Last night a very old friend called me to tell me he had found Jesus. Or more accurately, I called him in response to a text he had sent me two days before, following up on another unanswered text he’d sent me the previous week. So maybe he didn’t really just want to tell me he had found Jesus – or maybe he had been wanting to tell me for over a week. Before dropping the J bomb, he recounted a few other conversations he’d been having over the past several days with other old friends of ours about the question of faith, so it’s entirely possible that he had either been working up to this point for some time or rehearsing his declaration for just as long. Because he confessed that he had never declared his faith to anyone before as he did to me last night on the phone, however, I’ll assume the former. I told him that I respected and admired his commitment, particularly if he can take it up and make of it a life, to quote Lincoln, "touched . . . by the better angels of our nature."
I think my friend’s declaration of faith was intended not only to galvanize that identity but to evangelize, as he must have known me to be much too skeptical to preemptively concur or be swayed likewise, and in that recognition I also detected a kind of mischievous testing of his own faith – as if he knew that by calling me he would encounter a challenge. And so he pursued his rationalization further until I felt I could no longer agree with qualification but point out the radical divergences between his philosophy and my own. So after clarifying that I could not accept the existence of a benevolent deity who had conceived of a world wherein suffering existed – regardless of the merits of free will – and qualifying that I had not ruled out the possibility that such a deity exists, but rather choose not to validate it in the way one refuses to recognize a child throwing a temper tantrum – I explained my more provisional understanding of the existence of god as inseparable from our creative and pragmatic capacity: if god is everything, then god is also colored by our capacity to imagine god, so that god might be love but is also our incapacity to love completely. If we are an intolerable, warring people, then god will be an intolerable, warring god. If we are an oppressed people, then god will be a rescuer of the oppressed. Etc. God, then, is a measure of our creative potential to imagine the actualization of our species’ maximum potential. In other words, through our understanding of god, we create ourselves in the image of our own potential.
This, in turn, raises important questions about imaginative potential directly related to neosophistic rhetoric and what we hope it will accomplish. At the foundation of a conscious exercise of this potential is the Gorgianic notion that “logos is not a representation of the external, but the external becomes the signifier of logos” (B3.85). How liberating we might at first find this construction to be, but ultimately we are still constrained by our own imaginative potentials, which are constrained by logos, which is constrained by our experience of the external world with all its social relations. And those relations still appear to operate within a binary system of oppressor/oppressed.
Operating within such a binary is to operate on the oppressor’s terms. Bruce McComiskey adopts Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms strategies and tactics to distinguish between the oppressor’s ideological paradigm (strategy) and the attempts made by the oppressed to subvert that paradigm through postmodern epideictic rhetoric, what McComiskey coins graffitic immemorial discourse. The example McComiskey offers is the Darwin fish, which ironizes the Christian Icthys by the addition of feet, which in turn is ironized by Christians with the addition of a larger fish labeled “TRUTH” devouring the Darwin fish. The point is, this kind of tactical subversion might place the oppressed in a temporary role of power, but it leaves the provoking oppressive ideology intact. Martin Luther King, Jr, proclaimed in Stride toward Freedom, “A voice echoes through time saying to every potential Peter, ‘Put up your sword.’” But that voice doesn’t clearly articulate what to do next. King recognized that “to accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system,” but even Jesus got frustrated enough to react to the presence of the moneylenders in the temple by turning their tables over and physically ejecting them from the premises. That lesson appears to teach us that sometimes, such tactics of inverting the binary are all the oppressed have. But King rejected this lesson in favor of a notion of nonviolent resistance characterized by Christ’s more nuanced final act of rebellion.
Susan Jarratt relates to the problem of feminism on similar terms when she admits that in a tactical approach, “Each individual must agonistically take sides with the full knowledge that any position involves unpalatable political choices, acts of exclusion.” But she looks for hints of a more strategic response in the writing of Cixous: “Because she envisions a possible future in which difference is not tied ontologically to sex, her practice can be described as strategic rather than essentialist.” But it’s fair to wonder whether Cixous can ever really do anything more than “[attempt] to undo [hegemonic discourse] in an act of resistance and subversion.” Victor Vitanza might claim she is successful. His hope for the Third Sophistic is that through an act of affirmative (strategic) rather than negative (tactical) deconstruction, the rhetorician can explode the old hegemonic binaries of an oppressive logos. It’s possible that this is already happening, but its success is limited by our capacity to recognize it, internalize it, and act upon it.
Long before Jarratt, McComiskey or de Certeau were using the terms tactical and strategic to describe the inversion/explosion of binaries, American poet Thomas McGrath was using the terms to describe the same activity of subverting the oppressor on the oppressor's own terms through ironic or straightforward, pithy Brechtian doggerel and pamphleteering on the one hand, and on the other, a complete reimagining of the terms of engagement – an explosion of the binary. Mcgrath argued that one shouldn’t rely solely on one or the other – that there was a time and a place for both. His shorter poems, such as those included in Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesy, are tactical; his epic of 20th century leftist resistance in America, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, strategic, if such strategy is at all humanly possible.
The trouble with the strategic approach is that we don’t know we’re capable of it until we’ve done it. We learn by doing. Our imaginations evolve by struggling toward the possibility of imagining. And all the while we might be grasping at straws. All the while we might be chasing false idols, looking for evidence that the promised land is closer than before when really we’re still stuck in the same old Platonic quagmire, chasing after an ideal that can’t ever really exist. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing anyway. Maybe one constraint of the strategic approach is that the strategy forever continues to unfold in front of us as we implement it. And a strategy isn’t successful unless it informs the grand strategy of existence, enacts a paradigm shift, transforms reality.
At the center of this distinction between tactical and strategic is I think the primary crux of a sophistic/pragmatic approach to rhetoric and to life, because it raises questions about what is possible. If we’re limited forever by binaries, then we ought to find a way to swim in the pond to which our swimming has been relegated. But if the limit is only our vision, and the horizon is ever extending into the distance, then, well, that changes everything.
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