Excepts from F.G.Bailey: The palaestral mode of rhetoric
The Lintel
In the late sixties in Losa, a community of about 800 inhabitants in the Maritime Alps of northern Italy, I heard a brief tale—an anecdote—about a lintel. I will repeat it and then ask a catch-all question: “What does one need to know in order to understand what was going on there?”
The story-teller was Roberto, a wealthy corporate executive who drove down from his office in Milan to spend weekends in his substantial house in the center of Losa. He came in his chauffeured car. Roberto was an eager collector of local memorabilia. Hiking in the mountains, when he was passing a baita (a shack built in the upland pastures, occupied only when cattle were taken up the mountain to graze—virtually every baita, including this one, was by then derelict) he noticed that the stone lintel over the doorway had a date carved on it, the numbers spaced across its length. He worked out that it came from Losa's old municipio (town hall), which had been destroyed in the Napoleonic wars, and he decided that he must have it for his collection. He knew which family owned the baita (everyone knew at least the basics about everyone else in Losa and its environs) and the following weekend he sought out its head, offering both to buy the lintel and to have it replaced with a concrete beam. The owner, identified in the municipal register as contadino, a peasant, refused. He did so respectfully, explaining with great politeness and some eloquence that for his part he would be happy to give the stone to the gentleman (signore), but unfortunately this could not be done because the baita was jointly owned with his three brothers. It would be wrong to give it away or sell it without first asking their permission. He would have been more than glad to do that, but it was impossible because one brother was in the Argentine, one was in the USA, and the third was in Nice, and he had been out of touch with all of them for many years. In the circumstances, the best he could do would be to cut off his portion of the stone, one fourth, and give it to the gentleman.
Roberto, telling the story, said the man was a fool for passing up the chance to make a bit of money without having to do anything to earn it. Some people were like that—perverse and a bit stupid. Then he added that he himself, Roberto, had not been very smart. “If I'd sent Vincenzo to ask for it as a favor—to prop up a gutter or something—he'd have got it without any fuss.” (Roberto was a modern-day seigneur in Losa. Vincenzo, a construction-crew foreman, was one of his henchmen.)
There are two obvious questions: 1) Why did the peasant refuse to sell? 2) Why did Roberto think that Vincenzo could have had the lintel for nothing? You can easily—and correctly—deduce the lintel-owner’s motives: he intended to cock a snook at Roberto. Nor—the second question—is it difficult to work out that, at least in Roberto’s mind, the lintel owner had some kind of affinity with Vincenzo. You can also guess that both the refusal and the presumed link with Vincenzo had something to do with class. Roberto was a wealthy man and a signore (a gentleman) and the lintel owner was a peasant who worked with his hands, as did Vincenzo. The motives are clear enough; and so also—in broad outline—is the context of class antagonism. What is less clear is why the peasant chose to deliver his refusal in that elaborately rhetorical fashion. What could have been a plain “no” expanded into a parable about the various alternative and contradictory structures available to define morality in Losa.
Structures, “Truth”, Power, and Rhetoric
I will use a simple interactionist and (qualified) intentionalist model of the part rhetoric plays in the working of social systems. The model is constructed out of three elements: one is a repertoire of alternative ideas (structures) both about how a system should work (a morality) and about how it actually works (a presumed reality); the second is a cast of performers; and the third is a set of techniques used by performers to foist ideas on one another and so define—give an identity to—the situations in which they interact. The model connects agents (the performers) with structures (the ideas) by describing the persuasive techniques (rhetoric) that they use either to prevail over one another, which is the palaestral application of the model, or (sometimes) also to promote the structure they prefer, which is its instrumental (or consequential or constitutive) version.
Both versions (the paleastral and the consequential) presuppose that no structure and, more generally, no idea (excepting, of course, itself) could be an eternal verity. All structures and all theories, in varying degrees, are fallible when put to use, not because they fail when confronted by “absolute truth,” but only because they are liable to be displaced by another structure, which the performers hope will better suit their purposes. Structures, Evans-Pritchard said (in a lecture delivered in 1950) are “imaginative constructs;” they are not entities that exist outside the world of thought (1962, 23). None is everlasting; none can be true in the clear and simple correspondence-sense of that word. As Christopher Fry put it,
There may always be another reality
To make fiction of the truth we think we’ve arrived at.
