The challenge of avant-garde argument.

• Author: Chase, Kenneth R.

THE AUTHORITY OF ARGUMENT

The commonplace among many contemporary students of practical argument is to proclaim the tentativeness of any inference, i.e., an argument is built on the probable, not on an absolute foundation. Despite this tentativeness at the ground floor of reasoning, there remains an enormous confidence in the production of argument itself. Many scholars place the entire weight of personal and social progress on some concept of argumentation. Indeed, argument and hope are frequent bedfellows in the academy; various conceptions of informal and rhetorical argument are increasingly recommended as solutions to nagging philosophical and political problems. For instance, argument is presumed to be efficacious in democratic political judgment (Barber; Bellah et al.) and to be crucial in the critique of contemporary society (Goodnight; Willard, "Argumentation"); it is given the power to overcome radical relativism (Kienpointner) and to combat justificational epistemologies (Weimer); it is instrumental in rescuing philosophy from social irrelevance (Toulmin, "Recovery"); it is even described as the practical and interpersonal expression of reason itself (Walton). Each of these positions requires a confidence in argument. Of course, the degree of confidence varies, and so would the accompanying degree of hope, but in each instance argument is deemed worthy of functioning as a support for an intellectual position; it is a truss or brace for a larger intellectual structure. Often, it constitutes the entire structure itself.

Chaim Perelman is a fitting example of how argument can serve as an object of academic trust. His writing, both as an individual and with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, has strategically placed argument at the center of human affairs. Wherever human struggles are found--in philosophy, science, ideology or politics--Perelman's message is constant: argument is the ideal mechanism for approaching human disagreements.

One such account of his message is elaborated in the essay "Reflections on Practical Reason." Herein he places argument at the center of any determination of the proper ends of humankind; he includes in this center the nature of justice and the appropriate criteria for evaluating actions. Characteristic of his work, he accomplishes his goal through a strategic review of modern philosophy. He identifies the philosophical understanding of practical reason among the skeptics, such as Montaigne and Hume, then he moves through the rationalist response, by Descartes and Kant, and on to an explanation of how practical reason has been reduced to technical (means- ends) reasoning. He finally uses the logical positivists for the leverage point by which (rhetorical) argument can be restored to practical reason; their ultimate reliance on the justification of foundationalism, i.e., the axioms of their deductive system must be defended, is the place where argument returns. He can avoid, therefore, a rationalist epistemology and rely on a rhetorical epistemology. Skepticism is sidestepped through the admission that knowledge cannot be certain and that argumentation, which even the skeptics inevitably practice, is the basis for reasonable human decisions.

Perelman's epistemological position is persuasive. One can never know in any foundationalist sense of the concept of knowledge; one can only be reasonable. Yet in the center of his epistemology is a trust in argument as the key to reasonableness, by extension, a trust in argument for the well- being of humankind. We owe it to ourselves to interrogate this confidence in argument.

An initial step in the interrogation, and that which serves as the purpose of this essay, is the presentation of an idea--a notion or an insight--which is by nature unpresentable. Thus, the idea can be sketched and elaborated, but it will remain indefensible to an important degree. Furthermore, the idea always will escape any attempt to capture it within discourse. I will begin with a clear statement of it, but this clarity is only temporary; for through the pursuit of the idea the reader will come to the point of recognizing that this initial clarity is only a spur for the work of thought. The recognition of the idea can better be engendered through a peculiar kind of argument practice, a practice which this essay is designed to expose.

The idea to be presented is that argument is limited. By limited I mean the following. First, argument is only one kind of activity among many human activities; it is one particular genre of discourse, and other genres are equally useful in indicating the work of thought and of reason. Second, argument is dependent on something else for its existence and its development, i.e., something holds argument together. It is not the purpose of this essay to determine what it is that holds argument together. The something else could be desire or will or obligation or even judgment itself (presuming there is any difference among these).(1) Argument could be sustained by a combination of these. At times during the exploration of the idea I will refer to this something else as judgment, at other times as will or desire. The only important point concerning these sustaining forces is that argument is secondary to them and radically dependent on them.

Both these facets of limitation--the particularity and dependency of argument -- are central to the idea. Together, they identify argument as a fragile human construction, not suited to be a dependable object of intellectual confidence.

The idea that argument is limited seems straightforward and not at all unpresentable until one recognizes the dilemma in presenting the idea. The idea is controversial, for it runs counter to academic commitments. Thus, the idea would seem to require a defense. Yet to present the idea as an outcome of a defense is to reduce the idea to an argumentative claim. Consequently, the status of the idea as claim would be incompatible with its claimed content; if argument is used to establish the idea that argument is limited, then the idea would be easily rejected by reference to the need for argument in defending the idea. Argument, therefore, would be far from limited; it would appear to be essential. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes this conceptual and discursive double-bind as a differend, "the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be" (Differend 13).

How can the idea be presented in such a way as to preserve it from its own undoing? The need could be met through a discourse which alludes to the idea without subverting it: a discursive idiom that presents an idea which is endangered through the very act of its own presentation. Indeed, Lyotard describes his own political task as the development of idioms for the states of silence in which what needs to be said cannot be accommodated in existing genres of discourse. This is a matter of justice and injustice (Differend 12, et passim) and of resistance to political--and intellectual--totalitarianism ("Answering" 81-82). A proper idiom saves the idea from silence and places it into the realm of a just litigation.

But Lyotard's understanding of a differend is the point of my own differend with Lyotard. The politics he builds with this term seems to rest on the assumption that a proper idiom will turn a differend into a fair dispute, a dispute which relies on argumentation and not on silence. Lyotard's recourse to argument borders on that very act of trust which this essay will question.(2) Thus, I need an idiom which presents the limits of argument, yet that idiom cannot be absorbed into a confidence in argumentation. The idiom must weaken the very recourse to argument contained within the resolution of the differend.

Ironically, the resources for constructing this idiom--a discursive phrasing of the idea that argument is limited--are found in another aspect of Lyotard's work, his examination of the avant-garde artist. An analogy can best convey the idiomatic maneuver of juxtaposing the avant-garde and argument: just as the avant-garde artist can reveal the limitations and fragility of existing art, so can an avant-garde arguer reveal the limitations and fragility of argumentation.

The desire to experiment with received notions of argument and criticism is one motivation for drawing this juxtaposition. This motivation reinforces the more general and more overtly political motivation to struggle against the academic trust in argument. Lyotard's phrasing of aesthetic disputes will be the idiom to weaken his own occasional political trust in argumentation, and, in turn, to challenge the faith of the student of argument.

For these ends I will develop a three part identification of the avant-garde and argument. The first part will connect argument with aesthetics; secondly, this connection will pave the way for the subsequent connection of argument and the sublime. Third, I hope to introduce the idea that argument is limited, yet the burden of alluding to this idea will fall on a peculiar, and merely occasional, practice of argument. This essay will provide the idiom of the avant-garde to give voice to that practice. Finally, the essay closes with the suggestion of an accompanying critical activity.

THE AESTHETICS OF ARGUMENT

Avant-garde art is dependent, to a significant degree, on existing aesthetic conventions. Before juxtaposing the avant-garde and argument, therefore, I need to establish a preliminary association of art and argument.

Argument can be aesthetically appreciated. Each inferential structure-- whether that structure occurs in monologue or dialogue (O'Keefe) and regardless of its process, product and procedural dimensions (Ehninger and Brockriede; Wenzel)--can be viewed artistically, as embodying or involving qualities which can be described in the terms of modern aesthetic theory (Chase 265-267). This claim, that argument is art (in the...