DANCING with the ENEMY Jane S. Sutton* & Nkanyiso Mpofu
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FIGURING RECONCILIATION: DANCING WITH THE ENEMY Jane S. Sutton* & Nkanyiso Mpofu** This essay is about fi guring “argument as dance” and one way of conceiving how to live or embody argument as such. Concretely, it displays “argument as war” alongside a road in Mississippi after a white man shoots down James Meredith as he asserts his legal right to vote. And it tells “how to” perceive the shooting as dance by turning fi rstly to the performance of dance fi gured in the beginnings of rhetoric and then secondly, setting forth demystifi ed methods and strategies of body-speech fi guring argument as dance, rather than as war, through performances of Nelson Mandela. More generally, it explores a new meaning or experience of rhetoric by explicitly conjoining two historical times, two geographies, two speakers, enemies and dancers, that are inextricably interconnected. Using a combination of description and analysis, the fi rst is a full display of three photographs picturing argument as war. The whole picture serves as a descriptive compass 2007 CanLIIDocs 14 or guide for making our way analytically through argument as war and into dance language and behavior and their interconnections to argument. The second is a retrospective discussion of the background, dancing/argumentative practices, what is called “blinking on the behalf of the enemy,” of Nelson Mandela. Overall, the strategy of reticulating political times, chronology and political spaces, geography on the one hand, and argument as war and argument as dance on the other hand is to reconcile confl icting measures and to produce a performance practice (of rhetoric) of which there is no canon. Cet article représente «l’argumentation comme danse» et présente une façon de concevoir comment éprouver et discerner ainsi l’argumentation. Concrètement, il fait voir «l’argumentation comme guerre» le long d’une route au Mississippi après qu’un homme blanc ait tiré James Meredith alors que ce dernier affi rmait son droit légal de vote. Et il relate «comment» percevoir la fusillade comme danse en se penchant d’abord sur l’exécution de danse représentée aux débuts de la rhétorique puis, en deuxième lieu, en présentant des méthodes démystifi ées et des stratégies de langage du corps qui représentent l’argumentation comme danse, plutôt que comme guerre, par le biais de prestations de Nelson Mandela. De façon plus générale, il explore un nouveau sens ou une nouvelle expérience de rhétorique en réunissant explicitement deux époques historiques, deux géographies, deux interlocuteurs, ennemis et danseurs, qui sont liés inextricablement. En utilisant une combinaison de description et d’analyse, la première est une exposition complète de trois photos qui représentent l’argumentation comme guerre. Le portrait entier sert de compas ou de guide descriptif pour frayer analytiquement un chemin à travers l’argumentation comme guerre vers le langage et le comportement de la danse et leurs liens à l’argumentation. La deuxième est une discussion rétrospective de la toile de fond, les * Associate Professor, Communication Arts and Sciences, Pennsylvania State University. ** Instructor of English, Pennsylvania State University. 292 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 2007 pratiques de danse/argumentation, ce qu’on appelle «fl ancher pour l’ennemi», de Nelson Mandela. En somme, la stratégie d’agencer les ères politiques, la chronologie et les espaces politiques, la géographie d’une part, et l’argumentation comme guerre et l’argumentation comme danse d’autre part, est de réconcilier des mesures confl ictuelles et développer une pratique d’exécution (de rhétorique) pour laquelle il n’y a pas de règle. Because you participate in the violence of all things, all of this violence is part of your debt to justice. Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric1 Never use a metaphor …which you are used to seeing in print. …These rules sound elementary and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown 2007 CanLIIDocs 14 used to writing in the style now fashionable. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)2 One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)3 I. INTRODUCTION In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates says that justice is not limited to the courts of law, and thus the penalty of injustice cannot be “stripes and death,” especially since this penalty does not always fall on the wrongdoer.4 Rather justice is located in public life, and the penalty we pay may very well be connected to the patterns we make because these patterns are what we come to resemble. In effect, humans possess the directed power to fi gure a pattern for a just society by using the resources of an art (techne) of rhetoric.5 It may seem odd to turn to rhetoric for justice since dialectic is often 1 Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric, trans. by Cinzia Sartini Blum Russell Scott Valentino and David J. Depew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) at 48. 