Читать книгу Narcissism and the Literary Libido - Marshall W. Alcorn Jr. - Страница 13

If identification is the key to persuasion, then any response to human character is a formidable rhetorical power. This response, as many argumentation theorists see it, is not something behind the force of an argument; it is the force of an argument. This chapter attempts to clarify this claim and support it in detail.

If ethos refers to the manner in which the character of the speaker or writer is featured in persuasive activity, then we must examine how character can be fashioned by language to serve a rhetorical function in a text. Second, we must examine, at the most fundamental level possible, the relationships between language and human character. This examination of relationships between human character and language is crucial to the larger argument of this book. Rhetoric, as I argue, is fundamentally concerned with the way self-structures participate in, and become reformed by, verbal structures.

What is self-structure? How is it related to a “self”? Unfortunately, contemporary discussion of relationships between language and the self is often confined within the assumptions and parameters of two models: the traditional Aristotelian theory of ethos and the current poststructuralist account of intertextuality. Neither of these models of character understand self-structure. Both lack the theoretical flexibility needed for an adequate explanation of rhetoric.

Classical consideration of ethos frequently links three separate ideas closely together: the development of self, the development of ethos, and the development of ethical habits. The classical message seems to be that people are the roles they habitually play. Rhetoricians, for both moral and practical reasons, are instructed to learn “good,” or “ethical,” roles. Quintilian argues that the good orator should be “a good man [woman]; and consequently we demand of him [her] not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellence of character as well.”³ This quotation works in two ways. First, Quintilian is exhorting his reader: “Be a good man [woman].” Second, Quintilian is making what he takes to be a factual statement: “A good rhetorician is a good man [woman].” Taken together, these two messages implicitly define the self. A “person” is what he or she strives and learns to be. As a “person” learns and repeatedly plays a role (a “good” role, it is assumed), he or she becomes the person embodied by that role. The self is thus an effect of learning, a coherent behavioral role acquired through repeated performances.

This idea of the self may be popular because it has flattering implications for teachers of rhetoric. In a recent article on ethos, for example, S. Michael Halloran supports the claim that “habituation” is the means by which both character and ethos develop. Because Aristotle’s theory of learning seems intuitively correct, Halloran urges teachers to give students training in “rhetorical action” and to encourage the interaction between rhetorical training and self-development. Students will develop character, Halloran argues, by becoming educated through rhetorical models:

If ethos is manifested in rhetorical action, and if ethos is formed by choosing ethical modes of action, it follows that educating a person in rhetorical action, schooling him [her] in proper rhetorical habits, is a means of forming his [her] character.⁴

This image of the self, common among rhetoricians, may be partly true, but it is an overly simple perspective distorting the complex relations existing between rhetoric and self-structures.

Poststructuralists see the self very differently from Halloran: The self is not a freely chosen social role, but a linguistic accident. Selves do not emerge as they choose to do things with rhetoric; rather, rhetoric continually does things to selves. Selves are not creative agents working within the inner core of the rhetorical process; instead, selves are the effects of rhetoric, a sort of epiphenomena constituted by an interplay of social, political, and linguistic forces. There is no inner entity, the self, that chooses its character. Instead, the self reflects the particular character of larger social forces that determine its nature and movement.

In addition, the self is not something that needs constancy or consistency over time. Different social situations trigger different self-structures ; it is a mistake to assume that there is an inner core to the self that somehow grounds the various roles assumed by the self. Paul Smith, a theorist describing the implications of certain Lacanian and Althusserian ideas, suggests that a person can be “conceived as a colligation of multifarious and multiform subject-positions situated along, but not united by, temporal experience.”⁵ Such a self is little more than a simple collector of random and diverse exposure to social interaction. Memory and “character” play no role in giving a characteristic “shape” to self experience.

Not all Aristotelian and poststructuralist perspectives on the self are as tenaciously reductive as I have described. But as these models are disseminated in a formulaic manner, they pose serious limitations to any coherent theory of ethos. Both models fail to recognize the rhetorical complexity of the human structures they seek to explain. The Aristotelian view envisions an overly strong self able to choose freely its own nature, able to become whatever model it can imagine. Such a notion is a pleasurable and at times useful fantasy, but it is unable to account for the limitations of human nature—those moments when humans encounter their lack of freedom, their inability to be and do what they imagine. The poststructuralist view emphasizes the self’s lack of freedom, but in doing so it imagines an overly weak self. A self composed entirely of collected social discourse is infinitely plastic. It conforms effortlessly to textual influence, changes easily and constantly, and offers no determined or “characteristic” resistance to the discourses that assault it. This view of the self helps us appreciate the social determination of selfhood, but it implies that the self, once formed, has no organized and enduring inner structure. The traditional and poststructuralist accounts of the self are useful for some purposes, but they are not particularly useful for a theory of ethos.

I describe ethos as a relationship existing between the discourse structures of selves and the discourse structure of “texts.” Before I develop my argument, however, I want to clarify my claims in relation to the theoretical problems I have just raised. Aspects of my argument rely on assumptions antithetical to both traditional and poststructuralist accounts of the self. Rather than simply revealing these assumptions in the course of the argument, I want to argue in advance for their validity. I want to challenge traditional assumptions by arguing that the self is not something universal, but something deeply crafted by history and changing social formations. Second, however, I want to make it clear that my own position is not that of a poststructuralist. I want to challenge poststructuralist assumptions by suggesting that whereas various forms of the self change over time, the particular selves formed within particular historical conditions have relatively stable self-structures.

Historical perspectives on the self are important because too often we consider the self a stable entity that does not change over time. This conditions us to assume that all different perspectives on the self reflect different ideas about one and the same thing. It may well be, however, that there are many distinctly different socially conditioned versions of the self. We often think of ethos as a concept defining a single stable relation between language and the self. But if the nature of both language and the self undergo historical change, then it must follow that ethos also undergoes historical change. The concept of ethos, thus, should not be imagined as some fixed reality approached by different perspectives, but as something assuming different shapes and structures over time.

Our interest in Aristotle’s concept of ethos should reflect not only an interest in his understanding of the concept, but an interest as well in the social and psychological context that made the concept meaningful for him. Numerous scholars have increased our awareness of the historical and social context of Aristotle’s ideas. Less has been done to describe the particular historical character of the ancient Greek self. Of course, it is impossible to recover a complete description of the historically situated Greek self. Nonetheless, we need to consider the information available, seeking to understand the differences between ancient Greek and modern selves. In an essay in The Identities of Persons, Amelie Rorty offers help by providing a broad overview of the kinds of concerns an historical consideration of ethos should engage.

Rorty traces the historical changes in four different literary concepts of the self. These literary concepts, Rorty argues, reflect not simply changes in the way we imagine selves, but changes in the phenomenon itself. She names these different entities the “character,” the “person,” the “self,” and the “individual.” In unreflective moments we describe all these differently structured entities as the self.

The early Greek world, Rorty suggests, imagined people as “characters.”⁶ Characters have a certain coherency at the level of behavior, but they have little psychological inwardness that takes responsibility for behavior. Characters

are the predictable and reliable manifestations of their dispositions; and it is by these dispositions that they are identified. Their natures form their responses to experiences, rather than being formed by them. Nor do characters have identity crises; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. Dispositional traits form an interlocking pattern, at best mutually supportive but sometimes tensed and conflicted. There is no presumption of a core that owns these dispositions.⁷

The concept “character” suggests a primitive structure of self-definition. Characters do not grow from experience; they are simply “manifestations” of “dispositions.” Rorty’s point is not simply that characters are primitive notions of selves, but that there is a reciprocal relation between what people really are and what other people imagine them to be. Cultures that imagine people as characters, because they have less demanding social expectations than other cultures, create different kinds of people. Characters have less “inner discipline.” Culture and society neither expect nor create the psychological structures that provide such discipline.

More complex cultures begin to define social roles in terms of the “person.”⁸ The person evolves primarily in a society with a more elaborate legal system. Because laws require stricter social roles, the person is given impetus to be more responsible than the character, to conform more painstakingly to publicly approved roles. Rorty explains:

The person . . . comes to stand behind his [her] roles, to select them and to be judged by his [her] choices and his [her] capacities to act out his [her] personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama. The person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Only when a legal system has abandoned clan or family responsibility, and individuals are seen as primary agents, does the class of persons coincide with the class of biological individual human beings.⁹

Persons are more complex entities than characters. They facilitate smoother social interaction because they are predictable; they are not chaotic or undisciplined eddies of emotion held together by virtue of one’s name.

