Speaking: Or Why the Linguist Needs the Rhetorician.

Stephen Tyler

        Linguists, even functional ones, tend to be Platonists. They prefer thinking about "underlying forms" that purport to be realities behind--or is it "beneath"--appearances. Language for them is an idealized object consisting of concatenated signs which, even though admittedly variable in context, are thought to be autonomous, or at least autonomous enough to justify assumptions of normativity and consensuality. Language, the constructed entification of speech is the first virtual reality. It is a simulacrum that is both transcendent and immanent--a transcendental structure immanent in its expressions. It is constructed as an object of analysis by its method of analysis and this full reciprocity between the constructed object and its means of analysis is obscured and hidden from the linguistic gaze. The method and the object are co-dependent and emergent, constituting a transcendental nexus that constrains, if it does not fully determine, the expressions that simultaneously signify its immanence and its transcendance. The consequence is an object without subjects.
        At issue here is that roster of dualisms that are generated by the notion of transcendance/immanence--such hoary dyads as language/speech, langue/parole, competence/performance, collective/individual, necessary/contingent, structure/process, theory/practice, and so on. In each case, the first member of the dyad is thought of as controlling or having precedence over the second member. The first argument of this paper is that there is no priority to either member of these dyads. The second argument is
that there is a via media, a third component of structuration that is occluded by dualistic thinking. The third argument is that this third component can be revealed by "listening through" rhetoric.

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