The Imagination of Persuasion
Agnes Callard’s essay “Against Persuasion” is a piece I have read with increasing bemusement: what, exactly, is being imagined as persuasion here? How is it possible that her hero of listening is Socrates, the old gadfly of Athens? It is even more puzzling when we see how she interprets this advice in her own life. The question I take from this essay is How do we imagine persuasion?
Almost every available commonplace imagination of persuasion is one of compulsion and necessity, produced by a mysterious (and often sinister) force. Odysseus must escape the song of the sirens lest he and his crew be dashed on the rocks. Gorgias described persuasion as a force of compulsion that acts as a magical incantation. We might recall the early modern image of Gallic Hercules leading people whose ears are chained to his mouth, or, more recently, The Voice of the Bene Gesserit, that uses tone and timbre to force others to act against their will. Some of these images circulate as if they are established facts. There are experts who regularly testify in court about “brainwashing,” there are manuals on mind control, and it is not difficult to see the magical theory of language in the more outlandish claims made for neuro-linguistic programming. Even what appears at first as a weaker version of persuasion—influence—turns us to images of compulsion, whether in its astrological origin as the influence of the stars or to the paranoid fantasies of the “influencing machine,” as in James Matthew’s 18th-century diagram of the Air Loom, pictured below. But coercion, whether thought to be magical or material, is not persuasion, but the imposition of one will upon another. At the same time, the image of rhetoric as mere speech is often parodied as one of absurd weakness. To be “all talk” is to be nothing at all. The embassy to Achilles fails—it is only the actual death of Patroclus that motivates him to leave his tent and return to the war. So too the speech of windbags is not an image of persuasion but its failure. How, then, can we imagine persuasion?
It is difficult to imagine persuasion because its phenomenality is split and shifting. What appears to one party differs from what appears to the other. This is the moment of disagreement. But then the communication of how things may be seen, the possibility of an alternative appearance, is glimpsed. In light of this, perhaps the best image of persuasion would be something like an optical illusion: not one in which appearance is seen to be false but invincible, but rather where two appearances compete but cannot both be manifest at once. To see the image is to see both images. The persuaded person who can only see two people kissing does not lose this image when they see the vase. They now understand that image differently, however, as creating the possibility for a separate appearance that would transform figure to ground. But this too, we must admit, is a flawed metaphor. In the Vexierbild below, these two possibilities of perception do not tug us one way or another, but oscillate between two discrete states: ears become bill, bill becomes ears.
The experience of persuasive possibilities might be best captured in works of art. I think especially of those that refuse to resolve the image into a correct form. Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” or Melville’s The Confidence-Man never give the reader an answer about what truly happened and so force us to follow the movements of our own confidence as it shifts from one account to another. Film can do this as well, as in Kurosawa’s adaptation of “In a Grove” in the great Rashomon, or, more recently, in Kore-eda’s Shoplifters: we first see this family of petty thieves in their own light and through their own lies. When the camera turns upon the family, so to speak, with the gaze of normal society, we are left with a question: what is the right way of seeing? The question may remain open, but as open, it is unresolved: we feel the pressure of making a choice, of aligning ourselves, even when those choices are known to us as fictions.
That these are works of fiction is what makes the phenomenality of persuasion appear: we know—or ought to—that there is no real event that has transpired, nothing to confirm or deny our belief other than our own sense of the plausibility of an account. We discover a map of our own habits of credulity and suspicion, our sense of what is likely, true, right, probable. It is precisely in discovering that that sense remains fully intact even as we enter a fictional world that shows us the image of persuasion: it is memory’s tax upon anticipation, a taste in truths, a desire to complete appearances with what cannot appear. It is a complex, multi-faceted mood: though it may be the product of deliberation, it is not the product of the will.
Reflecting on this imagination is not an idle concern. We take our orientations and attitudes from images. Much of persuasion might really be a criticism of these latent, unexamined imaginations that circulate as meanings. Persuasion’s image today suffers from the brittleness of our understanding of self. Current common sense (that old vanguard of ideology) suggests our experience is sealed away into the windowless monad of Self. This facile conception forgets that we are within others’ experience as much as they are within ours. Even if life is but a dream, I see you rowing, more or less merrily, through mine. Your words, your voice, your example is an illumination of my experience. If I attempt to muster together what is mine in experience, I am left with nothing but what runs through my fingers: the experience may be mine, but it is always of the Not-Me. An image of persuasion would have to contain this dialectical paradox, the laying claim to what I see is other, that what is real is understood as the figure-ground relation of a duck-rabbit image, where what is thine makes possible what is mine, and where I Am makes possible what Thou Art.