In many respects Rorty’s person resembles Aristotle’s self. This self has coherence but not self-division (that is, it is defined neither by an experience of inner conflict nor by an awareness of plural inner voices—both defining features of the “modern self”). Also, when Aristotle says that “we believe good men more fully and more readily than others,” he seems to imagine ethos as some positive quality fully identified with the speaker’s character.¹⁰ Ethos achieves authority by virtue of acting out a particular role (a trusted “person”); ethos is not a complex and fully particularized experience produced by the distinctive self-structure of a fully individualized speaker. It is as if, for Aristotle, character does not itself trigger a distinctive emotional response in an audience. For Aristotle, in fact, the rhetor’s ability to manipulate an audience’s emotion is not considered as ethos (an expression of character) but as pathos, an argument consciously contrived in order to appeal to emotion. Consequently, in Aristotle there is a curiously sharp and unprofitable theoretical separation between a speaker’s real person and the emotions that speaker can use to move an audience. In Aristotle’s discussion of pathos human character does not reveal in a rhetorically effective manner the real emotion it “contains”; instead speakers, quite independently of their own feelings, consciously and purposefully direct words toward another’s emotion.

To appreciate further how Aristotle’s limited concept of the self restricts his understanding of ethos, we should consider Rorty’s other categories of selfhood. The person is the characteristic mode of self that thrives before the advent of capitalism and social mobility. Capitalism provides new conditions that change the rules in the game of social status. And in changing the rules of this game, it contributes to the change of the self. As the self gains status through the acquisition of money and property, the “person” gives way to the “self” per se.¹¹”Selves” develop, Rorty says, as individuals identify with their ownership of property, not with their roles. The evolution of a self identified with property allows the “self” a certain freedom. Selves transcend the limitation of proper public roles and become able to assume various roles:

When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self. At first, the primary possession is that of land, and a person of substance is one of the landed gentry. But when a man’s industry determines whether he is landed, the story of men’s lives are told by their achievements rather than by their descent. The story of fulfilled ambition is shaped by an individual’s capacity to amass goods, by the extent of his properties.¹²

Capitalism, by changing social and economic relationships, therefore changes the shape of selfhood. As a new culture evolves, people both expand their ability to play roles and grant socially legitimate entitlement to other people who can play a multitude of roles in culturally approved ways.

In time, new social and cultural forces encourage a different version of selfhood. The self of early capitalism gives way to the modern “individual”:

From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves—the divergence of practice from ideological commitments—comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.

Individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. . . .

Because they are defined by their freedom, they no longer choose from their natures but choose their identities. But since such choice is itself ungrounded, they are simply the act of choosing.¹³

The last category of self, the individual, gives Rorty’s argument a strikingly evolutionary cast. The essay thus describes a self evolving by gaining greater ontological freedom from, and control of, various forms of experience.

Characters simply react to experience. They have a measure of freedom, because their lack of “self-discipline” enables them to respond “freely” to any event. But in merely reacting to experience they do not learn from it; they are forced to repeat themselves in all they do. Persons, in contrast, have self-structures that mediate between experience and personality. The social roles given to persons allow them to take “positions” in relation to experience; they are not determined by the immediate emotional power of the experience. Selves have more freedom than persons, and they can play various roles. Individuals, finally, seem to have the most freedom. They have no core being, and are free from all constraints to choose their own “inner” being.

We can imagine, from Rorty’s discussion, a kind of economy in the change or evolution of the self whereby desire, rhetoric, ideology, and social structure interact to produce the various real forms the self can take. These various agencies change as they adapt and respond to each other in their competition for power. And as they change in order to compete more successfully for power, they formulate social conditions that require evermore inventive changes and responses to change. Such a situation, perhaps, is most characteristic of contemporary life.

Rorty’s analysis of the self should not be taken as a definitive description of the evolution of the concept of the self. Many of her terms appear to be overly idealized abstractions. Clearly, more precise work needs to be done on the relationship between social reality and literary representation. The historical difference among these categories of selfhood may also be less important than Rorty suggests. One mode of self may be prominent in a certain historical period, but all modes might exist in any one period. We might imagine, also, that a culture’s discourse promotes complex relationships between rhetorical illusions that sustain conceptualizations of the self and real self-structures that are in part produced by rhetorical illusions.

