In “Alter Progressivism: Modern Composition, Institutional Service, and Cultural Studies,” Michael Murphy castigates James Berlin for failing to recognize the implications of his allegiance to “democracy.” Murphy con­tends that Berlin’s much-cited article, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” treats democracy as a “transcendent truth” that “bubbles up from nowhere, erupting in the progressivist rhetoric of pluralism and egalitarian­ism” (354,355). I hear in Berlin’s essay and Murphy’s challenge the tenets of an ongoing discussion that has engaged composition theorists of many persuasions. Most participants in this debate, whether postmodernists, Marxists, or feminists, have challenged the assumptions of classical liberal democracy. They charge that the gap between its promise and what it has delivered exposes terms like “liberty,” “rights,” and “justice” as hollow concepts that must be rethought. Some, like Murphy, claim that the conventional democratic illusion, like all essentialized absolutes and “pro­gressivist discourse,” must fail because its tenets do not accord with the postmodern imperative to “interrogate and disclaim” all modernist con­structs (353, 359). Other critics, though, foresee a new, good democracy that will reverse entrenched patterns of effacement and oppression. Henry Giroux, for example, “dreams” of a radically open society in which long-occluded voices will speak new possibilities for human fulfillment and coexistence (116). This vision of a reconstructed democracy coincides with the hopes of many theorists for a postmodern ethics, an ethics that can translate the discontinuity and antifoundationalist vertigo of modern life into a strategy for subverting old totalities, opening rifts from which silenced voices may finally emerge.

Composition teachers with an interest in politics and theory inevitably share in this discussion, inscribing the questions it raises onto classroom practice. Berlin, John Trimbur, C. H. Knoblauch, and Victor Villaneuva, Jr. are among those who have recounted their efforts to engage students in critical explorations of the unanswered questions their traditional assump­tions suppress. Patricia Bizzell and Min-zhan Lu, among others, write about students’ efforts to construct political selves in the face of disruptive differ­ence and postmodern doubt.

I take the goals of this critique and this practice to be an expansion of social justice. I am deeply sympathetic both to the critique and to this goal. But I am troubled by a phenomenon that haunts many reports of critical practice. Whether calling for a demolition of the very concept of democracy or a radical renewal of its precepts, teachers and theorists have found their agenda hard to sell. Practitioners report that students who are asked to join in rethinking discredited guarantees of social justice cling ardently to their old identities and assumptions (Bizzell 271; Berlin, “Composition” 52; Knoblauch 18-19; Villaneuva 251). Their resistance, not to the hegemony that constructs them but to the critical awareness that should help them to confront it, has just been mirrored by our culture’s sharp turn to the right.

An important premise of this essay is that, for teachers concerned about ethics and justice, this resistance should be a serious concern. It marks a persuasive impasse whose sources I locate in two conflicted sites. First, as Patricia Bizzell points out, students often find the critical stance they are asked to adopt not just challenging but painful; they reject what they see all too easily as the “hip smirk” (270). Moreover, they must be perplexed by being asked to decide about and act on issues of politics and culture while being told that rational decision-making and choice are impossible. They must wonder at being asked to grant others agency while hearing their own challenged, to value others’ identities while their own are disallowed.

A second source of this resistance lies in the rhetoric of the postmodern critique itself. Theories of rhetoric tell us that shared conclusions follow from shared beginnings. An effective rhetor does not begin from the point to which she wants to convey an audience but instead from where her listeners are. Where my students are, most often, is deeply enmeshed in powerful cultural icons. For example, they refer all political debates to the Constitu­tion, which they invoke as a transcendental guarantor of all they believe in, a set of truths outside of history, carved on stone tablets on a mountaintop and ritually handed down. They are not easily talked out of this confidence. Social critic Martin E. Spencer reminds us that rhetors ignore at their peril what he calls the “prevailing rhetorics” of a culture (609). I suggest that teachers who would promote a cultural critique ignore the prevailing rheto­ric of democracy in theirs. But the need to respect these beliefs leaves me profoundly uneasy. If my goal is a radical revision of the meaning of democracy, how can I begin my students’ journey with these traditional documents and icons if I believe that they embody the very flaws I want to expose?