2 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” in Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961) at 353 [Orwell, “Politics”]. 3 S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001) at 255 [Bass, Blessed]. 4 Plato, Theaetetus, trans. by H. N. Fowler, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921) at 176d-e. 5 The literature on the relation between techne and rhetoric is rich and varied and too numerous to be mentioned. At the very least, the word techne encapsulates a strong sense of rhetoric as structure and process. By using this word techne, we wish the reader will understand rhetoric not as “mere rhetoric” but as an art. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy (University Park, Pennsylvania State University, 1980) at 26 offers a succinct overview: “[t]he techne of rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, of forming belief, structures the emotive framework, which creates the tension within which words, questions that are dealt with, and actions that are discussed, acquire their passionate signifi cance” [Grassi, Rhetoric]. Vol. 25. (2) Figuring Reconciliation: Dancing with the Enemy 293 considered justice’s counterpart. Traditionally speaking, rhetoric, as defi ned by Aristotle, is the antistrophe (antistrophos, literally,“turning about”) to dialectic. A few commentators who stress the word antistrophe illuminate the relation between rhetoric and dialectic as dance, specifi cally a choral or fi gure dance of ancient Greek drama.6 The dance that commentators say is dwelling in the word antistrophe is barely visible. The warring relation between rhetoric and dialectic over justice that has lasted for more than two thousand years overshadows any dance, but not the body.7 As far back as the early days of the Athenian assembly, a use of rhetoric has been intimately connected with a use of the body. Aristotle sets aside judicial rhetoric as a mode of defending oneself and conquering the other. And he cast deliberative rhetoric as the forum for matters of war and peace. Thus images of rhetoric, body, and war are bound up by a mingling of vocabulary and by rhetorical skills being deployed to conquer and defend. If rhetoric and dialectic bear the trace of dance and if the use of rhetoric and the use of the body are intimately tied, 2007 CanLIIDocs 14 could the body of the dancer resurface? If so, could the dancer’s feet become the internal movement between participants engaged in disputation common to judicial and deliberative rhetoric? Moreover, could the agnostic (and all too often antagonistic) relation common to disputation be choreographed to make a pattern that we could resemble for a just society? It is the sense of dance embedded in antistrophe that acts as our bridge for moving back and forth between rhetoric as rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic and dialectic is the antistrophe of justice. Undoubtedly, our line of questioning contains an element of interpretative play. And why not? Johan Huizinga, in his classic work Homo Ludens, says play initiated the verbal battle or agonistic form that defi nes the law and justice as we know it today.8 He writes, “[t]he connection between playing and dancing are so close that they hardly need illustrating. It is not that dancing has something of play in it or about it, rather that it is an integral part of play. Dancing is a particular and particularly perfect form of play.”9 In effect, dance is part and parcel of the judicial form. What happened to it? The playful, according to Huizinga, was “lifted on to the plane of that sacred seriousness which every society demands for its justice….10 So play interpenetrates with disputation and with justice. It was the engine that generated a form recognized today as 6 A number of recent commentators on Rhetoric feature the relation between antistrophos and the choral ode to discuss the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. See e.g. Edward Meredith Cope, The Rhetoric of Aristotle, ed. by John Edwin Sandys, (Cambridge: W.C. Brown Reprint Library Press, 1966)[1877] vol.3` at 1; William Grimaldi,, Aristotle, Rhetoric I: A Commentary (New York: Fordham Press, 1980) at 1-2; On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. by George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) at 28-29. A sense of dance as it is articulated by antistrophe acts as conduit among rhetoric, dialectic, and justice. 7 Socrates’ discussion on the status of rhetoric as art or knack is well-known.