Contesting Pornography: Terministic catharsis and definitional argument.

• Author: Palczewski, Catherine Helen

Catherine Helen Palczewski (*)

The 1980s bore witness to an interesting and confounding development in the ongoing debate over what constituted pornography. The traditional liberal vs. conservative disagreement was supplemented by competing feminist voices, voices that both defended and critiqued pornography. (1) Most of the debate centered around a civil rights ordinance written for the Minneapolis city council by Catharine A. MacKinnon, now a professor of law at the University of Michigan, and Andrea Dworkin, author and feminist activist. The Ordinance defined pornography as the "graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.. ." and it created standing to sue in civil court for women (and men, children, and transsexuals used in the place of women) who had experienced discrimination as a result of the traffic in pornography, who had been coerced into pornographic performances, who had pornography forced on them, or who had been assaulted as a result of pornography (Dworkin and MacKinnon 134).

The sustained disagreement over what constitutes the celebratory expression of sexuality and what represents the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women marks the pornography controversy as one to which argumentation scholars should attend. In fact, even with the 1986 legal pronunciation that the MacKinnon and Dworkin Civil Rights Ordinance did not pass constitutional muster, the controversy over the feminist critique of pornography continues. In 1995, ACLU President Nadine Strossen published Defending Pornography and Canadian feminist Wendy McElroy published A Woman's Right to Pornography. In 1997, noted U.S. feminist theorist Judith Butler published Excitable Speech and MacKinnon and Dworkin published In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. In 1998, Gail Dines et al. published Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality and Jane Juffer published At Home With Pornography. In 2000, Drucilla Cornell published an edited collection, Pornography and Feminism.

The pornography controversy is a complex one, spanning personal, technical and public argument (see Goodnight) as it invokes social, moral, legal, and ethical claims. It also raises interesting theoretical questions about the way personal testimony operates in public argument (see Palczewski "Survivor" and "Public"). Prior to all of these considerations, however, is how the controversy is distinguished by the primary role played by definitional argument. Ultimately, the controversy was and is over the definition of pornography (Kendrick xiii-xiv and 31; Hawkins and Zimring chapter 2; Duggan, Hunter and Vance 133-43; McElroy chapter 2; Strossen chapter 6; Dworkin and MacKinnon). Legislative and administrative action is "inseparable from... defin[ing] what [pornography] meant -- since the justice and effectiveness of any law depend on the precision with which its object is identified" (Kendrick 215).

The centrality of definition makes sense, given that "'observations' are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made" (Burke, Language 46). Names select, reflect, and deflect "reality" (Burke, Language 46). Thus, definitional argument is a constant, if implicit. part of persuasion insofar as "the process of convincing requires not only that a given policy be accepted but also that a given vocabulary (or set of understandings) be integrated into the public repertoire" (Condit 6). In this case, once a definition of pornography has been accepted, a particular course of action follows. If pornography is obscenity, then criminal sanctions should be imposed against all those involved in its production and use. If pornography is expression, then it should be encouraged in a society that values free expression. If pornography is the subordination of women, then civil sanctions should be applied against those who harm the women; the women involved in pornography's production are not criminals, but one of the people harmed by a discriminatory act. Accordingly, before any other type of analysis of the pornography controversy may be completed, a clear understanding of the dynamics of the definitional controversy is required. What, exactly, have MacKinnon and Dworkin done to destabilize the term's meaning and how have they used its ambiguity to open space for an alternative analysis of pornography?

In many ways, MacKinnon and Dworkin's work extends the second wave feminist critique of pornography, which focused on how it intensified the power imbalance between men and women. (2) Laura Lederer, editor of the influential collection Take Back the Night, distinguished this feminist critique of pornography from traditional obscenity analysis, arguing:

Until recently there have been only two sides to the pornography issue: the conservative approach, which argues that pornography is immoral because it exposes the human body; and the liberal approach, which presents pornography as just one more aspect of our ever-expanding human sexuality. [Take Back the Night] presents a third and feminist perspective: That pornography is the ideology of a culture which promotes and condones rape, woman-battering, and other crimes of violence against women. (19-20)

This critique of pornography was operation-alized with the proposal of the Ordinance.