In this essay, I explore this question. I start from the observation that the icons of liberal democracy grant textual criticism an important opening because they consist almost entirely in words. Much critical comment on the Constitution, for example, has examined how, like any text, the Constitution can be deconstructed along complex fault lines. But I suggest that critique itself can lapse into totalizing assumptions as surely as the documents it strives to examine. Postmodern insight warns that no ongoing textual scrutiny will reveal invariant patterns of cleavage; such consistent findings would imply an impossibly static, foundational structure of linguistic mean­ing. Instead, the delineation of fault lines is a function of interpretation, and interpretation is a function of lens and place. Decentered critical positions can enable divergent understandings of rifts and connections. In this essay, I take such an oblique position, from which I will show how the textuality of the Constitution, the most venerable of classical democratic icons, might be exploited to nurture a postmodern ethics. It might be possible, moreover, to co-opt and colonize the suspect term “democracy” for a new critical agenda, turning its traditional meanings back on themselves in fruitful ways.

The postmodern critique of rationality and by implication much of the Eglightenment agenda encourages a reading of the Constitution as a particularly egregious example of eighteenth-century flaws. In such a read­ing, the Constitution manifests a faith in rationality and purposeful action that cannot be endorsed today. Its chiseled, author-evacuated prose enjoins abstract actors to perform straightforward functions in an orderly universe. The simple act of creating a Constitution, moreover, is a supremely Enlight­ened gesture. The Founders’ intent, the Preamble states, is to “form a more perfect union,” an impossible premise in a world two centuries later. Now the very idea of perfection not only begs definition but points toward totalization, at best a dubious ideological choice. The document indeed might be likened to the blueprint of the Great Watchmaker: a set of instructions felicitous enough to be set in motion and then ignored. This watch metaphor connotes that it is possible to analyze conflicting roles and expectations so closely and know them so intimately that they can be ranged against each other in perpetual counterpoint. For example, the complex clauses of Madison’s and Hamilton’s Federalist Papers enlist syntactical balance as a marker of disin­terested reason. In these polemics, these two prime Founders work out the rules for reducing the intricacies of human behavior to regularized predic­tions. Hamilton’s “Federalist 84” attests to his belief in the ability of rational beings to discern what is “apparent,” “evident,” and “the plain dictate of common sense” (515-18). Contemporary theorists resist the idea that this single document can guarantee eternal order. For them, the Founders’ faith represents the epitome of hubris and a fatal misunderstanding of the tempo­ral, contingent nature of human interaction. For current critics of democra­cy, the Constitution, with its foundation in ideas of permanence, universalizability, and fixation, cannot possibly serve the very different consciousness of this radically transformed age.

But historical investigation can open up new readings alongside the rejection of the Constitution as universal truth. Even a popular account of the writing of the Constitution, Christopher and James Lincoln Collier’s Decision in Philadelphia, describes the Constitution as cobbled together by weary men. After months of haggling, the “Founding Fathers” finally accepted that no consensus would ever reconcile the complaints and conten­tion. The Bill of Rights, which Madison and Hamilton resisted until they came to believe that the whole project would fail without it, was in many ways a stopgap addendum rather than a cornerstone of an ideal political frame­work. Indeed, much of Madison’s strategy, once he had surrendered, may have been devoted to diluting the document’s referential authority, so that its prescriptions would obstruct, rather than facilitate, any absolute demarca­tions of the lines between the citizens and the state (Goldwin 70-74).

In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke undertakes a critique of the Constitution that authorizes such a reading. He depicts the document not as a rigid set of universalizable prescriptions for an eternal order but rather as a “calculus” for tenuous and contingent decision-making in a less-than-perfect world. An important corollary to Burke’s reading is his implication that the conflicts manifested in the Constitution will plague an attempt to codify the interactions of human beings in their historical and cultural specificity.

Constitutional Wishing: Burke

Burke’s section on the Constitution begins by characterizing the document as an act performed by agents who believed themselves capable of both promising and commanding, not just each other, but history as well. The Constitution, says Burke, essentially passes on to future readers a set of exhortations framed as “you shall” or “you must.” But in addition, these commands are issued to the Framers’ future selves (361). The assumption that people can make promises believing that years later they will be willing and able to keep them presupposes the unified, omniscient presences we have already discerned behind the document and behind the concept of democracy itself. But Burke’s reading of the Constitution quickly unravels the document’s rational structure. He calls into question not its intent, which is to supply a foundation and a legitimation for future decision-making, but rather the way it actually works.

