At the level of rhetoric itself, imputations of rhetoric are a mark of social unpleasantness. In ordinary usage, the term implies pretension, bombast, even deliberate dishonesty. As a result, the social sciences have generally treated rhetoric as an epiphenomenon on a real world to which it blocks access. Yet the consequent refusal to take rhetoric seriously is symptomatic of precisely what rhetoric does best: it backgrounds its own rhetoricity. Thus, all claims that social science should be free of rhetoric, that it should make modesty its watchword, are as rhetorical and immodest as anything they oppose. They suffer from the ultimate self-deception of positivism, the illusion of pure, direct, unmediated knowledge. And this conceit, as Vico points out with delicate subversion in the New Science (1744), is what makes the pretensions of scholarship and those of politics so hard to tell apart. This paper is a prolegomenon to the contrary argument that, in some intellectually productive sense, all social interaction is rhetorical, and that the denial of its rhetoricity perpetuates a separation of expression from structure that is logically incompatible with the recognition of agency in the creation of social relations.

My purpose here is not to document the rhetoricity of social science, which is a relatively trivial instantiation of the larger problem, albeit a useful one inasmuch as it challenges our complacency. It is, rather, to sketch the necessary presuppositions for a rhetorical account of social relations in general. Such an account (I would only label it a "theory" unless we can agree to extend that label to indigenous exegetical traditions as well) must be conceived as what Bourdieu (1977) has called a "theory of [social] practice," an examination of the part rhetoric plays in the active constitution of social relationships, and especially of the relationship between cultural form, performance, and the creative deformation of structures and normative patterns . It must be an explanation of how "emergent" social structure (Bauman 1977; Karp 1980; Giddens 1984) can be creatively modeled and explored through the daily interactions of sentient human beings.

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