The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Cultural Memory in the Present)

by Ernst van Alphen

In times of intercultural tensions and conflicts, sincerity matters. Traditionally, sincerity concerns a performance of authenticity and truth, a performance that in intercultural situations is easily misunderstood. Sincerity plays a major role in law, the arts with its religious and cultural conflicts and major transformations in representational idioms and media. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is concerned with the ways in which the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different media and disciplines. The book focuses on the theatricality of sincerity, its bodily, linguistic, and social performances, and the success or failure of such performances.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem with this kind of book is that you’re always going to get exactly as much as the book has to give. It isn’t bad; there’s nothing wrong with it. But the inherent limitations of the book’s format means I was always going to come away from this feeling like we didn’t quite get the bottom of things, and that’s now how I feel. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is an edited volume of fourteen different essays by fourteen different authors employing fourteen different methodologies all orbiting the theme, as the title suggests, of sincerity as a rhetorical gesture. Rather than a single author who argues a single thesis that gets developed along several succeeding chapters, you get a lot of different theses that approach the issue of sincerity in different ways. This reproduces the experience, as my wife says, of a conference, where lots of people from different sub-sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines’ niches try to explain their ideas to a room full of non-insiders who can do nothing more than try their best to hang in before asking an inane question about their own miniscule area of expertise that has nothing to do with anything anyone was talking about. So I’m reading about musicology and criminology and seventeenth-century Dutch plays and all I want to do is raise my hand and ask, “Yes, but have you considered the works of David Foster Wallace?” Actually, Wallace didn’t come up once. Neither did Adam Kelly or Jed Purdy. Meaning that this is what it could only ever have been: incomplete. What the authors here are doing well, though, is arriving, consistently, albeit in different terms, at the Problem of Sincerity. The thing about sincerity – conceptually, rhetorically – that absolutely must be confronted by anyone writing seriously about it is that it cannot be proven—there’s no mechanism for guaranteeing the sincerity of another person. The aporia between avowal and belief is, as has been said, unbridgeable. For Adorno, and for Trilling too (sort of), this meant that sincerity was a nonsense. But then, as anyone who’s read Wallace or Foer knows, there is still a way to get to sincerity (i.e., via faith/trust). My interest in reading this volume was to see how other scholars approached and tackled this thorny problem, but the essays, generally, didn’t have enough room to push through into this new territory. I suspect, at last, that this is because we’re not talking about quite the same sincerities here. And this is how the mitosis of discipline into sub-discipline occurs.