Truth, in this model, is only something to be argued about; the sole eternal verity is that there are no eternal verities. It is this fallibility of ideas, the absence of Truth, that makes it possible for rhetoric to play a part in social life.
In communicative encounters a situation is defined by imposing on it a structure. To structure something is to give it an identity (a name) and impart to it, imaginatively, a stillness, a concreteness, a wholeness, and an exclusivity that are not the reality. We have the poet’s pen:
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Since structures are imagined things, it follows that one and the same reality—which, unstructured, is Shakespeare’s “things unknown”—can be identified in different ways. When people interact this divergence is an ever-present possibility, and every interaction is potentially a competition to define the situation, that is, to decide which rules will structure conduct in the interaction. Likewise, any structured situation, if it is effectively challenged, may lose its wholeness and revert to inchoateness or shift to an alternative structure. The first part of my inquiry concerns this competition; it is about persuasion and manipulation, about the claims that people make, and about (in Perelman’s words) “techniques [that allow] us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent” (1971, 4).
There are many ways to “increase the mind’s adherence” to one or another definition of a situation. If what is in the mind is measured only by conforming behavior, then coercion is available; so is bribery. The word “persuasion” is not generally used in situations of plain force, except in irony, as when a handgun is called a “persuader,” but there are marginal situations in which force has a camouflaged presence. For example, one may “persuade” others by convincing them in a deductive-demonstrative manner that it is in their interest to act in accordance with a thesis that they believe is false or even wicked; blackmail would be an example. There is also manipulation: the persuader speaks or acts in a way that has the effect but not the form of persuasion, sometimes leaving the persuadees unaware of what is being done to them, or, if aware, unable to resist. The verb “foist” nicely covers these cases; it separates both the ingenuous and the conscious-but-reluctant acceptance of a proposed definition from the unqualified embracing of a “truth.” Rhetoric, as the further analysis of my brief ethnography will show, includes not only cajoling but also browbeating.
“Truth” is the business of deductive-demonstrative discourse, which is different from persuasion. She convinced him is not the same as She persuaded him. “Convince” indicates that the persuader has found a premise, accepted by the persuadees, that logically constrains them to agree with the proposed definition of the situation. That distinction frees “persuasion” for use exclusively in situations in which the persuader cannot think of a logical argument, or prefers not to use one, or believes that logic would be ineffective because the persuadees would not accept the necessary premises or are incapable of following an argument, or because the urgency of the situation requires immediate, unthinking and unquestioning acceptance—situations in which the heart is to be won over, not the head. In other words, as Perelman said, defining a situation has to do with “adherence” to a thesis and not with its truth. “Logic for the philosopher, rhetoric for the politician.” Truth is not the imagined telos of rhetorical exchanges, although it may be loudly proclaimed to be so; power is.
Rhetoric, in this model, is designed to convey unassailable “truths” which are to be accepted as they are and exempted from analysis and further argument. There is no rhetorical statement that does not beg a question and is not partisan. Rhetoric antecedes logic; its persuasive force is not derived from agreed premises; one of its functions is to create—or to destroy—the premises themselves. It serves to deter people from subjecting the definition of a situation to non-partisan critical examination.
The peasants ironic moves
The lintel-owner’s use of the word signore in the process of rejecting Roberto’s offer permits this noblesse-oblige definition of the term to drift ironically into their encounter via the insinuation that Roberto was overlooking not only his obligations as a paesano, but also the special obligations that attached to those paesani who were also signori. The irony is there because a second and contradictory definition of signore, along with a correspondingly different social structure, is drawn into the situation. The peasant used this second definition to type-cast Roberto and so to define their situation. Once again, however, the case was not made propositionally; it was implied.
The exemplar of this second type of signore was another man in the community whose status was slightly uncertain. He had useful outside connections (mainly with Church dignitaries and in the world of commerce) and he was fairly rich, but his identity in the municipal register was not at Roberto’s level, benestante (independently wealthy), but commerciante (businessman). Several years earlier he had bought a stretch of rock-strewn mountainside from three peasant brothers, who, they themselves boasted, had exploited his ignorance by inflating the price of land that they knew was absolutely unfit for agriculture of any kind. (He had told them he wanted to use it to develop thorn-stock on which to graft roses.) He held the land for a couple of years and then sold it, at a huge profit, to a cement company which needed to have access to the cliff behind it. He must have known all along of the company’s plans. The three brothers felt themselves cheated. Word got about and he became the boilerplate case of the bad signore, the person who uses long arms not to benefit ordinary people but to do them down.
