Bang!
(Indeterminate, yet sharply
delineated noise; perhaps of gunshot or fist thumping table or boot contacting
stone)
"I refute it
thus."
--(Dr. Samuel Johnson,
kicking a stone; rejecting Bishop George Berkeley's idealist philosophy.)
Furniture
No matter what the debate,
whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be some
furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and
abstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity,
we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open,
where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they are
external to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there is
another world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions.
Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage of
getting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical danger
of appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.
The Realist's Dilemma
Of course, the hitting is
not just a slapping; not only words signify. The table-thumping does its work
as meaningful action, not mere behavior. All the pointings to, demonstrations
of, and descriptions of brute reality are inevitably semiotically mediated and
communicated. Rocks, trees and furniture are not already rebuttals of
relativism, but become so precisely at the moment, and for the moment, of their
invocation. We term this the realist's dilemma. The very act of producing a
nonrepresented, unconstructed external world is inevitably representational,
threatening, as soon as it is produced, to turn around upon and counter the
very position it is meant to demonstrate.
The solidity and
out-there-ness of furniture (etc.) makes it a hard case for relativists to
deconstruct. And just as commonsense observation is the hard case for
relativism, it is the soft case for realism. Furniture arguments are realism
working on its chosen soft ground. However, there is a cost for realism in this
strategy: for in resorting to these cases, realists appear to be setting aside,
conceding even, a huge amount of more contentious stuff to
relativism--language, madness, the social order, cognition, even science. And
it is generally disputation about these sorts of things that ends in
table-thumping, the point of such gestures being to bolster a realist defence
of something more contestable. In the rhetorical situation we are describing,
the relativists may be winning the Epistemological Wars, but are in danger of
losing the final battle. The forces of relativism are gathered about the last
and best-defended castle of realism (Fortress Furniture), laying siege to it,
and in the process suffering a blistering bombardment--Bang! Bang! Bang!
The Bottom Line: The
Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations - Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter
