonstrate that, while my account of the history of feminist historiographical methodologies appears to conform to many of the conventions of traditional historical writing, in fact, at every turn, my discourse functions to deconstruct itself. Here, I continue to trace that deconstructive movement

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through, as Joshua Gunn would say, an “idiom of haunting,” or of “hauntology” (see

“Mourning Humanism,” “Mourning Speech,” “On Recording”). Drawing upon the work of both Gunn and Michelle Ballif, both of whom investigate the ways in which texts, performances, and language in general is “haunted” by, as Ballif would say, “the impossible possibility of the event” (“Writing the Event”), I suggest a hauntological approach to reading feminist methodological discourse.

To be clear, such an approach would be distinct from any development of a performative methodological figure, for example, the figure of haunting. Indeed, in my view, “haunting” or “hauntology” is precisely that which cannot be appropriated by any gesture of signification, either constative or performative—both the identity of what haunts, and the dis-identifying experience of being haunted stubbornly and necessarily resist the representational demands associated with any legible historical discourse. As

Gunn writes, “Haunting…suggests much more than a tidy critical protocol” (“Mourning

Speech” 94). He expands on this idea in “On Recording Performance,” where he responds to performance studies scholars Benjamin D. Powell and Tracy Stephenson

Shaffer: “working-through the performative idiom as a hauntology does not necessarily result in an (un)onto-epistemological ‘methodology’ that enables one to adjudicate who or what is sufficiently ‘haunted’” (25). Gunn advances this claim in order to trouble

Powell and Shaffer’s suggestion of “haunting” as a prescriptive methodological position.

“It seems odd,” he writes, “that a manifesto about hauntological performance ‘requires,’

‘demands,’ and ‘dictates’ scholars, performers, and audiences to be and think in predefined ways” (26). Indeed. This is why I would resist even a performative methodological discourse of “haunting”: insofar as the performative is necessarily

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subjects to certain prescriptions, conventions, and “conventional fictions,” the performative is precisely what would foreclose any true experience of being haunted, in the Derridean sense.

If I insist, therefore, upon resisting this facile appropriation of haunting as historiographical methodology, then what is the use of a “hauntological” reading of feminist methodological discourse? As I have just suggested, despite its unsuitability as a methodology in its own right, the idiom of haunting, or “hauntology” nevertheless provides a value way for us to read and deconstruct existing feminist methodological discourse so as to leave open spaces in which “the event”—as arrivant, or as spectre— might befall histories of rhetoric. And indeed, feminist methodological discourse, as symptomatic of the structure of language in general, is already marked, and even constituted, by spaces that haunt. Or perhaps, spaces that, if rigorously left open by certain deconstructive tracings, might haunt our received feminist histories by becoming haunted. As I have already mentioned in my discussion of Biesecker, and as

Ballif makes more clear, these spaces that haunt consist in the “spacing” of signs within a radically open and indeterminate linguistic (non)context. Citing Derrida’s essay on

“Différance,” Ballif re-explains the effect of this spacing:

To rehearse what is no doubt familiar: in his essay “Différance,” Derrida

demonstrates that the impossibility of a sign to be self-present to itself is the very

condition of its possibility to signify at all. As Ferdinand de Saussure explains in

the Course in General Linguistics, signs have no positive value; they have meaning

only insofar as they differ from every other sign in a system. Hence, a sign’s

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meaning is a function of its nonpresent absence (“spacing”). (“Regarding” 458, my

emphasis)

Spacing, as the “nonpresent absence” of meaning, suggests the idiom of haunting. After all, as Ballif writes, death (of the/an other, of truth as such) is also constituted as an absence, “but as a nonpresent absence and as a nonpresent but also nonabsent remainder—as spectral” (458). The differential spacing of signs, as well as the space of non-identity within the sign itself, perhaps points us, then, toward spaces that haunt our histories of rhetoric. Again, spacing—as the “nonpresent absence” of meaning, or as the spectre—cannot be instrumentalized according to any historiographical methodological program or logic. It can, however, and as Biesecker has suggested, be read and traced as the movement by which any text deconstructs itself. Indeed, insofar as we can conceive of “holding open a space” for the arrival of the other, or of the spectre, this would involve, as Biesecker says, a rigorous (deconstructionist) project of laying bare the processes by which the spacing, or “nonabsent presence,” of textual signs is “finessed” or

“concealed” in order to give ground to meaning.

It is this project that I have wanted to undertake in the preceding chapters, particularly where I have shown how, in each of the feminist performative figures I examined, the collapse of the performative as if into a constative representational demand forecloses the impossible possibility of “writing the event.” I argued that, on the one hand, the collapse of the distinction between the as if and the as such is necessary for anything like historical meaning to emerge; and yet, on the other hand, I suggested that this collapse also prevents the arrival of “the event,” the “radically other,” the spectre that is entirely beyond the representation grasp of either constative or

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performative historical rhetoric. If we are to be “hauntological” historiographers, we would need to be attentive to the spaces (and spacings) that haunt our received histories. To do so, as Derrida, Ballif, and Gunn would all certainly agree, represents an ethical imperative to welcome, in the mode of a “pure hospitality,” “the wholly other…the radical alterity that precedes and exceeds any representative order, that never appears as such (“Regarding” 457), absolutely and without laws, expectation, convention, or even the “conventional fictions” that attend the performative utterance.

