WHO SAID WHAT: SUBJECT POSITIONS, RHETORICAL STRATEGIES AND GOOD FAITH

Communication Studies, Winter 2003 by Anton, Corey, Peterson, Valerie V

Persuasion is part of a broader territory of influence than simply argumentative discourse. However, this essay focuses primarily on arguments and situations characterized by and/or as arguments. It is concerned with the relevance of argument to traditional, public, political rhetoric and the pervasiveness of argument in the everyday lives of individuals. Its purpose is primarily explanatory, foregrounding and highlighting the use of appeals to identity and their impact. Beyond their application in a wide variety of argumentative settings, ideas explored here also are applicable to the understanding and analysis of other symbolic/persuasive contexts e.g., narratives, role models, and visual communication.

Subject and Identity: An Overview

Questions about what it is to be a "human" and what it is to be a "citizen" have been around for centuries, but questions about "subjects" and "identities" are a more recent phenomenon. In particular, cultural studies of the last thirty years or so, broadly understood to include a variety of perspectives on power and the politics of identity, have addressed questions of subjects and identities most directly. In general, questions about subjectivity are questions about how a person becomes a person and the condition of being a person, that is, how a person is and is made a subject by being subjected to their social, cultural, and natural environments. Questions about identity refer more directly to a person's self-image (self-identity) and/or their image in the eyes of others (social or cultural identity). Key concepts relating to subjects and identities are essentialism, coherence, language, and agency.

Essentialism assumes there is some underlying identity to a person, a core or true self; anti-essentialism denies such a possibility. The Enlightenment or Cartesian subject is an example of an essential subject. Persons are conceptualized as unique and unified rational agents (Hall, 1992, p. 275). The postmodern subject, in contrast, is understood of as anti-essentialist. Subjects are decentered, that is, without a core or "true" self (Lyotard, 1992). Marxism, feminism, race theory, queer theory psychoanalysis, and theories of language and how it participates in the development and management of persons have all contributed to this understanding of the decentered self.

In relation to the critical perspectives mentioned above, women's movements provide a useful illustration of how subjects and identities prove themselves decentered. Within the first recognized women's movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s, differences of identity and perspective amongst "women" became apparent along the lines of race, class, and religion (Cott, 1987). Some women promoted temperance and suffrage as a way to support and enhance the traditional patriarchal nuclear family. Others challenged existing traditions with arguments about employment and "free love." Black women, largely barred from white organizations, drew connections between women's oppression and racism and tried to fight both. During the second wave of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, differences of identity and perspective appeared again. Middle-class, heterosexual, white feminists were accused of pushing their agenda at the expense of poorer women, lesbians, and women of color (King, 1994). In both cases, it became clear that despite sharing some biological qualities, women did not necessarily also share cultural and/or political interests. Even distinctions between sex and gender separating the essentially biological (female) from the essentially cultural (woman/feminine) failed because biology was found to be as corrupted by language as culture (Butler, 1993). Neither could be distilled into a "pure" identity applicable across other differences. Dilemmas caused by the recognition of differences and the impossibility of distilling essential identities led feminists and others who tried negotiating the challenges of identity politics to posit the subject as decentered-pulled in many directions, fractured, and multiple.