JAC Volume 16 Issue 1

Jasper Neel's Aristotle's Voice recognizes that the slender stripe of potential oppositionality won by composition in its break from English studies has long since faded (132). And while Aristotle's Voice works to make that stripe vibrant, it is derailed from its goal by the use of a rhetoric of pleasure that displaces class issues, making for an argument that legitimates the oppression of women and feminized "others," including TAs (133).

Neel's overarching goal in Aristotle's Voice is "to foreground the professional discourse"--its "dynamics" and "assumptions"--"in which teachers of writing are situated" (13-14). This emphasis on discourse is a hallmark of what Teresa Ebert calls "ludic materiality," in which "materiality" is understood as the discursive process of cultural representation wherein change occurs through deconstruction to allow for discursive (re)formation at the local level--higher pay for an individual, for example--rather than any kind of fundamental social transformation (887). Ludic materialism's emphasis on the discursive and local cripples political opposition aimed at the global transformation of basic inequality. In this way, ludic materialism legitimates the local and individual indulgence of the "middle" class, as is evident in Aristotle' Voice.

Neel's argument, in many ways an extension of his argument in Plato, Derrida, and Writing, consists of roughly three moves. First, Neel argues that Aristotle uses rhetoric to establish and maintain a binary between "professional discourse," "the role in discourse offered by Aristotle . . . of a separate, perceiving intellect . . . capable of disinterested, objective analysis" (24) and "human discourse," "human beings in the process of constructing themselves and their world" (78). Having set out this binary, however, Neel veers from the purely deconstructive impulse by arguing that professional and human discourse exist in a "relationship . . . less opposition than ventriloquism" (90). Neel's first move, then, in constructing the need to search for the roots of this ventriloquism, calls not only for deconstruction but also for history (90). Accordingly, his second move situates "rhetoric" as a product of "history," specifically the "antidemocratic ideology" (105) of ancient Athens. In this move, Neel advances his point that by being a "discourse about discourse," rhetoric corrals, naturalizes, and neutralizes the tropological properties of language that could throw professional discourse into question by pointing to the elitism that licenses ventriloquism, apparently the ownership of another's voice for one's own ends (180, 125). Having set the binary in relation to this elitism of a past society, Neel's third move is to grapple with "not what we will argue about but whether we will argue as professionals" (180). He argues for his preference, which is to take up "sophistry"--not, however, in the classical way advocated by Protagoras or Gorgias, but as "the (human) discourse that Plato and Aristotle excluded under the name sophistry" (190). This is the space of radical and perpetual destabilization, desirable because it is the space where the tropological properties of language are released so that, for example, "man' and white man' are no longer synonymous" (196, 192). By occupying this space, Neel knows that he will "enable" all "the seekers of true, scientific knowledge" (196). Yet in this space, at least, he will "not produce scholarship," but rather continually interrogate his own socio-political conditions, and so be "human" (197, 204-05).

The composition teacher looking to clarify her complex relationship to disciplinary structures may find much here, though not in the way of "knowledge." For as Neel cautions, in typically poststructuralist fashion, "No one. . . will be able to extract any knowledge' from these pages" (5). Here, Neel rejects rigorous conceptuality in favor of common sense, in the process dismissing powerful ways of understanding one's world and perhaps changing it, such as historical materialism. At any rate, while one will not get "knowledge" here, one will get a heuristic that may enable "a particular composition teacher . . . who cannot realistically seek more" to seek her "ontogeny," that is, her particular socio-political situatedness that will allow her to see the process by which she has come to present a "professional self" that seems "so complete and at ease" (7, 9). While "complete and at ease" does not seem to characterize most composition teachers, and while why these teachers "cannot realistically seek more" seems important to explain, Neel simply opines that ontogeny "is the most important knowledge" a teacher can take with her into the classroom, since one's pedagogy is shaped by one's situatedness (4). In this way, to recent calls for self-interrogation Neel's book adds the dimension of a type of "history."

It is precisely this issue of "history," however, that defeats Neel's desire to distance himself from the ravages of professional discourse and remain "human. Apparently taking for granted Mas'ud Zavarzadeh's notion that we live in a "post-al" world, a post-capitalist world where Marxism is dead and history has nothing to do with the binary division of labor by which we feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves, Neel allows "history" to become a shifting term (Zavarzadeh 1). It represents various notions, from "ontogeny" and "phylogeny" to "lived experience" to mode of rule (e.g., "democracy") (7-9, 34, 111). In the main, however, "history" is understood in terms of discourse. Neel "worr[ies] increasingly that rhetoric is at the heart of human behavior, . . . invented for the West by ancient Greeks, and that we now have a symbolic system of persuasion that always already codifies, solidifies, and immortalizes the racism, violence, and hatred that everyone in urban America--as did their predecessors in ancient Athens--accepts as an unavoidable way of life" (130-31). Here, "history" is a "symbolic system of persuasion." On these terms, discourse legitimates and naturalizes all forms of violence; in effect, "difference" itself is discursive (133). Moreover, what determines our safety from violence is our membership in a discursive community: "The people who leave Haiti" for the U.S. and get sent back are "outside the zone of rhetoric" (133-34).