The lintel-owner made no direct reference to class conflict. His entire discourse was overtly framed in only one part of the traditional paesano morality (brotherhood). It was left to Roberto to fill in for himself not only the signorilit‡ part of that morality but also to make explicit, in his remark that Vincenzo could have had the stone for free, the unvoiced class antagonism. Thus the peasant managed both to disoblige a rich man and at the same time to claim, implicitly, a moral high ground. That morality, however, was an instrument, not a directive; the values of signorilit‡ and brotherly-cum-community solidarity were used to convey their precise negation. By saying one thing the peasant insinuated its opposite.
That raises two questions. First, what motivated this indirectness? Discourse on the class struggle was certainly not without its own ample vocabulary to mark approval and disapproval. Second, how is it possible to do that? How does a message, which surreptitiously contains its own contradiction, invalidate itself and authenticate the contradicted meaning? ….
It is conceivable (barely—I will say why in a moment) that the peasant was acting straightforwardly and from the best of possible motives as a true believer in paesano values and signorilit, that he was genuinely upset by the amorality implicit in the money offer, and was trying, so to speak, to save Roberto from his baser self. Roberto did not think so; neither do I. The notion is altogether too Panglossian; mockery, not soul-saving, was the motive. There are some oblique but quite unambiguous signs, to which I will come in a moment, that make the disrespect obvious.
When Roberto first made his bid to define their encounter as a transaction, the peasant might simply have accepted the offer. Or he might—Roberto would surely not have been surprised—have asked to be paid more. But to do that would be to accept Roberto’s initial definition of their situation and to forego the chance to play the game of moral one-upmanship. That particular opportunity-cost was glancingly noticed by Roberto, when he said that the man was a fool for not accepting easy money.
The peasant might, third, have deliberately driven up the price to make Roberto balk. That would have provided a left-wing soap-box from which to deploy themes of capitalist greed and thus occupy a different kind of moral high ground. For that there might have been some costs.
First, at that time and in that place Marxist rhetoric associated with “The Revolution” had become something of a joke. One old man, who had been imprisoned in Mussolini’s time as a Communist, used to drive a small flock of sheep past the elevated verandah where Roberto’s aged mother sat in a wheelchair, sunning herself. He would stop and chat, looking up from the street, and on each occasion he would end the conversation with a warning “Viene la rivoluzione . . . Come the revolution and I will be sitting up there, Signora, and you will be driving the sheep to pasture.” They saw it—everyone saw it—as an ironic joke between paesani, not merely mitigating but for the moment altogether eliding the difference in wealth and class between them. The lintel-owner had no place for that kind of irony. He was not sharing a joke with Roberto. (He did introduce an element of farce, but in a different way and with a different effect. I will come to that shortly.)
Second, the idiom of straight rentier-bashing might have been rhetorically ineffective because it addressed a theme that was situationally ambiguous. In Losa at that time the left/right political division was complicated. Losa had no more than a handful of Communists. The dominant cleavage lay between Christian Democrats (slightly in the majority) and Socialists. The Socialists were led by Roberto and some other well-to-do people, whose ideological convictions had less to do with socialist dogma than with their wartime experience, when, in 1943, they fought in the Partisan wars against Mussolini’s Fascists and the German occupying forces. To have openly invoked the idiom of class warfare against Roberto, the leader of the principal left-wing group in the village, might, given the ironic contradictions of the situation, have been confusing. Effective rhetoric cannot rest on assertions that invite instant contradiction.
Third, to have played the class-antagonism card directly and openly would have deprived the lintel-owner of the pleasure afforded by a winning game of indirectness. More on the joy of rhetoric later.
Paesano values, in contrast, preserved that gratification. They also had an immediate pay-off, because they were a topos, a rhetorical commonplace that could be presented, in apparent innocence, as the one and only and obviously “true” definition of their situation, one that was instantly compelling on Roberto who was himself a signore and a paesano. The peasant deployed paisano values as if they were beyond contention, normatively imperative, despite the fact that everyone knew that in practice contradictory definitions of signore existed and that not everyone who claimed the title behaved in accordance with its traditional values. Family values in America have the same commonplace standing; there are dreadful families, and all families have problems, but to condemn the family roundly as an institution generally meets with disapproval, even outrage. Signorilit‡ and paesano values had exactly that status. Roberto, having accepted them (by default of not contesting them), was thus logically constrained to accept the moral reasoning that supposedly prevented the peasant from handing over the lintel. In that way the lintel-owner both defined and occupied a moral high ground.
