What a Rhetorician Means by "Truth"

An interesting challenge from a reader who self-identified as feeling defensive when reading my urgings to liberate ourselves from stuff:


"...This, for me, raises the question of universality. I am very curious about how you think your theory of stuff might change when viewed in terms of race/class/gender/ethnicity/ability etc. The "bling" phenomenon in urban African-American culture, for example, strikes me as conspicuous consumerism, consciously performed by a historically underprivileged and disenfranchised group, as a means of asserting status (which is both a power-getting strategy and a survival strategy). Bling is definitely stuff, but would you assess that particular "stuff" in the same way you'd assess your own stuff?"


Ah, universality. As a rhetorician, I cannot embrace universality, essentialism, etc. However, I have dared to invoke Socrates, Christ, and Gandhi as my examples of a proper relationship to the material world and these men are usually associated with one or another sort of universality. Let me do the truly Socratic thing and go back to a working definition for my term. As the quote above indicates, the reader means to distinguish between "universal" as the opposite of "individual" or "cultural." You can see the whole message here. When she wrote of her own defensiveness, she was distinguishing between the universal and the individual; wondering if my broad statements about our disordered relationship to material objects really applied to herself. When the reader wrote the specific lines above, she is questioning whether my broad "universal" assertions are culture-specific. 


Before giving my complete answer which involves further definition of the term, I'd like to take each of these possible challenges to my theory of stuff (oh dear, that's a turn of phrase that may stick) in turn. This is an important question because if my experiments with the truth of clothing, food, and clutter are valid, then I can't simply be asserting that they are true for me. I am clearly saying "we" and "us" in my postings, so I better back that up. So, as for the distinction between the universality of my statements on this score: yes, I'm doing universality. I do not believe we are drastically different from each other in the way our current cultural understanding conceives of individuality. I believe that we are all motivated by our common need for love. I don't believe this is untrue for any person ever. We want love and community with other people and our consumer culture perverts that in ways that are not good for us--any of us. 


Now, having dispensed with the more general question, I'll turn my attention to the specific examples of individual exceptions to my broad, universalist rule. The reader brought up the possibility that people with specific neurological or cognitive issues could be exceptions to my assertion that memories and things have no deep connection. In doing this she taps her own authority as a person who suffers from such a problem and I know this moment well as a teacher: this is the point at which students come up with special circumstances that would surely confound a general principle. It's a necessary stage in testing the veracity of a concept. Allow me to respond to this challenge by making the same rhetorical move as the reader who posed the question. I, myself, have such a condition. As an adult, I have discovered my many seemingly inexplicable failures in school as a child are attributable to dyslexia. One of the quirky ways in which it manifests in me is an inability to remember faces. I don't mean a vague difficulty in pinning a name to a face. Everyone experiences that. I can't recognize a student currently enrolled in one of my classes if I see her outside the classroom--even at the end of the semester. I confuse people I know with similar hair color or body shape, even if I know one of them fairly well. Only people I see literally every day are immediately recognizable to me. So, I really do understand the need for visual memory cues. I recently got into the time-consuming but worth-while habit of requiring my students to send me a photo of themselves and attaching it to that student's contact info in my gmail account. That has helped me pin names to faces but nothing helps when what seems to me like a complete stranger says hello in the grocery store. There is only so much you can fight this kind of disability before it becomes your whole identity. There are more important things about me than my dyslexia. I accept the limitations and awkward social situations dyslexia has given me because I know it has also given me some advantages. I have to solve problems creatively to work around what seem to be memory problems but are actually perception problems. This has made me a very efficient student and an insightful rhetorician. It's a fair trade. 


And this is the point in a classroom where someone suggests I've gone off the original topic when, in fact, I'm just arriving at the heart of the issue. I believe that one of the great advantages dyslexia has confired on me is the ability to step outside of a line of thinking and re-imagine it another way. This is essentially what rhetoricians do. So, let me step outside my explanation of how I see dyslexia as a fair trade. The original question was posed as one of "disability." Disability is not a thing in itself. It is a rhetorical construction. I'm not saying it isn't real. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm just saying that "disabilty" is attached to a discourse in our culture that establishes, among many other things, that individuals with a disability need to self-identify to the non-disabled of the world. This discourse also establishes that the non-disabled are unable to understand the life experience of the disabled. And so, this is my problem with responding directly to my reader's concern about whether the principles I'm outlining apply to her: she has isolated herself with a rhetorical construction and I don't want her to position herself that way. I countered the discourse conventions of "disability" by mirroring her rhetorical move, asserting that I, too, have a cognitive disability. I chose to do this because it is the only way I can position my reader as I want, as someone who is not different from me. And I didn't make that rhetorical move just to persuade that reader. I also made that move so I could explain what I promised at the start of this post: "my complete answer which involves further definition of the term."


And so, I would like to argue that the position I am taking in my "theory of stuff" is not one of universality, but one of rhetorical construction. I do not believe that individuals differ in their relationship to material objects and that can be labeled universalist. However, I will argue that my reasoning behind this statement is not universalist because I am not basing the statement on enlightenment-era assumptions about a mechanically ordered universe. Rather, I am arguing against such a scientistic view of the world as a well-ordered machine in which individual differences between people can be studied, measured, and explained. I am arguing that the world is made up of rhetorical constructions. We name our experiences. We have to do this to make sense of the world and to communicate with each other. However, rhetoric is powerful stuff. It is not the pliable tool we sometimes mistake it for. The very words that we use to communicate with others are the same vehicles we use to make our experiences intelligible to ourselves and those words come with baggage attached. We have to sift through the baggage and figure out how the words we use actually control our thinking. For example, I say that I am dyslexic because my culture has this term and it is useful in explaining how I am different. But the day I believe that term is what I am, I'm in trouble. On that day, I have to turn to a medical definition of myself and I have handed over my identity to medical discourse. And I would do that if it seemed medical discourse had a handle on my identity but they don't. Try to find a clear definition of dyslexia--and it's one of the easy cognitive disorders to diagnose. Yet it's a constellation of possible symptoms that don't ever seem to manifest the same way in any two people. I can't hand my identity over to a discourse that imprecise. I will, however, use the word when I need to reference the limited things it denotes in my case: my weird glitches of visual memory that routinely provide me with social embarrassment as an adult and that made school a hell as a child. But I don't want to hand my identity over to a medical definition of disability when this thing that gets called dyslexia is also useful to me. 


I believe we construct understandings of our stuff that placate our anxieties about the world. However, these rhetorical constructions tie us to political and economic realities that are soul-killing. If we resist this truth in the name of personal identity, we justify our self-soothing by reductionism.


I realize that I have dealt with only the last of the reader's big-four of human difference: race/class/gender/ethnicity/ability. But my answer is the same for all of these.