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Identity
and "Common Sense": Rhetoric's Responsibility Dana Anderson (Indiana University)
“Identity” has been a favored and fashionable target of theory since poststructuralism, a synecdoche of the entire Cartesian legacy, the mystifying calling card of the essentialized, freely self-determining, extra-linguistic human subject that never existed. But despite the mass disavowal of identity as a valid explanatory construct, rhetoric maintains an interest in—even a responsibility to—the concept of identity that should ensure its centrality within rhetoric’s critical vocabulary of the person. This responsibility, as I will elaborate, originates in rhetoric’s long tradition as a doxastic art, where suasive effects presuppose an understanding of the commonly held beliefs of one’s addressed audience. Identity—the idea that people can formulate and share answers to the question of “who I am”—is as defining as it is “common sense” within the contemporary doxa of the nature of the person (particularly in Western cultures); its prominence as a seemingly elemental feature of personhood authorizes a range of persuasive potentials in the expression of one’s identity, and these potentials are uniquely rhetoric’s task to highlight and critique. Building on a line of inquiry that extends from Aristotle to Perelman and to the current work of continental rhetorical pragmatists such as Ruth Amossy, Ekkehard Eggs, and Anne Cauquelin, I will suggest a perspective on identity that more finely attunes rhetorical theory to the doxastic grounding of identity’s rhetorical potentials. Treating identity as a self-story formed in relation to culturally defined topoi of selfhood illuminates how specific commonplaces delimit not only the content of (normalized) identities but also the forms in which they can be effectively, strategically expressed toward specific rhetorical ends. In discussion, I hope to further clarify these doxastic functions of identity by referencing autobiographical narratives where identity grounds explicit argumentative aims, such as Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (2001); and narratives of profound identity transformations (or conversions), such as David Brock’s Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (2002) and Deirdre McCloskey’s Crossing: A Memoir (1999).
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