Thethresholdoftheself- Bradford Vivian

The Threshold of the Self Bradford Vivian

The subject has a history. Classical Greek sculpture expressed a fascination with the formal beauty of one's self. Ever gazing outward or upward, the marble figures symbolized the Greek preoccupation with a boldness of being, a constant focus on the ideals of the body and mind, which, through their pursuit, might allow one a foretaste of heaven. Centuries later, as the pagan symbols of the ancient world were replaced with those of the growing Byzantine Empire, blocks of the same marble were fashioned into very different expressions. The ideals of form made manifest in the smooth, taught lines and surfaces of classical Greek sculpture were supplanted by Byzantine art's attention to the less perfect details of the individual: distinctive and common faces, beards, clothing, and less glorified bodies. The gazes of the Byzantine statues were cast down, contemplative, reflecting Byzantium's early Christian emphasis upon the modesty of human existence, the pious appraisal of one's time on Earth. Each of these sculptural styles is a material way of thinking and expressing one's being in the world. In this context, each is also symptomatic of the conditions in which such being was possible. The subject must not be conceived as a transcendent entity. Quite to the contrary, there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration. Within a more sweeping perspective, our epochal narratives of the subject—as well as the modes of thought and speech by which we make sense of ourselves—change with each passing age. At the forefront of the current era is a manifold effort to rethink and elaborate anew the concept of the subject. Feminist scholars have initiated political critique and transformation by arguing that the very notion of a subject in Western discourse has functioned as a trope of masculine privilege cloaked in the language of equality and secular humanism.' Postmodernists, of course, define contemporary subjectivity as de-centered and fragmented by nature (e.g., Baudrillard 1994; Latour 1993; Lyotard 1984). And Philosophy and Rhetoric. Vol. 33. No. 4. 2000. Copyright © 2000 The Pennsylvania Sute University, University Park, PA. 303

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a variety of interdisciplinary studies illuminate the role of modem science and technology in not only sustaining our being, but actually constituting the human; in short, our daily interdependence and union with artificial body parts, synthetic products, life-support machines, test-tube reproduction, computers, and more, characterizes the arrival of what has been called "the posthuman."^ Like ancient marble from a quarry, however, all of these materials are sculpted in historically specific ways to simultaneously think and express our subjectivity. What role might rhetoric play in this re-imagining of subjectivity? Modem Westem thought has defined the subject according to content—that is, by the nature of the essence or being the subject is said to possess. Drawn around this content, the subject comes to appear enclosed, perhaps autonomous, and identical to itself. In this essay, however, I argue that the self may be conceived as a form—a rhetorical form—that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming. The self is, by this account, isomorphic with the threshold out of which it is composed. Such a formulation makes the self open to difference, to continual movement and transformation, instead of identical to itself. I aim in this essay to explore the abstract rhetorical forms and functions out of which the self is composed. The distinction here amounts to no longer asking, "What is a subject?" but, "What conditions and forces enable the ongoing production of the self?" Commensurate with such a proposal, it will be essential to ask how this movement—this continual becoming—of the self is brought about. The answer to this question ultimately will amplify the role of rhetoric in, not simply expressing, but actually producing conditions of being. In what follows, I begin by reviewing the very general aspects of subjectivity that I wish to call into question. Thereafter, I explore how the subject might be conceived differently. Finally, I discuss the manner in which rhetoric may be said to function in the continual becoming of the self. The influence of poststmcturalist philosophers Gilies Deleuze and Felix Guattari on this essay should not go without mention. The movement of their thought is guided by a concem for the category of the subject, and the ways in which even those modes of thought that [vomise enlightenment, reform, or revolution can establish a tyranny over the self. Due to their perspective as such, Deleuze and Guattari were key figures in the philosophical movement that broke away from, on the one hand, the prevailing French structuralism that found its apotheoses in figures such as Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser and, on the other hand, the Marxist humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Because Deleuze and Guattari's thought, like no other

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contemporary philosophical corpus, offers such a radical critique of established conceptions of the subject, their work is essential to much of the analysis in this essay. Before introducing relevant dimensions of their philosophy, however, I will first summarize those aspects of Westem subjectivity that serve as a point of departure for the present discussion.