According to Burke, one of the Constitution’s most salient features is its assertion of contradictions. It is, he says, “a set of wishes more or less at odds with one another” in which “the law that frustrates one wish . . . will, by the same token, gratify another” (376, 378). The Constitution can encompass these opposing wishes because they are, after all, just wishes; the Constitu­tion is an ideal, created through the process of imagining an anarchic state where lions and lambs—absolutely incompatible principles—can lie side by side. “[I]n the realm of the soul,” Burke writes, “the lion and the lamb may lie down together, in the realm of the body the lion either eats the lamb or starves” (346). In other words, an ideal state is anarchic because elements within it don’t depend on each other, nor do they act or impinge on each other. Incompatibilities can ignore each other and exist in perfect equilibri­um because they are suspended, so to speak, in the ideality of hope.

Once, however, these wishes begin to descend into postlapsarian prag­matics, this equilibrium will break down because, as Burke says, “the body is the realm of ‘contradictions”’ (346). Here, one cannot deliver power to one party of a social contract meant to distribute finite goods and resources without diminishing the power of the other party:

Proposed acts of legislation often appear incompatible with the Consti­tution, Burke says, because of the essentializing principle. When readers, like the public, the press, or a judicial body, apply this principle, they focus on a single wish to the exclusion of all others, ordaining it the most important or primary principle. Opposed to the essentializing principle is the proportionalizing principle, which requires that any given wish be consid­ered in relation to other elements that impact upon it. When readers apply the proportionalizing principle to the Constitution, they recognize that context and exigency may indicate a hierarchy among contradictory wishes, but no wish is absolutely transcendent, and the degree to which each wish must be observed in the given circumstances may be modified (380). The result may still be a rejection of the proposed law as unconstitutional, but Burke claims that it is not the Constitution that has decreed this illegitimacy, but rather the contextual exigencies, the Constitution-behind-the-Constitu­tion, and that different circumstances may call for a different distribution of influences among the various principles. Thus, under different conditions, or presented in different terms, the banished rule may find itself eligible to get in.

In this sense, according to Burke, the Constitution is “supererogatory,” that is, superfluous (367). If the prevailing exigencies of value and power don’t permit a certain act, the Court cannot legitimize it; if the circumstances favor a particular act, the Constitution is not needed to endorse it. In Burke’s view, the Constitution does little more than provide a venue for people to come together and assess the political and social situation in which they must resolve conflicts. If politics is “the art of the possible,” the Constitution is a venue in which we decide what “the possible” is.

According to Burke, each of these choices among wishes or modifica­tions of the relationships of the wishes is itself a defacto amendment to the Constitution, and in the sense that ordaining the Constitution in itself was an act or enactment, so each outcome of the review process is a new act (387). In this way, the Constitution, far from being static, is forever being rewritten. Precedent—the drift of previous decisions—acts as a brake on this freewheel­ing re-creation. Burke calls these precedents “reference to the extra-Constitutional scene” or the Constitution-behind-the-Constitution, the pre­vailing social forces (379). Logically, he says, precedent as reference to social circumstances ought to dictate that we decide constitutional questions differently each time, since presumably no two social moments are identical. But he argues that precedent is equally warranted by reference to the ideal—the belief that the document as written can in fact ordain a perfect reconciliation between contradictions and the conviction that there is some “higher law” underlying its authority (379). Thus, precedent appeals to the legitimizing grand narrative that made the Constitution possible in the first place: the narrative of human perfectibility, rationality, and progress. This narrative valorizes consistency, or at least its illusion. To honor precedent, we must be able to argue for some logical connection with the story of our past as we understand it. This insistent relation to the past means that precedent limits the degree of variation a particular judge can introduce, even in radically different conditions.

Defining the Constitution in this way renders it an ongoing narrative, a series of peripeteia in the progression of Western history, tracing shifts in the way our country has traversed its crises and concomitantly inscribed the unfolding tale of itself. Narrative, though, is not just a recounting of events. Postmodern theories like those of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Susan Jarratt have noted the important ways in which it relates to ethics. My goal is to show how Burke’s reading of the Constitution accords with and even augments the theories of these thinkers.

Narrative Knowing: Lyotard

According to Lyotard, knowledge is not and never has been merely “a set of denotative statements”:

We recognize this type of knowledge in the privilege we bestow on certain literary figures. In a certain type of cultural politics, at least, those who have somehow absorbed (heard, received) the accumulated wisdom of the ages are believed to be best able to pass it on, usually by telling stories. In the past, these voices have been able to tell the stories that demarcate the roles that we, as Americans, or Westerners, or Southerners, or whatever, feel compelled to take on, or, as it were, to react against. Through this process, the values and visions that give a society its particular flavor are instantiated and passed on.

