Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Ideology as rhetoric
- 2 Counter-Statement: aesthetic humanism
- 3 Permanence and Change: a biological subject of history
- 4 Attitudes toward History: the agon of history
- 5 The Philosophy of Literary Form: history without origin or telos
- 6 A Grammar of Motives: the rhetorical constitution of the subject
- 7 A Rhetoric of Motives: ideological and utopian rhetoric
- 8 The Rhetoric of Religion: history in eclipse
- Index
6 - A Grammar of Motives: the rhetorical constitution of the subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Ideology as rhetoric
- 2 Counter-Statement: aesthetic humanism
- 3 Permanence and Change: a biological subject of history
- 4 Attitudes toward History: the agon of history
- 5 The Philosophy of Literary Form: history without origin or telos
- 6 A Grammar of Motives: the rhetorical constitution of the subject
- 7 A Rhetoric of Motives: ideological and utopian rhetoric
- 8 The Rhetoric of Religion: history in eclipse
- Index
Summary
[W]e found our pre-pre-introduction actually taking shape. And this we found in the selection of our pentad, as a “final” set of terms that seemed to cluster about our thoughts about the Constitution as an “enactment.”
Burke, GM[I]deology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects.
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes… Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.
Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion”Undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts).
Ibid.GM officially inaugurates dramatism. Our chapter subtitle borrows a term from the book's longest chapter, “The Dialectic of Constitutions.” In speaking of the constitution of the subject, we modify one of Burke's statements of the task he envisioned for SM: “The Symbolic should deal with unique individuals, each its own peculiarly constructed act, or form. These unique ‘constitutions’ being capable of treatment in isolation, the Symbolic should consider them primarily in their capacity as singulars” (RM 21–22). The “unique individual” is ambiguous insofar as it can refer to the individual either as body or as the subject constructed in the rhetoric of individualism.
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- Kenneth BurkeRhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, pp. 136 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996