Rorty’s work may be inaccurate, but it encourages us to acknowledge that different cultures not only imagine and define selves differently but also formulate social and cultural conditions that allow for the creation of disparate selves. These varied self-structures reflect distinct models of libidinal organization and utilize diversely structured self-components to organize and regulate desire. By providing for different organizations of self-components, cultures generate different strategies for structuring selves.

Social history plays a role in determining self-organization, but the individual history of a particular subjectivity also plays a powerful role in determining self-organization. While culture provides models for self-structure, selves also develop these models according to the particular workings of self-functions. Different self-structures, for example, are the consequence of particular selves responding to the cues of culture. Particular selves therefore internalize unique social ideals, unique self-images, and uniquely encountered particular role models. The individual self thus plays its own role in the development of self-structure at the same time that this role responds to the larger system of a particular culture. In all cases, the social rewards provided by a culture regulate those libidinal investments that contribute to a suitable self-structure and within each social context, there develops a reciprocal relation between the fictional self a culture imagines and the real shape of a particular lived self-structure.

“We are different entities,” Rorty argues, as we conceive ourselves in light of different concepts of the self “our powers of actions are different, our relations to one another, our properties and proprieties, our characteristic successes and defeats, our conceptions of society’s proper strictures and freedoms will vary with our conception of ourselves as characters, persons, selves, individuals.”¹⁴ Rhetoricians will readily see that Rorty’s remarks are not simply remarks about selves. They are remarks about the nature of ethos. They implicitly suggest that ethos, as a concept, should describe relationships between differing ideas of the self and differing abilities of selves to act rhetorically in a society.

When considering the self, we must examine the various historical determinations brought to the concept. Historical consideration of the self demonstrates how models of selfhood have enormous flexibility and fluidity as the self responds to changing social conditions. Too often, however, this useful perspective on the self suggests that a particular self formed by social conditions has the same fluidity and flexibility that self-structure itself shows over centuries of change. The self, as an abstract psychological structure, indeed has enormous fluidity, but a particular self does not have the same fluidity. As a result of its relatively constant and particular organization of components, a particular individual self is much more stable in structure than that same abstract entity “the self,” considered in terms of its historical permutations.

Scholars who take an historical or sociological perspective on the self see fluidity in self-structure as a result of self-structure changing from one generation to the next. This fluidity changing across generational lines is quite different from the fluidity within the self-structure of a particular self. History and social interaction give shape to selves, but these forces do not fully explain how particular and discrete self-structures interact with particular structures of language. To understand the rhetorical nature of a particular self, we must shift from an historical to a psychoanalytic perspective.

A particular self is not, as in poststructuralist terms, a simple, random, and constantly changing collection of texts shaped by historical forces. A particular self is not an infinitely changing collection of voices housed within a biological organism. It is a relatively stable organization of voices. Although we need not adopt the various models of the self-structure advocated by psychoanalysis, if we are sensitive to the nature of rhetoric we should acknowledge that the self has a relatively stable inner organization. Indeed, the idea of rhetoric requires a theory of a relatively stable self-structure.

The different modes of the self vary enormously according to time and place, but each self seems to have a distinctive character—a characteristic self-structure—that gives it a distinctive quality. Many poststructuralist theorists will find this claim about self-structure unsettling. New theories of language make it difficult to see the self in terms of stability, agency, or consistency—qualities we associate with self-structure. The self, thus considered, is a passive effect of language, something “subjected” to language use or a site where discourse collects. This emphasis on the self’s passivity has prompted some thinkers to argue that it is time to abandon the concept “self” altogether. Other theorists retain the concept but describe the self as “dissolved.” Jonathan Culler, paraphrasing claims made by Levi-Strauss, points out that whereas structuralist thought investigates the self, it also erases it: “As the self is broken down into component systems, deprived of its status as source and master of meaning, it comes to seem more and more like a construct: a result of systems of convention.”¹⁵ The new structuralist and poststructuralist ways of accounting for the self are useful, but they oversimplify the issues most important to rhetoric theory. They fail to grasp the self as an essentially rhetorical entity, a site of conflict in discourse organization.