Identity and becoming Perhaps the most enduring conception of the subject in modem Westem philosophy is found in the very conditions that are said to make thought possible. E>escartes's cogito is grounded by an analysis of the principles that confirm the truth-value of rational thought (1960). Doubt in Descartes's method functions to arrive at the identity of the self: by moving from doubting to thinking to being, thought negates that which might undermine its coherency or existence and becomes identical to itself. Consequently, the being of the one who thinks also becomes identical to himself or herself, for in order to think, one must be. The thinking subject acquires several important characteristics as a result of this analysis. First, dependent upon its identity to itself, the subject is defined by the content or essence—the intrinsic being—of this identity. Drawn around such content, the rational subject resides in a position of stasis, anchored as it is at the center of knowledge. Finally, the anchoring of the subject as such indicates a clearly defined zone of interiority: the thinking subject seeks only to apprehend and confirm its identity, thus rendering it immune to the difference at play outside of itself. This Cartesian formulation of the subject has, of course, enjoyed a considerable influence on the nature of Westem philosophy. My claim here, though, is not so much that the cogito has become a willfully imitated model of subjectivity, but that those conditions of thought it embodies have been elemental to the shape and function of the subject in much of modem Westem philosophy. Indeed, was this Cartesian attention to consciousness, rationality, and identity not also evident in the episteme of the nineteenth century, which, as Michel Foucault (1970, 322-28, 373-86) has observed, discovered a realm of the unconscious and irrational lurking beneath the conditions that made the identity of the subject possible? And wais it not this same unconscious realm whose secret desires and drives were made to speak so as to render the irrational wholly intelligible and therefore identical to the consciousness of the subject? Even in modemity's encounter with

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the unseen hands of the unconscious, this encounter was unified by a principle of identity—by an effort to chase away those unconscious forces that threatened to fracture consciousness, which ensured the subject's identity to itself. Even in its ongoing exploration of the unconscious and the irrational, therefore, the Western episteme continues to rely upon Cartesian principles of the conscious subject identical to itself. Organized around an effort to preserve the rational, knowing subject at its center. Western thought has functioned to produce attributive or existential judgments, to arrive at objective truth, and to confirm the identity of being. Deleuze, however, argues that this conception of thought and subjectivity—and, hence, much of the function of Western philosophy— must be called into question: "(A]ll our thought's modeled . . . on the verb 'to be,' IS. Philosophy's weighed down with discussions about attributive judgments (the sky is blue) and existential judgments (God is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing one to the other. But they all turn on the verb 'to be'" (1995, 44). According to Deleuze, then. Western thought exists principally to establish the identity of being, to define its content, and to arrest it in the self-same space of an "IS." In contrast to this "IS," Deleuze summons the operation of an "AND." "AND is neither one thing nor the other," Deleuze explains, "it's always in between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow" (45). This "AND," then, is no longer concerned with the identity or individuality of being, for it is "neither one thing nor the other." Rather, this "AND" marks a multiplicity, a conjunction made of difference. In opposition to the stasis of the "IS," Deleuze thus submits the movement of the "AND," exhibited in "a line of flight or flow." This movement finds its most coherent manifestation in the concept of becoming so central not only to Deleuze's philosophy, but to bis collaborative work with Fdlix Guattari as well. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is always double and heterogeneous; that is, becoming is effected by virtue of one's encounter with difference or an other. The encounter between these heterogeneous elements—in the space of the "AND"—forms a multiplicity, for together they comprise an event that is reducible "neither to one thing nor the other," but exists only in the movement of their congress. The nature, duration, or course of this event cannot be predicted, only experienced; whereas the Cartesian / remains identical to itself now and throughout future affectations, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming ensures that the nature of the event created by one's encounter with the new and different cannot be foreseen. Becoming thus represents the opening of one's self onto the nonpredictability of difference and chance, for it de-