For Lyotard, an important characteristic of this kind of knowledge is that it is ahistorical. It pretends to be timeless, focusing on an endlessly repeated and repeatable “meter” rather than an idiosyncratic “accent,” to use Lyotard’s musical/poetic metaphor (Condition 21). Again, we recognize this claim in our own traditional culture, which insists that great works of art convey timeless truths. In Just Gaming, Lyotard valorizes this traditional narrative knowledge, which he calls the source of an anonymous obligation that drives us toward just action. These stories are told again and again lest their hearers forget (Just 34). In The Postmodern Condition, however, Lyotard claims that the messages have been so reduced to meter that the content has become incomprehensible (21). In fact, cultures actively wish to forget the past (Condition 28). I take what seems a contradiction in Lyotard’s meter/accent metaphor to mean that content stripped of a contextualizing frame has also been stripped of concrete meaning. All that remains is a residue so general­ized it can be applied equally well anywhere. The specific “words” are gone, perhaps willfully forgotten; only the generic “beat” remains, and it is this traditional repetitive template the culture does not want to forget.

Hence, each new use of the template, each new telling of the abstract story, may inscribe a particular content in this generalized residue, depend­ing on the agenda of the teller. The template may tell of courage, for example, but what specific behavior constitutes courage may change, depending on what the particular speaker wishes to valorize. The speaker will claim that his special “filling” of the template is also timeless because his version of the content is the same content the template has always contained. But an audience with no historical sense cannot discern whether or not the content really is the same. Thus, tellers who claim that their specific readings exemplify the timeless truths intrinsic to a given story cannot be contradicted in the way speakers of denotative statements can when they offer their claims to be falsified. Hence, the “memory” or “tradition” speakers invoke to legitimize their stories is the product of their argumentative powers, a rhetorical construct. To derail a rhetor’s claim that her examples of courage indeed manifest eternal characteristics of courage is to call up and argue for occluded examples from other tellings one’s audience might well have forgotten or might not understand. Rhetors constantly strive to reinforce these connections between the cultural templates themselves—the meter—and the “accent,” the specific instances they themselves would promote. To do so, they must fully understand their audience’s investment in and under­standing of the traditional templates, and they must know what other factors might influence their listeners’ susceptibility to new connections between traditions and details.

Although Lyotard insists that the “grand narratives,” those capable of defining an entire culture, have fallen into disrepute, he valorizes “little narratives” as the means by which a more situated, flexible ethics can be passed on (Condition 37, 60). In fact, he says that as science has increasingly realized that it cannot prove its proofs, it has fallen back on these traditional forms of legitimation, embedding its claims in stories (Condition 28). He seems to argue that there is finally no other kind of legitimation. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that cultures need and want to forget the past, because too much memory might call into question the reliability of narrative knowledge by exposing the argumentative machinations of those who would use the stories. If Lyotard is right, such knowledge has returned as the only available means of legitimation. As a result, laying bare its rhetoricality might finally condemn us to the antifoundationalist abyss. Thus, in addition to the age-old need to negotiate conflicts over which narrative content is the right one, we must explore as well what is to be gained from recognizing the rhetorical nature of narrative content. Susan Jarratt’s “Toward a Sophistic Historiography” shows how the rhetorical qualities of narrative, as compo­nents of an ethical calculus, can enhance our ability to apply the cultural templates that guide our moral choices.

Narrative Ethics and the Return to Memory: Jarratt

Jarratt claims that the sophists Gorgias and Protagoras used narratives as forms of argument and as forms of knowing. While some have questioned her specific readings of sophistic texts (see., Williams 535), her explanation of the function of two rhetorical devices, antithesis and parataxis, has been partic­ularly useful in my effort to read the Constitution in a fruitful way. Jarratt claims that the sophists relied on narrative not just to pass on traditional knowledge but to disrupt it, to cast doubt on conventional assumptions about the way the stories had to end and the way the roles within them had to be played. She feels that this effort reflects the sophists’ fascination with contingency and particularity and their belief that circumstances, and not timeless truth, guide social decisions and judgments. Their method was to demonstrate how a particular canonical narrative could be read as a series of antithetical possibilities or questions, raised in the narrative itself but usually effaced or buried in traditional readings that assumed that only one ending would suit. Jarratt says that “[e]ach sophistic discourse disrupts a stable historical narrative and subverts the teleology of its analogs” (“Toward” 14).