That moral high ground, as I said, was an ironic fabrication. To use irony with the intention of hurting or embarrassing a victim is to walk the edge of a precipice, a fall being irony that goes unperceived and is accepted as sincere. Certainly there are occasions on which ironists prefer to entertain themselves and never let the victims know that they are victims. The lintel-encounter was not of that kind. Therefore the peasant had to frame the message in such a way that it would be difficult for Roberto not to realize that what the message ostensibly conveyed was not the authentic message. In particular, he needed to make clear that his deference was in fact mockery. Roberto said nothing about the peasant’s demeanor, other than what is implied in the elaborately polite words and phrases of the refusal. But even without a confirming visual image of the peasant’s self-presentation, the words alone indicate the kind of gamesmanship that is played in Italian complimenti: praise is bestowed with such vigor and extravagance that the victim is embarrassed and the complimenter’s lack of sincerity is made very obvious. (In hayseed America there is a convenient, if rather inadequate, response to such treatment: “Aw shucks!”—shucks being corn husks, worthless things.) The mildly idiotic concern for the interests of long-absent brothers in a baita that was already derelict, the very respectful forms of address, the anxious protestations to be of service, and the use of signore as a term of reference all signal humbuggery. So, above all, does the peasant’s absurd offer to have his one fourth of the stone cut off and given to “the gentleman.”
The offer was absurd because the stone’s value to Roberto was the date carved along its length. It was also absurd because to cut the lintel would cause the doorway to collapse and thus deprive the other brothers of their share of the baita, which itself was absurd because the baita was already a wreck. There is a Monty Python quality about the scene that makes the peasant, if one were to assume that the offer was sincerely made, look like an idiot. I am sure the offer was made with a straight face; but it was hardly sincere. It was ironic.
What else could one read into the suggestion except mockery? When Henry Ford told his customers they could have their new car in any color they wished so long as it was black, the irony is at their expense because the offer that appears to cater to their preferences instantly repudiates itself. The peasant’s offer is in the same category, a form of disrespect paid from behind a posture of deference. But his performance is more complicated than that; it contained yet another level of mockery. The peasant was clowning, ironically self-disparaging, mimicking the Boeotian half-witted creature that the gentry were supposed to see in a typical peasant. In doing so he sent two messages. First, he caricatured himself in order to caricature Roberto by insinuating that this was how Roberto, being crass, saw peasants. Second—the counter-punch—by invoking, with apparent sincerity, the framework of signorilit‡ and at the same time putting on an idiot mask he enacted the idea that only idiots take signorilit‡ seriously.
There was little that was hit-or-miss about the peasant’s performance; he neutralized “the aleatory characteristic of attributions of intent” (Herzfeld 2001, 67) in the use of irony, over which many scholars have exercised themselves. Roberto, the victim, was left under no illusions about what was the intended message. The peasant, hyperbolizing his own imbecility, had effectively extracted the substance of ambiguity from their encounter while leaving its outer form intact.
Combative Irony and the Joy of Rhetoric
The peasant made his overt argument with apparent directness and simplicity–we are paesani. (Even that was not without indirectness; he talked only of his brothers.) But the real message was: “We are not paesani, because you are a rentier!” Ostensibly (and ironically) the peasant treats Roberto as an innocent who will accept the paesano message as authentic, at the same time expecting him to get the real message. The irony in this case is more than simple dissembling; it is dissembling in such a way that what is outwardly hidden from the victims is at the same time made obvious to them. This is an irony of ridicule akin to Socratic irony but by no means identical; I will call it “combative.”
There are many kinds of irony. Combative irony is enacted and contrived for a purpose; it is not spectator irony, neither the mean-spirited judgmental variety of Hamlet’s “For ‘tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar” nor the gentler kind that would see irony in the wealthy Roberto’s confident and well-intentioned ploy so promptly negatived by an ungrateful not-at-all-wealthy peasant. A fortiori this is not an instance of dramatic irony. No tragedy is involved; no inexorable fate, known to the audience but not to the players, strikes down their hopes and ambitions. The victim, Roberto, is not left unaware; he is made to be an audience for the spectacle of his own entrapment. Irony that is merely observed is, for the observers, self-distancing; they are not engaged. Those who use combative irony are on the field, committed to action.
