Conversations with Sara Jameson are always nice to have. We talked about agonism in display, or more to the point, what is argument? Is argument good? Is argument always agonistic? We talked about the necessity of conflict in society. When I first came to grad school, I was a very anti-conflict person. Now, I embrace it. I understand its necessity. I understand that concensus, voting, and compromise merely mask conflict. So, how do we deal with conflict? Perhaps argument is not a bad thing, but hyper aggressive argument is? The problem with arguments and not being aggressive, though, is the language that we use around arguments. Lakoff notes that the dominant metaphor of argument in our society is “argument is war”: you win arguments, you strike down someone else’s argument, you destroy your opponent, you lose, you are humiliated, you can’t stand up to someone else’s attack.
Sara also lent me Clueless in Academe by Gerald Graff, which has a chapter titled “Two Cheers for the Argument Culture.” Sara led me to understand that he critiques Tannen for critiquing agonistic argument while simultaneously engaging in it; therefore, perhaps argument is inescapable in our society?
How should argument be made so that it is not agonistic, so that it promotes listening and dialogue, not conquering and obliteration? How can we make argument dialogic, (polyphonic?), so that it’s not aggressive? I agree with Lunsford that “Everything is an argument,” which is both an obvious statement and a profound one. It’s also troubling, because if, in our culture, everything is an argument, then everything is war; we have built up aggression and agonism. Conflict is fine, aggression onto others, I view as bad.
Well, or is it? Ong makes the argument that aggression can be good. For instance, the young child aggresses (?) him/her/hirself onto the mother when frightened, invading her private space. This can certainly be viewed as aggression. But I wonder how much of this is aggression and how much of it is regression (the child becoming once again one with the mother). Perhaps it is aggression, in which case we must assess, what aggression is good and what aggression is bad? And are good and bad the right words for this kind of debate?