The problem is that "rhetoric" can't explain the why of this injustice, since "rhetoric" is "discourse about discourse"--nothing more. In short, when "history" is understood in terms of discourse, what gets excluded is the mode of production and the violence precipitated by the class antagonism whereby one class exploits the other for the amassment of surplus value. The Haitian refugees were not turned back because they were outside a "charmed circle of rhetoric" (133). They were turned back because powerful transnational corporations want to keep them in "underdeveloped" countries where their labor costs less. To put "history" in terms of discourse and not mode of production is to ignore the violence of exploitation and allow for its advance.

Putting "history" in terms of discourse also leaves inexplicable the occurrence of change beyond that within existing local groups. As Neel points out, "rhetoric does not offer much of an opportunity for expanding a community beyond its own preexisting boundaries" despite "contradictions" (134, 150). And while sophistry "did nothing to transform Athenian class- and race-based society," Neel's preferred notion of sophistry as the "human discourse" excluded by Plato and Aristotle is as incapable of change as rhetoric: Neel's "sophistry" is merely the arena for the release of the tropological properties of language which "allow" people to construct themselves, through the slippage of differance, to "fit" (or not) a local situation, a local identity (191). And a focus on local identities erases people's position as class subjects, with the result that the existing relations of production which make many poor and a few rich remain unchanged, merely swamped beneath a sea of signifiers.

Neel's deployment of ludic materiality accounts for the ahistoric essentialism pervading Neel's book. Neel repeatedly points out the similarities between ancient Athenian democracy and contemporary U.S. democracy (see 119-23). Completely erased in his discussion are differences in mode of production and the material circumstances produced by them. Ancient Greece was a slave civilization in which the forces that would produce capital were still in their infancy. We now live in the time of late capitalism, in which the means of production have developed to such an extent as to make possible, for the first time, the satisfaction of the needs of all people, yet the social relations of production--the priority of profit--prevent this. Neel's discussion of "democracy" as a discourse destabilized by the antidemocratic tendencies of rhetoric is an important reminder of the need for self-interrogation in a time when Western "democracy" is being reported worldwide through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Yet the ludic ahistoricism dominating Neel's book erases the differences in--and thus the possibilities created by--the mode of production, making self-interrogation parochial.

The critical question to ask of Neel's book is, Why now? Why advance a discursive understanding of history at this moment in history? Class antagonisms are now exacerbated and extended by the globalization of capital. The divide between rich and poor is growing daily, with many of the "middle classes" losing much of their "discretionary" spending power. Yet left intellectuals, having jettisoned Marxism in the wake of poststructuralism, celebrate multiculturalism, a movement itself under fire from the right. In short, teachers in general, but particularly left-leaning teachers in the humanities, have not only lost sight of the goal of transformation when it is most needed, but have been increasingly under pressure to justify their scholarly endeavors. Neel's book addresses these issues, but shortsightedly, putting the emphasis on "personal transformation" that can also be comfortably and pleasurably achieved, since the space of sophistry is one where you can be "self-indulgent and playful" (205). Basically, becoming a sophist means you will "have pleased yourself" (198). Yet you will also feel comfortable in that you can explain your situation as "always-already inscribed by Aristotle."

And that's not all. This pleasure, and the comfort in knowing that the pleasure can be justified with reference to Aristotelian discourse, is not a carrot at the end of the stick of professional life. "Such ontogenesis can . . . be done by anyone at any time" (8). You can, beginning today, have pleasure and justify it. "Even the newest, most inexperienced TA right out of undergrad school can do it" (204). What a wonderful argument for justifying the overtasking of teaching assistants!¹

What the understanding of history as discourse produces, then, is a cadre of "intellectuals" who can comfortably ignore capitalism as it bleeds dry millions who cannot achieve the "comfort" necessary to believe that "history" is an effect of discourse and not the exploitation of their labor. And it is problematic that, in an information age when it is the cheap labor of women and feminized "others" that builds the information superhighway, Neel can encourage the feminized workforce of composition--who "cannot realistically seek more"--to find "pleasure" in their own highly contingent employment and in doing so remain "comfortably" unaware of the exploitation of women and feminized "others" worldwide (7). History understood as discourse and not class antagonism allows for the separation of the working class from its potential intellectuals. It is capital's effort to prevent education from participating in the development of class consciousness and the transformation of the relations of production.

What is needed is a theory of the social that can explain these contradictions without denying that human labor and its relations condition them. We need far better than John Trimbur's "dose of vulgar marxism" used to plug the gaps of a multiculturalism detached from the economic. We need historical materialism in order to explain and change the world as a whole.