A Final Word on Becoming Haunted Historiographers

While the ethical imperative to hold open spaces that haunt is an imperative that attends all historical discourse, and all discourse in general, I would argue that this imperative is particularly relevant to feminist historians of rhetoric.

Of course, many feminist scholars in the field will want to resist this imperative, which is also, as I have said, an imperative to deconstruct. One reason for resisting this ethical imperative might be to avoid re-opening painful methodological debates and discussions, and thereby to “keep the peace” amongst feminist historians and historiographers. This perspective is represented by C. Jan Swearingen who, during the first octolog panel, “The Politics of Historiography,” could “barely [disguise] her exhaustion with the whole project”: “Polarization begets polarization,” she laments.

“Confrontation should be a last resort. No one wins wars—or revolutions—because when one side wins, everyone loses in the end” (qtd. in Crowley 5). Another reason for resisting the ethical imperative of deconstruction might be due to a general skepticism amongst contemporary feminist scholars toward anti-foundational methodologies, and toward deconstruction in particular. While, in my view, the bulk of these objections

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misread deconstruction as a kind of obscurantist relativism, this skepticism nevertheless makes its way into feminist historiographies of rhetoric, often under the name of “theory.” 39

Even feminist historians of rhetoric who would resist the deconstructionist approach, however, would likely recognize a more general methodological imperative to be attentive to historical exclusions, particularly when those who are excluded from histories belong to communities that remain disenfranchised from contemporary institutions, culture, and politics. Further, these historians would also likely accede to an even more general imperative that feminist histories of rhetoric ought to, as Andrea

Lunsford has written, “interrupt the seamless narrative” of traditional histories of rhetoric (“On Reclaiming” 6). More recently, Jessica Enoch has echoed this demand, writing: “To challenge and revise the rhetorical tradition—this phrase captures the prevailing exigencies for feminist historiography in rhetoric” (“Releasing” 58). These descriptions and definitions of feminist revisionary historiography show the extent to which feminist methodologies frame their task in terms of “challenge,” “interruption,” and “revision”—terms that might just as easily be used to frame the task of deconstruction, as “hauntological historiography” (Ballif, “Historiography” 142).

To hold open the spaces that haunt feminist histories of rhetoric asks that we consider writing histories of rhetoric, not in the mode of an as such, or even of a performative as if, but rather by resisting altogether the “representational demand” instituted by the “as.” We are called, that is, to consider a mode of writing history as a

39 The feminist objections to deconstruction are too many and diverse to review here. For a more thoroughgoing approach to this question, I would direct readers to Kate Nash’s helpful essay, “The Feminist Production of Knowledge: Is Deconstruction a Practice for Women?”.

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perhaps: “There is no future and no relation to the coming of the event [or of the

“radically other,” or of the spectre] without the experience of the ‘perhaps’” (Derrida,

“University” 235). Perhaps, therefore we might begin to think, research, and write histories in more hospitable ways, which would further call us to affirm the arrival of the spectre, this impossibly possible experience of haunting, without condition. As Ballif writes, “[a double affirmation, a “yes” before the “yes”] characterizes ‘pure hospitality,’ acknowledging the aporia between one and the other, acknowledging that one never resolves or absolves the absolute responsibility one has for the ‘wholly other’

(“Regarding” 457). In this way, she writes elsewhere:

A hauntological historiography would dedicate itself to radical singularity—by

refusing to put rhetoric under the ‘logic of an emblem,’ or to erase its singularity

to a ‘paradigm.’ The infinite responsibility is to live (with) this radical

singularity—that which is murdered/repressed/excluded under the banner of a

‘grand’ narrative, or even in a ‘petit’ narrative. (“Historiography” 142)

A hauntological historiography, in other words, is a mode of response—what Diane

Davis would call a “response-ability”—that would respond to the call of the other, of the spectre, and that would receive this “wholly other” without convention, and without submitting it to even the benevolent representational logics of feminist revisionary historiography.

A “pure” hospitality, as a figure of openness to “the event” and to the spectral haunting of our histories, remains only an impossible possibility. But this does not mean that Derrida’s ethical imperative is without significance for study in feminist histories of rhetoric. In all that has come before, I have wanted to demonstrate what it might look

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like to trace the spaces that haunt feminist histories of rhetoric—the spaces that are covered over by the representational demands of the as such. If there is a prescription for future scholarship that would build on this model (but already, in entering the realm of prescriptions and models, we foreclose any ethical response to the arrival of the spectre), it would be to resume a rigorous engagement with feminist methodological discourse and to lay bare textual moments where “spacing”—which is also, again, the space of what haunts—is exposed. It is in these moments where we glimpse, as Ballif says, a “historiography to come.”

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