6 - A Grammar of Motives: the rhetorical constitution of the subject

Summary

[W]e found our pre-pre-introduction actually taking shape. And this we found in the selection of our pentad, as a “final” set of terms that seemed to cluster about our thoughts about the Constitution as an “enactment.”

Burke, GM

[I]deology has the function (which defines it) of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects.

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes… Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.

Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion”

Undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example, of meaning, but also of acts).

Ibid.

GM officially inaugurates dramatism. Our chapter subtitle borrows a term from the book's longest chapter, “The Dialectic of Constitutions.” In speaking of the constitution of the subject, we modify one of Burke's statements of the task he envisioned for SM: “The Symbolic should deal with unique individuals, each its own peculiarly constructed act, or form. These unique ‘constitutions’ being capable of treatment in isolation, the Symbolic should consider them primarily in their capacity as singulars” (RM 21–22). The “unique individual” is ambiguous insofar as it can refer to the individual either as body or as the subject constructed in the rhetoric of individualism.