It differs, too, from Goffman’s “subversive” irony, which also is enacted but is not combative. Subversive irony is collusive, deployed to protect a “focused encounter” by taking the bite out of contexts (his “properties”) that, if presented directly, would disturb the regnant definition of a situation (1961, 76). The peasant was not protecting a defined situation. There was no prior agreement about what might be allowed to penetrate the “membrane,” because there was, as yet, no membrane. Goffman, as I noted earlier, is concerned less with how inchoate situations get defined than with how those already defined are protected from contexts (alternative structures) that would put them in peril.
Nor is combative irony like that other variety of apotropaic (or procataleptic) irony—also enacted and benevolently intended—that anticipates and prevents changes in a situation already defined to the speaker’s liking. Rosa, an elderly woman (in another community in the Italian Alps) was terminally ill. A neighbor-woman dropped by to see if Rosa needed anything from the shop. Rosa handed her a letter to post, giving her 100 lire to pay for the required 100 lire stamp, and saying, “With the change, buy yourself a coffee!” The coffee would have cost at least 150 lire. They both laughed and the woman went on her way. Rosa was making an ironic joke by indirectly voicing the idea (the opposite of what she hoped was the truth) that her friend might gossip about Rosa’s failure to return favors. The irony was deployed to safeguard their friendship. That was not the peasant’s irony; he used irony precisely to deny mutual regard.
Combative irony, by definition, presupposes antagonism. Liddel and Scott gloss eironeia as “ignorance purposely affected to provoke or confound an antagonist” (a near enough description of the peasant’s intentions) and add that it was a device used by Socrates against the Sophists. Socratic irony is a weapon; it is not the kind of constructive argumentative exchange envisaged in Gandhi’s satyagraha (struggle to find truth) in which the debaters are imagined not as contestants but as mutual critics, partners in a cooperative endeavor to find the truth that is waiting there to be discovered. Socratic irony is bare-knuckle stuff, rhetorical assault and battery, intended to wear opponents down, to exhaust their capacity for logical combat, to knock all the ideas out of their heads, and thus render them unable to resist an implantation of “the truth” that Socrates, all the time protesting his own perplexity (and patently dissembling), professes not to know. In these circumstances the word “persuade,” with its etymology of sweetness, would, as in the case of the handgun, itself be an irony.
Socratic irony pays lip service to the protocols of logic and is purportedly deployed in the service of truth. The victims are reduced to silence because they cannot show that their conclusions follow from the premises that they have been maneuvered into accepting. Combative irony is different; it is not a demonstration of correct logic but rather a pre-emptive (and duplicitous) assertion of the rightness of a premise—in the present case, paesano values. At the same time it is a demonstration of superiority—of superior cunning and superior agonistic skills: the peasant, from a posture of humility and self-disparaging half-wittedness, shows himself to be smarter than Roberto. Combative irony challenges the victims to look at what is being done to them and to acknowledge that they are helpless. It is the complimenti situation. To protest against complimenti with a feeble and embarrassed murmur of “Shucks!” is to throw in the towel. To challenge irony with anything but a counter-irony is exactly that—an admission of defeat.
Roberto came out of the encounter partly amused, partly bemused, seeing himself not so much mugged as outmaneuvered by an agile shape-shifter, and regretting that he had not used Vincenzo as his cat’s paw in the first place and so spared himself the hassle. He did not tell the story in the manner of someone brainwashed, Socratic fashion, and on his way to believing that class antagonism was the dominant structure in Losa. He understood very clearly how the peasant saw (or implied he saw) life in Losa, but there was no sign that he himself, Roberto, as a result of the encounter, was moved to see it in the same way. He was not persuaded. Nor, I think, was the peasant trying to foist on Roberto—“induce or increase the mind’s adherence” to—the thesis that Losa was structured by class-antagonism. Certainly he enacted his own hostility toward Roberto and other rentiers. But that is not the same as promoting Roberto’s “adherence” to the class-antagonism definition.