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pends upon the risk of experimentation, and "experimentation," Deleuze and Guattari write, "is always that which is in the process of coming about— the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is" (1994, 111). The various elements of any given multiplicity, moreover, draw upon one another and thereby undergo particular transmutations that would not have been possible without the multiplicity—the irreducible difference— of their alliance. To use one of Deleuze and Guattari's most often-cited analogies, the orchid and the wasp form a becoming: their heterogeneous encounter "brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other," which is "neither imitation nor resemblance," but a singular alliance that creates the new and different—a multiplicity (1987,10). The nature of this alliance is, in Deleuze and Guattari's words, "a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp" (10). Literature is also an important means of becoming for Deleuze and Guattari: "[W]riting is a becoming," they claim, "writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc." (240; see also 1986). Elsewhere, Deleuze himself extends this line of thought, commenting that literature "nnoves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete... . Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of life that traverses both the livable and the lived" (1997, 1). According to Deleuze and Guattari, then, the phenomenon of becoming produces all being—or what Deleuze, in his work on Nietzsche, calls "the being of becoming" (1983, 23). The mode of thought embodied in the concept of becoming bears tremendous implications for the present discussion of subjectivity. Already, the characteristics of becoming warrant a radical departure from those of the cogito. In contrast to the latter's identity to itself, we submit the difference of a multiplicity. In opposition to the stasis of the Cartesian subject as a seat of knowledge, we must assert the movement—the process—of becoming and the encounter with difference it creates. Guattari explains that, in a discourse attuned to becomings, "[t]he emphasis is no longer placed on Being—as general ontological equivalent, which, in the same way as other equivalents (Capital, Energy, Infonnation, the Signifier) envelops, encloses and desingularises the process—it is placed on the manner of being, the machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity" (1995, 109). In short, then, the concept of becoming promises "to decentre the question of the subject onto the question of subjectivity" (22), to transform this question from one concerned with

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the essence or nature of the subject and its identity to one attuned to the heterogeneous process by which subjectivity is produced. As Deleuze puts it. There's no subject, but a production of subjectivity" (1995, 113). At least for Guattari, "[A]n important ethical choice" motivates this analysis: "[EJither we objectify, reify, 'scientifise,' subjectivity," he writes, "or, on the contrary, we try to grasp it in the dimension of its processual creativity" (1995, 13). If the concept of becoming, however, offers a novel and provocative mode of thought by which the subject may be re-imagined, then what role does rhetoric play within such a re-imagining? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to ask how the self may be figured as an aesthetic phenomenon. As I argue in what follows, the rhetorical dimensions of the self emerge most clearly when we contrast the self-governed and enclosed zone of identity that defines the cogito with the very different, and profoundly aesthetic, morphology of the self manifested in the process of becoming.

Aesthetic folds The individual works of both Deleuze and Guattari seek to discover the conditions for new modes of subjectivity. Their analyses, moreover, tend to revolve around like criteria—namely, the conditions by which the space or dimensions of the subject are drawn and the nature of the relationship between inside and outside that ensues. In this section, I demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari's various accounts of this relationship provide the conditions by which the rhetorical becoming of the self may be perceived.