One way antithesis disrupts preconceptions is by calling into question uncritical assumptions about cause and effect, raising the possibility of “a multiplicity of probable connections” in a given sequence of events and keeping these in play rather than letting the narrative congeal into and confirm a particular causal chain (“Toward” 18). In his telling of the story of Helen of Troy, Gorgias sets up

This process of reconstruction Jarratt likens to the second rhetorical device she examines, parataxis. Parataxis, or, I suggest, a contingent decision about the hierarchies among contextual elements, is necessary because, according to Jarratt, Gorgias’ disruption suffers from a “lack of resolution” which “fails to signal a directive for action” (“Toward” 19). Parataxis is the device of joining syntactic elements loosely and ambiguously, with no con­necting transitions to indicate or solidify causal, temporal, or logical rela­tions: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The construction of relationships among these elements becomes a creative synthesis performed by the reader or hearer. Because the connections are unexpressed, they remain arguable and subject to redefinition in the course of the rhetorical flux. Moreover, a hearer can envision and perhaps hold in consciousness more than one possibility for linking the elements or terms. Jarratt associates this device with the sophist Protagoras, who, she maintains, “moves beyond the critical to the construc­tive” (“Toward” 20). In Jarratt’s example, Protagoras, responding to Socrates’ goading, “chooses” a narrative as his argumentative device because it will appeal to his young audience more than will a reasoned debate. Further­more, he chooses a reading of the old story he tells that can reinforce the point he wants to make (“Toward” 21). Lyotard points out that a salient feature of narrative knowledge is its toleration for, even delight in, many different kinds of language games (Condition 20), and Jarratt suggests that mythos or narrative, as a paratactic strategy, similarly allows for more different readings or uses than logical demonstration.

Even more to the point, the capacity granted by parataxis to hold different readings in tension means that the ethical implications of elevating one over the other become more visible. Ethics returns, too, in Jarratt’s conception of parataxis as basically linear: it allows for an evolution through time (“Toward” 22). Evolution that incorporates time must also incorporate change. In incorporating change, it leaves a visible trace. This visibility allows for—is—memory, and thus reinserts, despite the willful oblivion Lyotard finds in those who would rely on narrative knowledge, an awareness that the content of any given telling might not be timeless, that other specific instantiations have come and gone. This historical sense, embodied in motion, is an ethical force, acting to break down static conceptions of right and wrong.

Jarratt argues that the shift from a timeless knowledge to a linear, unfolding knowledge is a shift to a rhetorical rather than a demonstrative method of legitimation. In a demonstrative method, like that in a strict causal argument, “the end is [always] prefigured from the beginning” (“Toward” 21); that is, the conclusion is always entailed by the premises and the constant, predetermined rules that link them. In demonstrative knowledge, if one accepts the premises, the conclusion is locked in. In effect, such an argument, when valid, is a tautology, utterly circular, returning constantly to its own beginning, repeating itself again and again. In this way, then, rigid traditional narratives resemble demonstrative knowledge by pretending to tell the same story endlessly and cyclically, as if to suggest that memory isn’t necessary because the amnesiatic version of narrative knowledge Lyotard depicts reveals all that needs to be known. In rhetorical knowledge, in contrast, each new turn in a story must legitimize itself anew, not in rigid rules of formal logic, but in the memory and perception of the audience. But since memory and perception are themselves rhetorically created, we seem to have come full circle ourselves to Lyotardian narrative amnesia, where each claim about content and meaning is merely the product of a game.

But I have argued that Jarratt’s version of this rhetorical legitimation, by beginning with the tactic of antithesis, breaks up previous rhetorical con­structions and calls attention to their rhetoricality. Moreover, her version insists on a reconstruction by way of linear, mobile parataxis rather than static hypotaxis, and in doing so reactivates memory, providing a means of subverting the amnesia Lyotard predicts. The memories that will now validate content are informed memories, alerted by the sophistic problematization of the traditional narrative to their own location in a continuum that is both temporal and spatial. Such memories belong to an audience acutely aware that other audiences might not hear the story or choose to end it the same way. Thus, Jarratt’s reading provides the devices for an ethical historization consistent with the postmodern understanding of plurality and contingency that can break up the ahistorical blindness in Lyotard’s account.

