Rhetorical Folds

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“The Fold” is a concept developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) over the course of his last several books, most notably Foucault and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.  Most generally, the fold is a way of talking about how self-contained systems (folded pieces of paper through to people, anything that can be said to have an “outside” and an “inside”) are constituted, but it also has a number of more specific meanings.  Folds allow what look like self-contained entities such as human subjects to be seen as enfolded from and traversed by the environmental, political, historical and other outsides that surround them, without positing any original unit, separate from other original units. On the other hand, they also carve out an ethical space (an inside) from within a world that is frequently portrayed as irrevocably dominated by the often oppressive political and other outsides currently in existence.  The concept describes how such construction takes place–what different ways are there to frame this ethical space, these outsides, and how we act within them?  What does “fold” mean, as an ethical way of creating spaces for action and interaction (as opposed to, say, cutting or tearing or mechanical stamping?) Finally, and most tellingly given their already evidently slippery nature, folds are ways of thinking about creativity–when writing an essay, a short story or poem, or making a film (or doing anything else in life, really) how does what exists turn into what’s new?  How does what starts out as outside-an unfamiliar text or environment, an acquaintance we have just met-end up as inside-inside our heads, in our routines and the way we move through now-familiar spaces, in the memories called up by the laughter of old friends?  (As any reader of Plato’s Phaedrus or of Luce Irigaray or Maurice Merleau-Ponty knows, such folding can also extend to the core of our own intimate embodiment).  And vice versa: how is what starts as inside our heads transformed into something outside of us?  Was it ever truly inside us in the first place?

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This bring me to rhetoric.  People have offered more definitions for this term than it’s remotely possible to talk about here, but many of them are fundamentally bound up with the question of new events, ideas and institutions, and how they replace old ones, as well as the ethics and politics involved in slippage between the old and new, inside and outside, individual and collective, contingent and necessary.   Rhetoric can give us thousands of years of forays into why, when, and how new foldings (or unfoldings) emerge within human experience and its own folding onto its outside.  Thus, I seek to explore here how rhetoric works as a tool for folding or unfolding (people, places, situations, works of art).   I will also think about how rhetoric folds onto and interferes with its own outsides, from philosophy and politics to art, cooking and everyday experience.

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The final term contained in the concept of the fold is perhaps the most important: friendship.  I encourage anyone who passes through here in the future to fold your own words in with mine in ways that will be joyful as well as productive.