ABSTRACT
Notorious for its self-serving definitions of decorum, George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) seems to join an explicitly pedagogical motive with consistent definitions and uses of gender and rhetoric. Not only does the Arte envision itself as a manual for the formation of courtiers, but it also implicitly fashions a definition of the appropriate position for women under a female monarch, even (or particularly) for anyone "a litle peruerse, and not disposed to reforme her selfe by hearing reason.,,1 The happy combination of the language of rhetoric with a formal reliance on the persuasions of pedagogy has eased the appropriation of the handbook by both formalist and historicist approaches to the English Renaissance. To these, Puttenham provides either a contemporary terminology for describing textual mechanisms or an example of the ideologico-political consequences or motives of rhetorical practices common in Elizabeth's court, and in either case he understandably appeals to a criticism that seeks in part the reformation of its readers, or at any rate their education to the inscription of power in the contemporary language of gender. For this critical reformation occurs in part, as in the Arte ofEnglish Poesie, not only by hearing texts' reasons, but by learning how to read them, as it were, perversely, where reading seems least called for and where such "learning" most resists formulation. However imperfect in itself, the Arte (and, more broadly, the genre of which it is an example) seems to indicate the possibility that reading itself will provide a common institutional and discursive ground between such forms of criticism-a way of moving, in Patricia Parker's recent phrase, "beyond formalism, differently. ,,2
The project that this movement announces is compelling, and to some degree it is underway-if, however, in directions that can seem contradictory. Efforts in this country to align the strategies of rhetorical reading with the concerns of feminism have begun to problematize and extend dated or conceptually limiting analyses of the linguistic and ideological construction of sexuality. 3 At the same time, historicizing criticism that seeks to describe the "power of forms," whether in the English Renaissance or elsewhere, has tended to substitute for reflection theories of history the more dynamic mediation of discursive power in the formation of a dominant ideology persuasively coordinating the formal and the empirical. The institutional
effects of this distinction have at time been suggestively bitter, perhaps because the tacit agreement between deconstructive, cultural materialist, and certain feminist criticism about what lies beyond formalism is threatened by incompatible understandings of the term "beyond." Not only is matter, the term that organizes this effective critical accord, the site of, rather than the solution to, the temporal and epistemological impasses encountered by the desire to move through reading "beyond formalism," but the concept of material mediation, conceived in dialectical terms that should not be applied uncritically (and in particular not to the representations of sexuality with which Renaissance rhetoricians sought to educate and persuade their readers), is the subject of some confusion. 4 For to the extent that textual production, understood as either reading or writing, provides access to matter, however equivocal the status of that access, it become dispensable or contingent. Unless the terms are correlative, proceeding beyond formalism then becomes a way of going beyond reading, a project whose ease and desirability depend more on deliberate misreadings of the term "reading" than on consistent critiques of its "politics." Such correlation, however, cannot without simplification be expressed in terms that relate notions of praxis to the practice of reading or writing. 5 That this dilemma is in tum taken to suggest that we can in no sense go "beyond" reading seems to bring into question the passage from this notion of materiality to the more familiar, if equally opaque concept of matter associated with empirical events and with political and ideological resistance and change. 6
Retaining for the moment only the outlines of this problem, I want in this essay to address the possibility that the distinctions between formalist and historicist criticism that Puttenham's manual allows us to pose, if not to resolve, themselves arise as a way of displacing other difficulties. These concern the more general question of whether gender and gender difference-as they come to be represented and used in a theory of persuasion-can be aligned with either the historicity of forms or that of empirical events. The question is on the face of it contradictory, even if the analogy at work is not trivial. Persuasion, after all, involves a use of language that seems strictly intersubjective, one which it is entirely appropriate to define as one would the exchange between a forming and a reformed self, and by extension between the recognizable figures of the teacher and pupil or, as in Puttenham, between an argument and its representation in examples, or between man and woman. 7 It is no news that the definition of this exchange has suffered a considerable theoretical elaboration, both in aesthetic and in explicitly historical terms, and most notably as the concept of mediation is introduced and what Luce Irigaray has called its "old dream of symmetry" is opened to question. 8 The subordination of the second terms-the reformed self or persuaded subject, the pupil, the example, the woman-in the analytical sciences of logic, education, and the law not only follows analogous discursive patterns, but often has the same content. And it also remains an open question whether the "alignment" of gender difference with formal or empirical categories does not itself repeat this gesture of subordination. It is only in the most deliberate cases that reading escapes from
the problematic of what has been called the "reontologization" of the chora, the "essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases" that we find in Kristeva and Irigaray and whose very resistance to the geometry of position-being between or mediating-becomes symbolic law. 9
It is no coincidence., then., that when Puttenham's Arte reflects upon its primary formal categories-persuasion. denomination-it does so in examples not only constructed to persuade or educate., but understood to be externalizations by which the form of language reflects upon itself. To suggest that the language in which this reflection and questioning are to occur necessarily repeats the asymmetries it discloses, and that for this reason it must take into account and in part be about this repetition., is to say that in its most perversely rigorous form this language is necessarily that of rhetoric. And to suggest that the necessity of this argument comes from the desire to displace its asymmetry is to say that the epistemology of rhetoric is inseparable from a reflection on the difference of gender. Rhetoric, and in particular the rhetoric of examples., will always have been the "demoiselle aux miroirs" in which this reflection finds its term. Jean Paulhan's celebrated phrase reflects the logic binding the analytics of externalization to both rhetoric and the figure of the woman., but it is subtle in suggesting that the status of this figure is itself far from clear. 10 The allusion to the "caballero de los espejos" episode in Don Quixote shows to what extent relations between "demoiselles" and "caballeros," rather than serving to wed linguistic concerns to the empirical figure of gender, tend instead to express these as the abyssal intertextuality of literary history. Whatever its practical consequences, this tendency should remind us that what we call "desire"-the desire., for instance, to move "beyond formalism"-is not only, or not primarily, a subjective or libidinal function. Desire names the disjunction between the discourse of subjectivity that structures our understanding of reading and the rhetorical form of language's epistemology. And because in this sense it is strictly a nominal mechanism for producing text, the desire to move differently beyond formalism becomes in every instance the matter of reading.