Although it makes good sense to see the self as an entity composed of “component systems,” as Culler suggests, it is also important to see the self as a conflictual organization of such components. The idea of conflictually organized self-components explains how and why selves act rhetorically. It explains why selves sometimes “take in” or internalize discourse, but also sometimes resist and deflect the linguistic structures and social formations that surround them. Clearly, selves are not mere radio receptors for social discourse. They are not passive vehicles constantly animated in different patterns by the passing-through of ceaselessly changing social discourse. Selves do not become each and every socially constructed discourse formation they encounter; something within its own inner organization prompts the self to identify with certain social forms and to reject others.

In some ways the account of the self offered by Culler and others is compatible with the account of self-structure given by contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers. Theorists who maintain a lively interest in the self understand it, not in terms of some authoritatively unified and dominating ego, but (much like Culler) as poorly organized self-components that interact with variable consequences. These same theorists frequently maintain that the “voice” of the ego has no existence prior to the voice of others. The self is not some homunculus that stands outside and beyond all social interaction. Instead, the self gains “form” as it is “informed” by the speech of others. The self indeed is a function of self-components that participate in and reflect psychologically significant nodules of social discourse. But these components, although they change over time as a result of social interaction, nonetheless maintain relatively stable configurations within the self. The relative stability of these configurations allows the self to dialectically engage and resist—rather than passively submit to—social interaction.

Poststructuralist descriptions of the self and the accounts given by Kohut and Lacan, for example, differ in their emphasis on language. For most poststructuralists, the self is nothing but speech. For Kohut and Lacan, speech is central to self formation, but the human person is more than speech; it is a biological organism whose desires, goals, and ambitions are organized by linguistic structures that overlay and complicate more primordial biological and preverbal structures. The self is not just a “text”; it is an active and complex organization of libidinal investments. It is, as well, a process of disorganized organization, a moving, interacting effect of discordant self-components.

Rhetoric might be defined as a well-focused and carefully crafted strategy for changing self-organization. It seeks to participate in the modification of self-components in order to produce changes in human action or belief. As an activity, rhetoric requires discipline—strategy, organization, planning, complexity—because selves are not passive receptors of discourse. Selves do not simply adopt the discourse systems they encounter; they admire, resist, or reject discourse according to their own unique character. Selves are clearly organized by forces that are not fully disclosed in any purely linguistic analysis of the organization of language.

A properly complex understanding of the self is important for a theory of rhetoric. If the discipline of rhetoric is to have the coherency it aspires to, the self must be imagined as having a self-structure held in place by organizing principles that are responsive to the forces operating in rhetorical transactions.

Major concepts in rhetoric reflect the discipline’s longtime interest in relationships between self-structure and rhetorical structure. Style, for example, is an important rhetorical concept reflecting assumptions that rhetoricians hold in regard to the relative stability of self-structure. Style indicates a certain distinctiveness in the manner (as opposed to the content) of expression. At times this distinctiveness can refer to socially learned qualities, for example, when a writer is described as having a Romantic style. In this sense, style helps us to understand how human character is informed by social custom. Equally often, style posits a certain uniqueness of character itself. In this sense, style shows how each subject, although informed by social custom, also reformulates the patterns of social custom in distinctive ways. Ben Jonson, for example, insists that “this my style no living man shall touch.”¹⁶ In a similar fashion (but using a more theoretical vocabulary) Paul Valery argues, “Style signifies the manner in which a man [woman] expresses [her-] himself, regardless of what he [she] expresses, and it is held to reveal his [her] nature, quite apart from his [her] actual thought—for thought has no style.”¹⁷ Jane Gallop, after discussing Lacan’s interest in style, suggests that “the object of psychoanalytic study reveals itself as style.”¹⁸Style, in this case, reflects the manner in which content of any sort is appropriated by the symptoms of subjectivity.

The self has a relatively stable self-structure, and therefore a recognizable style. Rhetoricians frequently describe and analyze this property in linguistic structures produced by writers. Style is important not simply because it is a distinctive property of selves; it is important because it describes a linguistic site where self-structure, engaging social discourse, produces rhetoric. Rhetoricians examine how the style of the self is “characteristically” carried forward (consciously and unconsciously) into language to achieve rhetorical effects. Terry Eagleton emphasizes that much of Frederic Jameson’s rhetorical force derives from his personal rhetorical style. “Jameson,” he observes, “composes rather than writes his texts, and his prose . . . carries an intense libidinal charge, a burnished elegance and unruffled poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most tortuous, intractable materials.”¹⁹Although it expresses the “subjectivity” of the writer, style composes also the “subject” of sentences, and at least momentarily (and, when effective, more than momentarily), a unique subjectivity within the reader.