Becoming-Aesthetic Guattari takes care to explore the radical multiplicity of the subject In Chaosmosis (1995), he argues that being is constituted by the coagulation of different intensities, by the emergent organization of multiple and intercalated surfaces, textures, sensations, emotions, perceptions, and expressions. Like the orchid and the wasp, in other words, the self is composed of its encounters widi difference. Above all, Guattari intends to rid us of the assumption that the subject is constituted by a bound interiority, that the subject is an autonomous "inside" protected from the "outside." Guattari claims that there is no univer-

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sal, completely circumscribed human form. Hence, in his discourse, "we are situated totally outside the vision of a Being moving unchanged through the universal history of ontological formations" (1995, 27). This is not to say that Guattari believes there are no forms of interiority at all; in fact, Guattari's project examines how the chaos of different sensations, experiences, and expressions becomes ordered out of disorder into novel and unforeseen human forms that are nevertheless open and in constant communication or interaction with what comes to be known as the "outside." One might summarize Chaosmosis as an effort to ask: Tiiroughout all the chaos and multiplicity of being, what kinds of machines can we build of ourselves in order to survive that chaos, in order to attain some form known as "human"? As Guattari puts the question, "How can we, in this sensory submersion in a finite materiality, hold together an embodied composition" (93)? By virtue of Guattari's analysis, it becomes clear that one's being is a wholly aesthetic process that depends neither upon an originary moment nor upon a telos. "One creates new modalities of subjectivity," he writes, "in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette" (7). One's being is, therefore, always a becoming, wherein the creative event of this becoming "is inseparable from the texture of the being brought to light" (81). This definition of aesthetics, however, and its relation to subjectivity in this context must be clearly explained.^ Guattari writes that what he calls "the aesthetic paradigm . . . has become the paradigm for every possible form of liberation" (1995, 91). In light of the failures of "old scientific paradigms," such as "historical materialism or Freudianism," Guattari asserts that "[i]t has become imperative to recast the axes of values, the fundamental finalities of human relations and productive activity" (91). Guattari believes that what he calls a "virtual ecology" is the key to this project: An ecology of the viitual is thus just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world. And in this regard, poetry, music, the plastic arts, the cinema—particularly in their performance or performative modalities—bave an important role to play, with their specific contribution and as a paradigm of reference in new social and analytic practices. . . . Beyond the relations of actualised forces, virtual ecology will not simply attempt to preserve the endangered species of cultural life but equally to engender conditions for the creation and development of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and never felt. (91) Because the scientific, historically materialist, and Freudian paradigms of being have broken down—have, in fact, proven oppressive—Guattari of-

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fers the "performative modalities" of aesthetic practices as paradigms by which the continual becoming of subjectivity may be cultivated. Far from seeking to define and preserve what being is, Guattari indicates that aesthetic practices constitute an ongoing and creative bringing-into-being of one's self. "All this implies the idea of a necessary creative practice and even an ontological pragmatics," Guattari adds. "It is being's new ways of being which create rhythms, forms, colours, and the intensities of dance" (94). Such a formulation of the aesthetic nature of subjectivity provides an essential linkage toward discovering the rhetorical dimensions of the self, and it is this linkage that I will now explore.

Becoming-Enfolded If one's being is an aesthetic process, then rhetoric must be accounted for as an important aesthetic technology within that process. In order to offer a fulsome account of this technology, however, it is necessary to discuss the mode of thought that engenders the rhetorico-aesthetic composition of the self. In his work on Michel Foucault, Deleuze draws upon Foucault's research concerning the conditions that made possible the ancient Greek thought and care of the self. Deleuze indicates that such a mode of thought stands in contrast to that of the cogito, which maintains the identity of the thinking subject by its fundamental distinction from the object of thought. Whereas the Cartesian account of thought renders a stark divide between the enclosed thinking subject and the exterior object of thought, Deleuze states that, to the contrary, the motion of thought creates a fold, an interiority; this interiority, however, owes its shape to the animation of the exterior. Thought, therefore, is not the rational product of an enclosed interior: "The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside. . . . The inside as an operation of the outside . . . as if the ship were a folding of the sea" (1988,96-97). Vis-^-vis his interpretation of Foucault, Deleuze thus identifies a very different space and morphology of thought than the one embodied by the self-same subject of the cogito. The exercise of encountering the outside is therefore an exercise by which one simultaneously hollows out a space for self-knowledge, self-reflection, and self-mastery. This self-knowledge, however, is not founded upon the identity of the thinkitig subject. By Deleuze's account, the admonishment to "know thyself is actually a com-

