Rev. of Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion, by Jean Nienkamp

Jean Nienkamp begins her book Internal Rhetorics with the obvious: people talk to themselves. Of course, we all know this, but we also tend to take this fact for granted. Nienkamp's book is the first attempt to take these internal voices seriously and ask how they might have been described throughout the history of rhetoric. This is especially important because, quite often, such internal dialogue takes the form of persuasion, in that we convince ourselves of a certain mood or action. Nienkamp considers these and other provisional thoughts and moves to define internal rhetoric as what "occurs between one aspect of the self and another (e.g. among reason, emotions, and will, or among ego, superego, and id), no matter how those inner selves are seen to be generated" (x). By calling attention to what happens internally (and she notes that the word 'internal' denotes not so much an origin as a scene), Nienkamp throws into sharp relief the cultural bias towards external or public forms of rhetoric (xi). In doing so, she also suggests that internal rhetoric is central to understanding what she calls the rhetorical self. And the rhetorical self, she claims, ties into the tradition of an expansive rhetoric, which "looks at the rhetorical function of all language and symbol use rather than rhetoric as a specific genre of discourse" (2). To get to the rhetorical self, though, Nienkamp moves through a few select periods of the rhetorical tradition, considering what various thinkers have had to say about internal rhetoric.

For Nienkamp, Isocrates stands as the primary classical model for internal rhetoric, even though earlier figures like Homer had already portrayed mental divisiveness (11). Isocrates claimed in the Nicocles that the wise are those who most skillfully debate their problems in their own minds, which leads to Nienkamp's assertion that "there is a causal connection between internal rhetoric and ethical, wise behavior for Isocrates" (20). This idea is a cornerstone of the book: there is a direct connection between the capacity for inner deliberation and the ability to assess the kairos of a situation in order to take the best possible course of action (23). In this way, not only does Nienkamp make a strong case for the expansive view of rhetoric, but she also makes ethical issues central to the constitution of the rhetorical self.

It is Nienkamp's adherence to Isocrates' core beliefs concerning internal rhetoric that shapes the argumentative trajectory for the rest of the book. Thus, she next presents Plato's understanding of internal rhetoric, an understanding that she finds wanting in relation to the Isocratean model. Her discussion quickly shifts into critique: although Plato supplies an indeterminate space for internal rhetoric, that space is rendered problematic because of the appetites. Plato "characterizes intrapsychic interactions as hierarchical because he elevates the rational part of the soul to a divine status" (34). What is of the body, the emotions, or the appetites requires control by the rational. Moving on, Nienkamp makes a similar point in her discussion of Aristotle, who, despite his fairly pragmatic understanding of public rhetoric, tends to favor the rational in his presentation of deliberation. She claims that Aristotle fails to demonstrate how the appetites are aligned with reason, and thereby misses the fully rhetorical dimension of deliberation (37). We thereby see that Nienkamp's discussion of classical rhetoric is already working to prepare us for her later argument about the role of emotions and unconscious impulses in our understanding of rhetoric and the constitution of the rhetorical self.

In keeping with her theme about rhetoric's need for a moral component, Nienkamp next turns to moral philosophy and the faculty psychology that emerged with it. Looking at Francis Bacon, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury, and Richard Whately, Nienkamp argues that faculty psychology serves as a bridge between the Classical and Freudian/post-Freudian perspectives she is leading up to. The three figures she examines see the mind as comprised of various interior faculties that interact rhetorically. Thus, Bacon, unlike Plato, argues that the faculties are negotiative rather than coercive and hierarchical; this means that reason cannot simply triumph over and govern the affections (appetites), but must rather persuade them (44-45). Logic must enlist the passions, not just overrule them. Shaftesbury is similar to Bacon, except for the fact that he sees the appetites as actively bad (53). Further, internal rhetoric functions to let us know what we think in the first place. Thus, more than just managing emotions, it "enables self-knowledge as well as self-definition" and thereby comes to have an "epistemic function" (56). Like Bacon, though, Shaftesbury believes that reason remains the guiding principle, even if he sees it as more difficult to cultivate a rational moral sense in the face of the eminently corruptible appetites. Whately, however, differs from Bacon or Shaftesbury in attributing agency less to individual, internally-operating faculties and more to a whole sense of personhood, while also rejecting the idea that the emotions or appetites can be controlled solely through force of will (73-74). The self is persuaded by enlisting the emotions, not just subordinating them, even though in the end rhetoric itself must be utilized according to the precepts of reason and wisdom.