Jarratt’s later valorization of metonymy over metaphor in “Beside Themselves: Rhetorics of Post-Colonial Feminism” continues this exploita­lion for ethical purposes of linearity, simultaneity, and contingency. In metaphor, she contends, one thing “stands for” another, and thus takes its place (“Beside” 3). One result of this representation or substitution is that the symbol, which can never be complete or truly “re-presentational,” occludes or blocks out the things it stands for (“Beside” 6). In metonymy, on the other hand, multiple elements, even those that are contradictory or agonistic, exist in proximity to each other, loosely linked only by their contiguity. This contiguity need not even be linear; it can be planar. Any number of concatenations may be possible; moreover, these relations, both in space and time, are fluid, so that various contingent, ephemeral links may occur. Because in a planar metonymic construction, all elements remain visible, the implications of any given pattern of connections are easier to discern. Each element has its face and its voice; no one blocks out another. Not only does this depiction honor the postmodern sensibility of the divided consciousness, it provides a way of keeping in view contexts, individuals, and endings, even when contingent connections among some of them form. As a result, it is not necessary to disrupt all connections in order to avoid totalization. In metonymic or paratactic structures, connections can form and reform without ever suppressing or dominating other possibilities. Therefore, such a construct permits many sorts of creative potentialities rather than closing off the empowering option of social cohesion. But because no one cohesion can block out others, none can appear permanent or unproblematic. Because other options remain visible, various alternative cohesions can and do make sense.

Antithesis and Parataxis in the Constitutional Calculus: Burke

It remains now to connect this discussion of narrative ethics to Burke’s discussion of the Constitution. How can this rationalist document, even if it contains narrative elements, accord with the metonymic re-presentation narrative knowledge permits? Specifically, the Constitution as Burke reads it is itself a metonymic construct that handles its incompatible wishes very much the same way Jarratt claims sophists handled narrative possibilities. In Burke’s view, the proportionalizing and essentializing strategies work in counterpoint much like antithesis and parataxis, exploiting similar tensions in a document that, like all stories, can develop in many different ways.

The proportionalizing strategy, Burke suggests, would seem to be more “judicious” than the essentializing mode, in our usual understanding of “judicious,” because it implies a careful, informed weighing of options that takes all known variables into account. But, says Burke, the “dialectics of the law court” are fundamentally litigious:

Burke uses the argument in which Chief Justice Marshall established the principle of judicial review to expose the rhetorical function of this apparent oppositional structure. Marshall legitimizes the Court’s right to review by insisting that the Court can decide unequivocally whether a piece of legisla­tion is or is not in defiance of a claim in the Constitution, but in order to prove this claim, he sets up an artificial situation. He selects one Constitutional injunction and posits a piece of legislation that specifically counters it. This move gives the impression that this kind of clear opposition is paradigmatic even though Burke claims Marshall knew such instances are rare (385-86).Thus, Marshall purports to believe that judicial review will require only essentializing, that is, locating the one right reading, an obtainable goal only if one exhortation is singled out. But Burke says that Marshall’s subversive goal was the right to apply a proportionalizing strategy. He had to claim the power to decide not just what the Constitution “explicitly lays claim to cover, but also what, in the Court’s opinion, it implies” (386). None of what the Constitution implies, according to Burke, is in the Constitution; it is rather dependent on the Constitution-behind-the-Constitution, or the social and historical context. Because the elements governing decisions about implica­tions are not in the Constitution, they are “free”—they allow, even require, a de facto amendment of the Constitution with each judicial act (387). In these cases, Burke says, since

A straightforward example is the conflict between the two phrases of the First Amendment “establishment clause,” which commands the state to “make no law” concerning a national religion, thus problematizing any insertion of religion into public schools. At the same time, this clause guarantees teachers as well as students the right to practice their religion freely, which suggests they ought to be able to proselytize anywhere they choose. We may now be seeing a turning point in the saga of this issue, as the proportional valorization of one clause over the other shifts.

Strict constructionists might argue that the Constitution cannot be so freely manipulated, but Burke accuses these critics of perpetuating what he calls “the fiction of positive law” (363). This philosophy of limited interpretation insists that “the Constitutional enactment itself is the criterion for judicial interpretations of motive,” and contends that one should look “only to the Constitution itself” and not to variable external circumstances to legitimize interpretation (362). But the felicity of such strict reading, according to Burke, must be a fiction because in his philosophy, acts like the Constitution are affected by what he calls the scene-act ratio (362). An act that is heroic in one set of circumstances becomes an act of bravado or even of cowardice in another because acts are changed by the scenes in which they occur. Burke alleges that the fiction that the Constitution, like a traditional narrative shorn of context, contains some timeless set of injunctions in fact serves to buttress whatever ‘‘scenic" forces happen to be able to impose their own reading, just as the apparent permanence of the content of traditional narrative is a function of the persuasive power of the teller who happens to control the stage at the time. We cannot pin down exactly how our scene differs from that of the 1780s. “What they must have meant” is a rhetorical creation of arguers with a full arsenal of persuasive devices to draw on and the authority to use them. As a result, the current content of our Constitution enforces the capitalist ethic, as capitalists are the ones presently most able to drive home their interpretation.