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mand to know one's self in the world, as part of the multiplicity of the world, since one's self cannot be separated from, but is indeed enfolded among, the world. As Deleuze puts it, "[T]he relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with the outside and the two are in contact" (1988, 119). Because one is always already embedded in a multiplicity, then, the efforts by which one comes to know one's self necessarily create a folding in that multiplicity—a folding of the outside that forms a cenain interiority, a space in which to know one's self in the context of one's encounters with the outside. According to Deleuze, "It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension" (100). Simply put, the fold is the self in Deleuze's discourse. The space and function of the fold are paramount to a conception of rhetoric as an aesthetic technology of the self. If the fold is a space where one comes to know one's self, there must be multiple ways in which this knowing can occur (109). As we have seen, Guattari demonstrates that being is an ongoing aesthetic phenomenon—a becoming. It follows that one's ability to understand and cultivate that aesthetic phenomenon is a product of the ways in which one comes to know one's self. If the self is a creative, aesthetic process, then knowledge of one's self is constituted by the activity of selecting different aesthetic modes of being, different styles of life to inhabit. These styles are constitutive of our being and its expression, of our selfhood and its elaboration: styles of speech, modes of thought, gestures, expressions, movements, corporeal comportment, rhythms, forms, intensities—all plastic modes of being. But how are these styles adopted? How are these aesthetic modes decided upon? The fold, as a space where knowledge of one's self is cultivated, must also be seen as a space where the creation of one's self is conducted. Insofar as this creation is aesthetic, and depends upon the selection and fashioning of certain styles of life, the fold is a space of deliberation, judgment, and, above all, persuasion: a space where one persuades one's self* to compose one's self according to a multiplicity of styles, to select particular aesthetic modes of being from an entire field of those available at any given moment. Traditionally, rhetoric has been defined as the faculty by which one looks out of or beyond the self in order to observe the available means of persuasion, which aid the speaking subject in the creation of an external work.' Means of persuasion, however, are also available to one's self within the fold. The exercise of reflection—as a means of coming to know one's self—consists in persuading one's self to adopt particular styles of life from all those available in any given situation. Indeed, Paul Rabinow

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posits that subjectivity, k la Foucault, is "a form-giving practice that operates with and upon heterogeneous parts and forms available at a given point in history" (1997, xxxviii). One's self, then, is a local and ongoing aes&etic formation, continually becoming and coming into being; to die extent that the aesthetic nature of this process is produced by persuading one's self to adopt some styles of life over others, then this process is a thoroughly persuasive phenomenon. The aesthetic composition molded by this continually renewed persuasion might best be described as the rhetorical self. Within the fold, knowledge of one's self cannot be distinguished from the practice or process of one's self. The self cannot be thought outside of its elaboration, and the elaboration of the self cannot be accomplished without reflection upon one's self. The fold is not a theoretical or metaphorical space reserved for detached, abstract introspection. Deleuze writes, "[T]he relation to oneself will not remain the withdrawn and reserved zone of the free man, a zone independent of any 'institutional and social system.' The relation to oneself will be understood in terms of power-relations and relations of knowledge" (1988, 103). Deleuze continues, 'To think means to be embedded in the present-time stratum that serves as a limit: what can I see and what can I say today?" (119). In this context, the fold is also a space devoid of any mind/body dualism, a space where thought is deterritorialized onto the whole of the self, where thought is expression and expression thought. One does not think or persuade one's self to adopt a particular mode of being outside of existing power relations and relations of knowledge; rather, the movement of thought and self-persuasion is the very movement of experimentation and expression, like the in-between improvisational moment when the jazz soloist swings into a melodic sojourn instead of repeating the familiar refrain once more. Such a movement is not first thought and, then, only when it is completely thought, expressed. To the contrary, the improvisation itself is the simultaneous thought of expression and expression of thought. Thought here is thus rendered radically exterior, aesthetic, and, above all, rhetorical.