At this point in the book, Nienkamp moves into a sketchy look at the twentieth century. She examines the role of internal rhetoric in several post-Freudian, anti-foundationalist rhetoricians: Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca and Kenneth Burke. These theorists move beyond the idea of vying internal faculties to incorporate notions of the unconscious, among other advances in the psychological understanding of the mind. One consequence of this shift in understanding is that the problem of the passions is transmuted into a "pervasive, unconscious primary rhetoric that shapes our very selves" (82). For rhetoricians, this idea of unconscious factors that remain impervious to conscious attempts at apprehension, and that have a large influence on who we are and what we do, comes to be a means to combat the growing influence of science's hegemonic ideology, positivism. Thus, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca argue against the belief in an impartial, objectivist stance beyond emotional or other corrupting influences. The ability to make choices goes hand-in-hand with free will. In short, these are ultimately rhetorical considerations fundamental to all human activity and knowledge-making, not merely subjective contaminants imperiling the production of "true," empirically-verifiable, and purely objective knowledge, as the positivists would have it (85-86). Yet, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are also critical of Freud, arguing that his notion of the unconsciousness merely flips the binary from the positivists; instead of locating truth in the realms of the objective ala the positivists, Freud removes it to the realm of the subjective unconscious (86). Nienkamp argues that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca thereby take issue with the Freudian understanding of rationalization, which is only a rational covering over of a deeper, more profound unconscious truth. They want to recover rationalization for rhetorical deliberation, which for them is another form of argument; in this sense, rhetorical deliberation becomes integral to how people persuade themselves and then others to take this or that action (88).

In similar fashion, Burke subscribes to a notion of deliberation at odds with the Freudian version, and he in turn argues for a complex notion of internal rhetoric "in that a rhetor might have a variety of motives, possibly conflicting, for engaging in a single rhetorical act" (98). There can be no simple, single cause for a given act if the complexities of internal deliberation are acknowledged as preceeding it. Burke also explores the interrelations between an individual psyche and the larger social realm, and he ultimately makes socialization rhetorical "because it is concerned with identification between the individual and society" (101). Through public discourse, then, internal and external rhetorics intersect, and in a sense come to require each other (102-03). Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, remains of limited usefulness in exploring such intersections due to its limiting (albeit groundbreaking) understanding of the unconscious. Its challenges to positivism come with too high a price tag for Nienkamp and the rhetoricians she discusses here, at least in the Freudian version of psychoanalysis she limits herself to. This is clearly a problem, a point I will return to below.

Nienkamp's historical sketch ends with Burke. Her next move is to complete her theorization of the "rhetorical self" using the theories of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky, the goal being a rhetorical self conceived as a construct of rhetorical language uses, both internal and external, with an emphasis on the internalization of social language (109). She presents a theory of the origin of language as something that emerges progressively "from instinctive to significant gestures and from vocal gestures to language" and that "provides an entire genealogy of hortatory, and therefore rhetorical, human action. [1] This understanding allows Nienkamp to assert the rhetoricality of all language; it is not, as she states, just "a specific application of language use" (111). The usefulness of Mead and Vygotsky is that they provide us with "models of people internalizing the persuasive function of language" (118). This internal, hortatory function of language is manifested in the rhetorical self as multiple "voices" (128). And with this, Nienkamp moves us towards her conclusion: just as the inner self is constituted and maintained by a plurality of voices, so too for the external world, which is also characterized by a plurality of voices. The upshot of her argument is the necessity for openness, an ethical injunction (or is it a plea?) that we be willing both to persuade and be persuaded (134). In this way, Nienkamp claims, a consideration of internal rhetoric returns us to a moral component that contemporary society and rhetoric have left by the wayside. Interior deliberation mirrors social deliberation in that both require openness, the ability to present for rhetorical consideration the various strands of ethics, beliefs, and socialization within the particular situations that require response (134).