The Ordinance twice was adopted by the Minneapolis city council as an amendment to the Minneapolis Code of Ordinances relating to Civil Rights and twice was vetoed by the mayor. Later, Indianapolis adopted the Ordinance as an amendment to the civil rights law of the city of Indianapolis and Marion County and it was signed by the mayor. The District Court of Appeals for Indianapolis eventually declared it unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds (American Booksellers Assn. v. Hudnut) and the legal future of the law was resolved in 1986 when the Supreme Court denied a petition for a rehearing of the Hudnut case (Hudnut v. ABA).

This essay focuses on the debates over the MacKinnon-Dworkin Anti-Pornography Ordinance to explore one instance of definitional argument: the attempt to effect a redefinition. Accordingly, I hope to add to the growing body of argumentation scholarship on definitional argument. David Zarefsky's keynote at the 1997 Alta Conference on Argumentation recognizes the importance of definitional argument insofar as "[d]efinitions ... are fundamental units of argument" (4). He concludes that argument scholars need to "understand the role of defining and redefining situations, creating and modifying frames, at both the micro- and the macrolevels" (9) in order to understand the "argumentative moves that are involved" (7).

As part of this attention to the role of definition in argument, many have provided case studies of the effect of definitional argument on the progress of a dispute. (3) Perhaps the most comprehensive theory provided for the effect of definition on argument is J. Robert Cox's 1981 essay, "Argument and the 'Definition of the Situation.'" In this essay, Cox posits: "(1) actors' definitions of the situation (DS) emerge in their symbolic interaction with their environment; and (2) these definitions function in identifiable ways as context-specffic 'rules' for actors' judgments and actions" (197). Cox's essay focuses on the second of these two roles of definitional argument. My interest is related to the first element Cox noted, how "actors' definitions of the situation ... emerge in their symbolic interaction with their environment," and how those definitions are contested. By analyzing in detail how one argument over definition was operationalized and resisted, I hope to do more than merely indicate that a defi nitional shift occurred. Instead, I offer one theory of how a definitional shift can be advocated.

Other studies have explored the mechanics of how definitional argument occurs. Schiappa's 1993 essay, "Arguing About Definitions," explores the way definitional argument can function through the process of dissociation. Much like Schiappa's essay, I seek to contribute an analysis of how a definitional shift actually occurs on the microlevel (as opposed to looking at the macrolevel effects of the proposed definition) through terministic catharsis, a concept introduced by Kenneth Burke in his 1962 "What are the Signs of What" essay (Language 367). I argue that definitional shifts can occur when ambiguity is created within a term as a result of rhetors' simultaneous deployment of a term in multiple locations of the Burkean pentad, thus stretching the term to encompass more.

Definition is a central concern of Burke's in The Grammar of Motives and my hope is that this essay can demonstrate the utility of the pentad not only for discerning motive, but also for tracking the genesis of the condition of ambiguity that enables terministic catharsis. Burke recognizes that "[d]efinition itself is a symbolic act..." (Language 44). Thus, it is understandable why "a Dramatistic approach to the analysis of language starts with problems of terministic catharsis" (Burke, Language 367).

Using Burke's critical matrix of the pentad as a framework, I argue that advocates for a definitional shift created the possibility for a "terministic catharsis" by simultaneously locating pornography in multiple locations on the pentad, highlighting its act/agent/agency functions. As described by Burke,

a Dramatistic approach to the analysis of language starts with problems of terministic catharsis (which is another word for "rebirth," transcendence, transubstantiation, or simply for "transformation" in the sense of the technically developmental, as when a major term is found somehow to have moved on, and thus to have in effect changed its nature either by adding new meanings to its old nature, or by yielding place to some other term that henceforth takes over its functions wholly or in part). (Language 367)

In using Burke, my argument...