Becoming-Rhetorical Improvisation and invention are the methods of self-persuasion by which one fashions the ongoing aesthetic composition of the rhetorical self. Some styles and forms of being available in a given moment appear more attractive, more efficacious; yet movement, difference—becoming—are brought

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about only through one's alliance with such styles and forms, only in one's inhabitadon afaad experimentation with such aesthetic materials. There is no self other than its aesthetic materiality, and insofar as the various styles of this aesthetic existence are brought into being by a process of self-persuasion, there is no knowledge of or reflection upon the self outside of its ongoing rhetorical creation and transmutation. But where do diese aesthetic styles of life come from? Of what are these modes of being comprised? In order to answer these questions, we must scrutinize perhaps the most basic capacity of the self: the capacity to say "I." Clearly, the cogito functions to create a thinking subject able to refer to itself with certainty: the linguistic / is identical to the one speaking. By this account, / confirms the existence of an individual, an identity. Poststructuralist thought, however, calls this definition of the / into question. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, claim that "there is no subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation" (1987, 130). Put another way, discourse creates subjects by first creating suhj&ct positions from which to speak. The ability to say "1" thus depends upon an entire "assemblage" of subject positions that are the willful creation of no one, but are instead formed by the complex operations of discourse, or what Foucault calls "discursive regimes" (1972). In Deleuze's words, "[S]tatements refer back to an institutional milieu which is necessary for the formation both of the objects which arise in such examples of the statement and of the subject who speaks from this position (for example the position of the writer in society, the position of the doctor in the hospital or at his surgery)" (1988, 9). Simply put, the individual / is always already the product of a collective—a multiplicity—that endows it with value and meaning. In this way, "I is an other, a multiplicity of others" (Guattari 1995, 83). The very concept of the individual subject, therefore, is an abstract concept, a grammatical category. Hence, the category of the subject is never a marker of innate individuality. It is, instead, a position or location from which to speak that has been created by the social. A subject is thus, above all, a formalization of expression: the doctor is constituted by a form of expression distinct from the writer or the orator and has no existence outside of its production and value within the social. The subject, then, is a form of expression, but a form of expression that relies upon the conditions engendered by a particular discursive regime. A subject (the writer in society, for instance, or the doctor in the hospital) always implies a normative index of subjectivity against which one is measured. The subject is therefore a functional category that can never approach the multiplicity of the real, the multiplicity of the becomings involved in the continual ex-

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pression of one's being. In contrast to the subject, the rhetorical self thus appears as a strategic possibility whose movement and difference cannot be contained by or reduced to a grammatical category. Deleuze and Guattari's statement, then, that there is no subject, only collective assemblages of enunciation, does not readily translate into the nonexistence of a self. To the contrary, it is the self that throws the normative dimensions of the subject into question. According to Deleuze, "The struggle for a modem subjectivity passes through a resistance to the two present forms of subjection, the one consisting of individualizing ourselves on the basis of constraints of power, the other of attracting each individual to a known and recognized identity, fixed once and for all. The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis" (1988, 105-6). The practice of the self is thus found in the "difference, variation and metamorphosis"—the becomings—effected by one's experimentation with existing subject positions, formalized styles of being. While the subject is a coordinate of the social, this coordinate is not a single, fixed point. It is, rather, a relative center that expands and contracts as a given discursive regime makes access to this relative center either more or less accessible. A subject position is a permeable space through which one might pass in relative proximity to the center; occupation of this center, moreover, would constitute the realization of the ideal subject position. Given this description, it becomes clear that the self is never reducible to one subject position. There are, instead, multiple and proliferating relative centers, expanding and contracting, pocketing and animating the machinery of the social. The ihetorical self passes between, across, and even through these relative centers, these different modes of being. During its passage, the rhetorical self draws upon the materials of different subject positions to produce its ongoing aesthetic becoming. These various subject positions, these existing styles of life, thus house the fund of available aesthetic modalities with which one may rhetorically compose one's self. Drawing upon this fund of materials, moreover, requires a certain pragmatics—what Guattari calls "a creative practice and ontological pragmatics" (1995, 94). The process described here is not a practice of intrinsic agency or complete autonomy. Rather, as Deleuze has indicated, the depths and contours of the fold owe their morphology to existing power relations and relations of knowledge. Insofar as one is able to manage the ongoing aesthetic modality of the self, then, one must accept that the materials for its production will always be contingent and imperfect. A pragmatics of the available, and not the ideal, is required. Consequently, some aesthetic