In the end the encounter did not have much to do with persuasion. This was not Mark Anthony’s rhetoric deployed to turn the Roman mob against Caesar’s assassins. Mark Anthony shifted the foundations; the peasant had no such agenda. Nor was he trying to put across his ideas as “truth.” Rather he intended to “provoke or confound an antagonist,” to put Roberto into the position of having no words to argue back. Essentially he was defining their immediate situation by defining himself as smarter and therefore superior. The complex deployment of paesano and signorilit‡ values, to be “unfolded” by Roberto into class antagonism, was a convenient vehicle for a display of rhetorical skill. Those structures entered the situation not as definienda but as contextual resources—weapons—that allowed the peasant to get the better of Roberto. The reward for winning was not a convert, but the winning itself—having the satisfaction of contemplating his victim knocked off balance, subtly but indisputably insulted, and quite unable to do anything about it. A bumpkin-look-alike, a moralizing innocent apparently so anxious to please, reveals himself to be an artful and punishing strategist, happy to spike Roberto, not just because Roberto belongs to the rentier class, but also because spiking is a manifestation of paleastral skill, which can be an end in itself.
A game played for its own sake may or may not have an affect on its context (on structures). But even if it has no affect, structures remain an integral part of the model, not as explananda but as resources. Structures are like cards in a card game; without them the game could not be played at all.
From the postscript
It is not the events recounted in the story of the lintel that matter; they have no consequential importance; they are indeed trivialities. (That is one reason why I selected this tale.) The events are of interest to me because they exhibit patterns of rhetorical conduct which invite generalization beyond particular occasions and particular cultures. To speak of universals in cultural anthropology may still, I suppose, be considered a near-profanity, but the concept can be made respectable by replacing an existential with a heuristic format: a universal is nothing but a question generated in one situation (or in one culture) and asked again in another, and so on until one has assembled a repertoire of strategies and attached each of them to the type of contexts that give it meaning and make it effective. The product of such inquiry is not, of course, a set of universal naturalistic laws but rather an analytic compendium of the conventions that rhetoricians follow. The way forward is the way of comparison.
Finally, there is a moral dimension—Bertrand Russell’s over-hasty “handbook for gangsters” gibe. What does the palaestral model (or rhetoric or any agency model) have to say about right and wrong? To found the inquiry on the question “What must be done in order to win?” would place it with the positivists—neoclassical economists and other rational-choice theorists—and so model rhetoric as something close to a natural system and therefore blind to moral issues. But in fact my question is different: “What do people think they must do in order to win?” We are looking for patterns in beliefs about social behavior, not laws that govern it. These patterns, obviously, can include what people think about good and evil. No less obviously, they do not include our own judgments about good and evil. Nor do I think they should.
Not everyone agrees; my own view, I suspect, will be considered pseudo-scientific and out-dated. Fernandez and Huber, in their introduction and again in a coda to the essays in Irony in Action, anticipate the chill wind of disapproval that blows around many (but not all) forms of irony. An ironic view of life may also be a cynical view that ends in nihilism; it may both misrepresent the “moral imagination” of the people studied and excise the moral sensitivities of those who study them. Irony points the scholar toward a “detour from rather than a route to responsibility”(2001, 262-263). It indicates a “suspension of commitment” and so undercuts moral standards and moral responsibility (2001, 15). What is to be done? Their answer, which has an appropriate whiff of manifesto, is this: “While the moral imagination may not be much easier to define than irony itself, we would like to suggest a simple enough definition relevant to those who work in the human sciences: the creating of as clear an image, or set of images, as possible of existing social conditions in their positive and negative aspects, along with an image or set of images of one’s own obligations for achieving through practical action better conditions for all concerned. In other words, scholars, like professionals more generally, have a set of responsibilities in the world, not just to their own fields” (2001, 263). They go on to say, rather weakly in the light of the remark quoted in footnote 33 above, that irony can at least be used to take the wind out of “powerful persons” who are being “repressive.”
I would buy that more readily if they had also told me (i) why knowledge must be followed by good works, (ii) how to determine “better,” and (iii) how to keep our knowledge from being skewed by our “moral imaginations.” My position is simpler. Rhetoric (including irony) is a communicative activity about which we are seeking knowledge. That, in itself, is enough. What use is made of that knowledge, or any other knowledge—“achieving better conditions for all concerned” (a Pareto optimum shifted from economics into morality and every bit as empty)—is an important but also an entirely separate issue. Evans-Pritchard got it right: “Knowledge of man and of society is an end in itself and its pursuit a moral exercise that gains nothing and loses nothing by any practical use to which it can, or may, be put” (1948, 14-15).
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