Tug-of-War

From "Rhetoric" by Stanley Fish:

...Gordon's (Robert Gordon) pages are replete with the vocabulary of enclosure or prison; we are "locked-into" a system of belief we did not make; we are "demobilized" (that is, rendered less mobile); we must "break out", we must "unfreeze the world as it appears to common sense". What will help us to break out, to unfreeze, is the discovery "that the belief-structures that rule our lives are not found in nature but are historically contingent," for that discovery, says Gordon, "is extraordinarily liberating". To the question, what is the content of that liberation, given a world that is rhetorical through and through, those who work Gordon's side of the street usually reply that emancipation will take the form of a strengthening and enlarging of a capacity of mind that stands to the side of, and is therefore able to resist, the appeal of the agenda that would enslave us. That capacity of mind has received many names, but the one most often proposed is "critical self-consciousness." Critical self-consciousness is the ability (stifled in some, developed in others) to discern in any "scheme of association," including those one finds attractive and compelling, the partisan aims it hides from view; and the claim is that as it performs this negative task critical self-consciousness participates in the positive task of formulating schemes of associations (structures of thought and government) that are in the service not of a particular party but of all mankind.

Indeed. But wait...

But it would seem, from the evidence marshalled in this essay, that something is always happening to the way we think, and that it is always the same something, a tug-of-war between two views of human life and its possibilities, no one of which can ever gain complete and lasting ascendancy because in the very moment of its triumphant articulation each turns back to the direction of the other.

...

What we seem to have is a tale full of sound and fury, and signifying itself, signifying a durability rooted in inconclusiveness, in the impossibility of there being a last word. (Fish, Stanley. "Rhetoric" in Critical Terms for Literary Study. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 (Hedges))

And the dialogue moves on. What seems important to me is that the dialogue does move on because as soon as it stops, so will the mystery that is life-- and all that could have been will never be.