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compositions of the self—some becomings—work better than others: some are smoother, more consistent, and can be prolonged, whereas others may operate clumsily, break down, or must be rethought altogether. The composition of the rhetorical self, therefore, leads not to guaranteed agency or absolute sovereignty, for these conditions would merely re-instantiate the Cartesian characteristics of the subject from which we departed at the outset of this essay. Instead, the rhetorical self is a contingent practice of difference and multiplicity whose results cannot be predicted, only responded to—a practice that leads only to more difference and multiplicity. It is this practice that one might even revel in, for it produces, in Guattari's fanciful description, "[a] subjectivity of the outside and of wide-open spaces which far from being fearful of finitude—the trials of life, suffering, desire and death—embraces them like a spice essential to the cuisine of life" (89-90). The pragmatics peculiar to the practice of the rhetorical self are thus found in an affirmation of and attunement to difference and contingency—an art of holding together "an embodied composition" (93), as Guattari would have it. The rhetorical self, then, is brought into being through the traversal of existing subject positions—those permeable relative centers—by persuading one's self to establish a certain proximity with one style of life, to ignore another altogether, or to inhabit several styles at once. In Deleuze's words, "[T]he self, self-Being, is determined by the process of subjectivation: by the places crossed by the fold" (1988, 114). Via this movement, the rhetorical self emerges as a plastic and contingent constellation: some may persuade themselves to form a fairly consistent pattern; for some, the locale may be different with each motion; and others may choose to oscillate only between a limited number of relative centers. The depths and contours, the surfaces and textures of the self, however, are brought into being only out of the abundance or poverty of materials available at any given moment. Persuasion of the self to adopt certain styles of life—to approximate an ideal or to avoid the coordinates of a certain subjectivity— produces this plastic and contingent constellation, a thoroughly aesthetic work. The rhetorical self, therefore, is composed of difference, multiplicity, and contingency—of its passage through the space of the "AND," where it is "neither one thing nor the other," to use Deleuze's phrase. The aesthetic morphology of the self is, in other words, homologous with the threshold fashioned by its movements. And yet, one final question remains: How are these styles accessible or evident except by virtue of their form? Without question, such styles cannot be thought or expressed outside of their formal manifestation. On this

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point, the patently rhetorical quality of the rhetorical self becomes most explicit. Forms, like agency, are not possessed. Aesthetic forms do not exist only for the self who encounters them. Rather, forms exist by virtue of their production and recognition as such by a collective. In this context, how can such forms—their cultivation and their expression—be "possessed" by a self? Indeed, these forms come into1>eing only in the encounter between self and collectivity—^in the space of the "AND." The threshold homologous with the morphology of one's rhetorical self, then, is produced through the formal recognition and experience of its aesthetic composition by the changing multiplicity of which it is comprised. Guattari refers to the breach of this threshold, and the encounter with multiplicity it demands, when he writes that the aesthetic production of the self takes advantage "of all occasions opening onto the outside world; a processual exploitation of event-centered 'singularities'—everything which can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation with the other" (1995, 7). Consequently, the becoming of the self is always a production of multiplicity and difference, wherein the folds and movements of the inside and outside are animated by the same fund of aesthetic forms and materials—where the inside is a folding of the outside.