Precendential Ethics

But as I have argued, the advocacy of strong polemicists is not the only force that acts on these re-creations, limiting the power of judges to diddle with fundamental laws at will. These “new acts” are bound by precedent. Prece­dent may be read as evil and stultifying tradition, but it also can and must be recognized as part of the contingent context. It is part of the Constitution-behind-the-Constitution, the set of social, historical, and political exigencies the sophists drew on in choosing both stories and readings. Moreover, it has positive values. True, it can obliterate memory. Allowed to stand unchal­lenged, it can act like a traditional reading of a story, masking the injustices that undergird it and legitimizing heroes who would turn into villains were their full biographies known. It can naturalize as givens the interested victories of those who have always held power; the sanctification of property, for example, has proved a hard template to shout down.

But precedent can also be the conduit for memory. Investigated and historicized, it can become instead a visible narrative that allows us to keep the genesis of our actions and thus their ethical implications always before us. What is more, it brakes the power of those footloose judges, who, otherwise, can lead the Constitution into whatever dance they wish.

Thus, like most elements in the mix, precedent is a complex force bound up with all the other forces that influence patterns of social order. Its power to limit and direct options is both a threat and a help. For example, it provides a source of connections that may ameliorate some of the problems a met­onymic ethics entails. While paratactic or metonymic possibilities may be unlimited, the very multiplicity that renders them ethical also limits their efficacy. When so many links are possible, it can indeed be hard for one link to establish itself as monolithic, but at the same time, no one connection may be able to assert itself over the cacophony, even when such an alliance would further social justice. Potential connections will not “stick” on their own; someone must champion them, making them make sense in different peo­ple’s differing terms. For example, women of color have no self-evident reason to bridge the gulf that separates them from wealthy white women in order to resist a shared oppression. Someone must remind the two groups of what they share and argue for the link. Environmentalists long failed to join forces with minority communities to fight pollution. Successful argument—that is, making successful meaningful identifications with listen­ers and interlocutors—depends on the ability to connect or reconnect divergent elements successfully, to couple shared but submerged values within different groups. Precedent, which is in fact a form of traditional narrative, is just one of the potential connections in this mix, but it is one of the most compelling, a boon to a rhetor able to use it and a danger to the rhetor who forgets its power to dominate and occlude. In judicial review, precedent comprises public expectations of fair play and honor and hard-fought ethical victories as well as oppressive stagnation or obfuscation. Judges ground their new acts in its promises. It provides an a priori cohesion that can be enlisted as a matrix on which new coherences can be grafted. While it must be disrupted if it is to be reconstructed, its total disruption would make way for Lyotardian amnesia, in which the past we need to know about in order to act ethically disappears.

Therefore, freedom from the weight of precedent will not necessarily equalize narratives or release them into infinitely free interplay. Such a dream echoes the myth of the free market, which our own history assures us can never exist. We can’t go back to an anarchic Eden, from which everyone could start off on equal footing. Even if we could, too much power for a few inevitably accrues by too many accidents as history piles up. New power concatenations will arise from the flux. Serendipitously, some good forma­tion may result from the unbridled play of luck and persuasion; just as likely, it will not. We forget that custom and law were, as Jürgen Habermas reminds us, developed to combat the arbitrariness of power and to introduce some small measure of predictability into human fortunes. Precedent is a permu­tation of that predictability, a way of limiting random acts. The sophistic calculus Jarratt describes did not demand an anarchic return to pure begin­nings; instead, it began with tradition, understood it, and spoke to the audience that tradition had produced.

A Postmodern Constitution and the Contemporary Writing Class

Hence, Burke’s reading of the Constitution casts it as a strangely postmodern document: a metonymic constellation of contingent possibilities relying on contextual interpretation for implementation and realization. As Burke sees it, the Constitution is a bundle of incipient antitheses waiting to be highlight­ed rhetorically in litigation, then reconstructed rhetorically through paratactic reassociations. The efficacy of these reassociations cannot be taken for granted. Their worth must be established in the heat of the rhetorical moment in all its frustrating complexity. The Constitution does not shape the end, as would a strictly logical calculus; rather, it provides the venue in which various endings can be shaped, as needed or as rhetorically legitimized. If we accept the ethical implications of metonymic re-presenta­tion—presentation again, alongside rather than in front of—the Constitu­tion is an intrinsically ethical construct. That it has not succeeded in defining and imposing a particular reality and still requires us to argue over its meanings may in fact be an aspect of its ethical nature: it is “constitutionally” unable to do anything so final and domineering. It was set up deliberately to disperse rather than to concentrate power. Political scientist Benjamin Barber argues that it has in fact succeeded, to some extent, in effecting this dispersion. It has been used rhetorically to transform an aristocratic slave society where a few privileged men could make rules to our tendentious and noisy civilization where people whose ancestors were radically silenced now have access to the venues of change. This change has been both painfully slow and painfully rapid. Which you emphasize depends on your reading of history. What does emerge from this reading of history, though, is that it is people and language who make history. The Constitution, rather than being a static monument to a mistaken age, can be seen as an incarnation in language of the people it names.