Other facets of rhetorical study imply a similar co-responsive relationship between self-structure and rhetorical language. Because selves respond to rhetorical discourse in complicated patterns of pleasure, censorship, attention, and belief, rhetorical activity attempts to control and direct these complex interwoven patterns of response. When speakers prepare speeches, for example, they typically seek to learn the attitudes, feelings, and values of their audience in order to promote certain intended rhetorical effects. Audiences, rhetoricians argue, can be most easily moved when they are flattered by a speaker who seems to promote their own values. Flattery is not a mere ornamental device. As Burke argues, “Persuasion by flattery is but a special case of persuasion in general.”²⁰ This assumption indicates something important about rhetorical transactions: Rhetorical structures work best when they “fit into” or “work on” psychological structures already in place.

The beliefs of an audience are important to know because we assume that the self, as a result of deeply held beliefs, can resist rhetorical manipulation. Real people, unlike the passive creatures often conceived by structuralist theory, are not easily “subjected” to rhetorical effects of language. Real people resist that which they sense to be “rhetoric.” The self seems to have a relatively stable structure that identifies with particular feelings and ideas in a predictable way, so it actively resists other opposing feelings and ideas. Rhetoricians acknowledge this fact and seek to develop rhetorical strategies that can overcome resistance.

Human value and belief—character itself—are not easily changed because of self-structure. Self-structure reflects those organizations of libidinal investment and libidinal control that define subjectivity. These organizations are durable and not easily changed. Rhetoricians, however, believe effectively planned discourse can overcome the resistance these systems have to rhetoric. When resistance is overcome, the stability of human character is an ally rather than an enemy to rhetoric.

Consider for a moment how the temporal stability of the self contributes to rhetorical effects. It seems clear that rhetoric can work—that it can have practical effects on the ways people act and behave. But what makes these effects possible? How does mere language have lasting effects on a biological organism? It must be the case that effective rhetoric is something like self-structure itself. It is not a mere collection of words and voices, not a passive structure of language; rhetoric—like self-structure—manipulates the properties of linguistic form that organize (articulate the emotional and linguistic components of) the self. Both structures, rhetoric and the self, actively employ language to organize human feeling and behavior.

Rhetorical form “works” when it operates psychological mechanisms that inform self-structure. More importantly, rhetorical form can work only when its effect survives the temporal moment of language exposure, is preserved in certain components of self-structure, and is carried forward temporally into some larger horizon of thought and planning.

For most people, human experience is not like an afternoon at the circus, a dizzy disorganized collection of momentary rides, that once ridden, are immediately left behind. Some principle organizes and focuses human experience. Self-structure is precisely such a principle. It gives meaning, focus, and organization to diverse segments of human experience. Effective rhetoric, in a similar manner, makes use of this same principle of focus and organization. Effective rhetorical transactions, like strongly remembered experiences, stand out as an ordering center for an otherwise less impressive collection of dispersed impressions. They draw disorganized elements of memory and emotion into their patterned structure. Admittedly, people are often only momentarily moved by rhetoric. But people can be affected in ways that move them to vote or act in conformity with rhetorical aims at moments much later than the time of the rhetorical experience. Effective rhetoric is not a momentary and quickly emptied thing, and this fact requires more theoretical attention. Through language, such rhetoric taps the energy that organizes self-structure. It can radically and lastingly change people’s attitudes because, much like strong experience itself, it makes use of language to build self-structure.

All these observations lead me to a simple generalization important to describing relationships between rhetoric and self-structure. There is a sense in which people change and a there is a sense in which people do not change. This assumption is essential for rhetorical theory. The self is stable enough to resist change and changeable enough to admit to rhetorical manipulation, but not so changeable as to be in constant chameleonlike response to each and every social force. Rhetoric therefore needs a theory of the self that is sufficiently complex to conceptualize these features. A theory of rhetoric needs an understanding of the self that appreciates the relative stability and instability of self-structure.