And . . . The self has a history, and within its historicity the self cannot be distinguished from its expression—from what it becomes. The human that chisels and polishes a marble block into a given form creates an aesthetic work that is not "representative" of its self, but is no less a part of its self than are that human's own limbs; this creation—this extension of one's self into a series of creative events—is the process by which one inhabits a certain style of being. One's being is not constituted through the identity of an /. To the contrary, the continual becoming of one's self is cultivated through the inhabitation of various aesthetic forms and stylistic modalities that allow movement in certain directions, at certain speeds. Invariably, the result of this movement is a production of difference. Far from laboring to anchor the existence of being in its identity, then, the self may be composed through the movement and multiplicity of its becoming. Rhetoric is a precious aesthetic technology within this process. In order to compose and cultivate one's being in the world, one must persuade one's self to choose and orchestrate certain styles of life from among those avail-

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able into an entire aesthetics of being, a densely textured series of becomings. Rhetoric may thus be viewed not only as the rational art of selecting persuasive proofs to affect an audience, but also as a self-persuasive process by which one continually experiments with or improvises upon existing styles of life and thereby holds open the threshold of the rhetorical self. Along the contours of this threshold, rhetoric itself becomes an art of living. Department of Speech Communication The Pennsylvania State University Notes 1. There are too many good examples of this critique to list here in a comprehensive fashion. For perhaps the most seminal critique of this kind, however, see Fraser's "Rethinking the Public Sphere" (1992); or. for an entire volume devoted to such issues, consult Landes's feminism (1998). 2. Feminist scholars have been influential in this strain of scholarship as well. For readings that focus upon the intersection of technology and the human (especially with respect to questions of gender), see Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996) and Haraway's Simians. Cyborgs, and Wom*n(1991). For a more philosophical inquiry into the category of the posthuman, consult Fraser's "Foucault's Body Language" (1989). However, the question of the posthuman is. in many ways, the legacy of Nietzsche's work, which revolved around the question of what might lie beyond "man"; hence the Nietzschean concepts of self-overcoming and the superman. 3. Although I rely upon Guattari's definition of aesthetics here, the topic has received growing aitention within rhetorical studies, albeit in new and varied ways. Recent treati!;es on aesthetics and rhetoric that bear the most family resemblance to the one in this essay may be found in Whitson and Poulakos's ai^ument that rhetoric is an artistic enterprise that does not merely question, but indeed prefigures, the positivist and seemingly objective concepts of perspectivism or intersubjectivism (1993). as well as Biesecker's brief but highly suggestive discussion of subjectivity, resistance, and rhetoric in the context of Foucault's notion of style (1992). More generally, though, for an insightful treatment of rhetoric as a practical and tneaningful art of appearances in the context of classical Greek foundations, see Farrell's "Rhetorical Resemblance" (1986), 4. The concept of self-persuasion is addressed in a quite different but noteworthy manner through Burke's theory of rhetoric and identification. Burke's vision of self-persuasion depends, of course, on a stroog sense of cognition, and for this reason it does not come directly into play here. See Burke's Language as Symbolic Action: "Aristotle's Rhetoric centers in the speaker's explicit designs with regard to the confronting of an audience. But there are also ways in which we spontaneously, intuitively, even unconsciously persuade ourselves. In forming ideas of our personal identity, we spontaneously identify ourselves with family, nation, political or cultural cause, church, and so on" (1966. 301). See also A Rhetoric of Motives: "As for the relation between 'identification' and 'persuasion'; we might well keep it in mind that a speaker persuades an audience by the use of stylistic identifications; his act of persuasion may be for the purpose of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker's interests" (1969, 46). 5. Aristotle, of course, defines rhetoric as "tbe faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (Rhetoric bk. 1; 1954. p. 3).

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