But perhaps this is too optimistic a claim. For too long, the Constitution, like other democratic icons, has been a metaphor both for unexamined absolutes and for oppressions it steadfastly refuses to confess. I have argued, though, that teachers concerned with an expansion of social justice cannot simply erase too hundred years of cultural faith. My best hope as such a teacher is to reinvirgorate the Constitution, rather than reject it. If I can show how the Constitution really supports my vision of a complex polity open to diverse, situated negotiations, I will not need to divorce myself from “the people” named in it in order to present myself as beyond such bourgeois institutions. I can use it to claim a new, ethically self-reflexive power base. Earlier in this essay, I used the term “co-opt.” If Burke’s reading is indeed compatible with the kind of critical ethics Marxist, feminist, and postmodern scholars invoke, it might provide me with the means to effect such co-option.

Metaphors of any kind are particularly susceptible to such appropria­tion. They can be purposefully enlisted and reversed. For example, in the 1950s, the term “family” stood for a specific conventional image: mother, father (white), two children (healthy), house in the suburbs, two cars, a dog. Attached to this image were connotations of warmth and safety. When, during the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton detached the term “family” from its outdated but persistent referent, the word retained the connotations of warmth and safety. This transference, this stickiness, meant that suddenly “warmth and safety” accrued to any structure to which the term “family” might be applied. It became possible to spread the metaphor, so to speak, to diffuse its meaning across a much broader range of referents, like single-parent families, same-sex families, welfare families. Similarly, Consti­tutionality might come to mean diversity if appropriated aggressively, its mythic force diffused to more and more new situations in need of its peripheral but historically grounded meanings of “justice” and “fairness.” It will never come to mean any of these things if abandoned to its old be­smirched haunts.

How specifically can composition teachers begin this process? Perhaps, first, those of us interested in a revitalized democratic discourse can continue to look closely at the terms that so much vigorous critique has already helped us to historicize. But this investigation can resist totalizing concepts as unusable because they are flawed. Jean Bethke Elshtain, for example, suggests that social critics should take traditional if equivocal values like rights “seriously.” Speaking as a feminist, she points out that “[w]omen have struggled for too long to be included within the range over which rights operate ... to junk “rights” as mere idology without substantive value and meaning” (343). Students can also be encouraged to investigate rights rather than to denounce them. For example, they can be exposed to the accessible but challenging work of writers like Mary Ann Glendon, whose Rights Talk suggests that our native language of rights can be productively modified to be less divisive and absolutist while still working to preserve human dignity and provide opportunities for personal and social growth.

Similarly, students can address issues like those raised by the critical legal studies movement, which functions not just as a radical challenge to liberal assumptions about the rational management of ethics but also as a study of the difficulties faced by any attempt to create a civic space. Students often acknowledge that the difficulties of defining fairness and opportunity in a diverse, crowded society place them, as well-meaning and intelligent people, in uncomfortable moral straits. They don’t need to reject liberal values in order to see the difficulties inherent in applying them in real life. Such studies can be historically grounded as well, opening students’ eyes to the struggles and unresolved issues that attended the Framers’ decisions. “Constitution” and “Bill of Rights” can come to mean confrontations with difficult and perhaps ever-contentious issues rather than final solutions. Democratic life can come to be seen as negotiation rather than competition. Accommodation to diversity can become a personal value because of its relevance to students’ own identities and needs.

But these representations of democracy, like all specific content for long-repeated stories, must be argued for and established rhetorically; they cannot be established in any other way. Those of us with democratic dreams must not only investigate contradictions. We must also investigate connec­tions: specifically, how we can tie ourselves to the needs and fears of our audiences and make our tellings of old tales seem compatible with the templates as our listeners know them? We cannot collapse the templates; we must inhabit them. Only then can we turn them into spaces that many others can share.