It is at this point that I have to wonder what just occurred in this book. Although the historical survey is well-researched, I never get a grounding sense of import, a feeling for what's really at stake as I move through the personages. But when I read the conclusion, I'm more than a little dubious, if not wary. Although the topic is of considerable interest, I want there to be more here than a pluralist ethics writ internal. If, as Nienkamp claims, we live in an age of moral pluralism (132), surely there is more to intervening into such a situation than claiming we just need to be more open? Haven't the more sophisticated postmodern theories of the past thirty years precisely challenged that very assertion, which smacks of a neo-Habermasian naiveté concerning the possibility of ever achieving such a power-and-influence-free communicative situation? In this regard, Nienkamp's reliance on particular figures, such as Mead, Burke, and Vygotsky, is telling. Her challenge to psychology-based modes of inquiry, which she claims is a major goal of the book (125), thus ignores the complexities offered by other psychoanalytic narratives, such as that of Lacan or latter-day Lacanians like Žižek. [2]

But the larger point is that post-Freudian psychoanalysis and postmodern theory provide sophisticated and serious challenges to this naďve idea concerning an ethics based on plural openness. That is, one must do more than pay lip service to the various constitutive forces that call the possibility of such openness into question. Specifically, one must acknowledge fully, and grapple with the consequences for, ideas that assert—I'm generalizing rather broadly here—that power and influence in a variety of guises, conscious or not, circumvent any notion of openness predicated on persuasion, if persuasion is understood to be occurring on a more or less level playing field. What is especially odd here is that Nienkamp is at some level aware of this. As she asserts in her closing line, "we must develop this rhetorically negotiated conception of the self and moral agency to take into account biological and cultural, conscious and unconscious influences on who we are, what we believe, and what we do" (136). [3] While I am in agreement with Nienkamp on this point, what is astonishing is the willfulness with which Nienkamp asserts the priority of a discursive, pluralist rhetoricality, a stance that is actually at odds with her closing statement. To account fully for its implications, she would then have to admit that the four influences she mentions—biological, cultural, conscious, and unconscious—already preclude the possibility of the openness she desires. Indeed, her use of the word "must" already traces a kind of force, an imperative that belies a rhetorically-grounded conception of persuasion.

In the end, such wrinkles in her argument, or the challenges posed by other theoretical paradigms, are merely sidestepped, and to the detriment of her book. If the historical survey is at least useful, the later half of the book speaks to a kind of ethical bankruptcy that I find more than a little disturbing. Surely rhetorical scholarship has more to offer to the academy and to the public? And of course it does. Although such richer insights are not in this book, at least Nienkamp does us the service of opening a fresh line of inquiry. Even if we wish more had been accomplished, we cannot ignore the attempt to extend further the province and importance of rhetoric. Such work cannot but have urgency today, and in this regard Nienkamp's greatest value perhaps lies in showing us where certain lines of theoretical inquiry have achieved their senescence. For that suggests new, more fallow ground is awaiting us, and we have only to look to find it.

Notes:

1. I note as an aside that it would have been interesting, not only for the added scope but the challenges they would have presented to Nienkamp's argument, if she had included alternate conceptions of the origins of language, such as that of Johann Gottfried Herder, whose work was later greatly amplified in the discussions of language by Martin Heidegger. Unfortunately, this is a tradition and a series of problematics that Nienkamp scrupulously avoids. (back)

2. Indeed, Lacan only merits two mentions in the index, and one of those is an endnote (see 168). Other, non-psychoanalytic traditions are also ignored, such as nineteenth and twentieth century Continental thought, work that poses serious obstacles to her argument. (back)

3. It should be noted that this assertion is prefaced by warnings concerning the loss of moral direction or even its possibility because of postmodern theory (136). Of further note is that postmodernism seems like a target here, yet it is never given any discussion, nor even an entry in the index. It is even unclear what "postmodernism" is in this context. (back)

Works Cited:

Herder, Johann Gottfried. On the Origin of Language. Trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1966.

Nienkamp, Jean. Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2001.

Citation Format:
Rickert, Thomas. "The Dialogue with the Self, or Who Are We When We Talk to Ourselves?" Enculturation 4.2 (Fall 2002): http://enculturation.net/4_2/rickert.html

Contact Information:
Thomas Rickert, Purdue Univeristy
Email: trickert@purdue.edu
Home Page: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~trickert/

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