Macksoud’s move to New York brought him back to the state from which he had begun. He was born in Brooklyn in the year of the depression, 1934, the son of Lebanese Catholic immigrants. Hearing of new opportunities in California, the Macksoud family moved to the Los Angeles area shortly after the war. As a Catholic, Macksoud was enrolled in the local parochial schools and eventually attended Loyola High School where, under Jesuit supervision, he received an exceptional early education. While, on the one hand, this education prepared him well for future academic ambitions, on the other hand, he found the Catholic training to be too blinkered and dogmatic and rebelled against it. This would not, of course, have been the first time that a Catholic youth raised in southern California felt existential tension between the lures of the land of sun and plenty and the rigors of the creed of the crucifixion. And like many young men caught in similar tensions, Macksoud was not clear about what direction his life should take. It’s one thing to turn away but it’s another to know what new heading to follow.

    Consequently, Macksoud spent time at Los Angeles City College and the Valley Jr. College before being admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles. He then entered the UCLA Law School for a year before shifting his major to psychology—the subject in which he received a Bachelor’s Degree in 1957. But he found even psychology to be a wrong turn. Having experienced disillusionment with religion and law Macksoud found only further disappointment with psychology—which signaled the bottoming out of a progressive slide toward profound disillusionment with what emerged as central to all these pursuits—their sacred texts. As a result, he could not escape a growing sense of becoming disillusioned with language itself—and sufficiently disillusioned that language began to present itself as the place to make a stand, the place to dig deeper for response to a question that kept turning up around the corners of every inquiry: Why is language relied upon so much and yet, when pressed, found to be so unreliable?

    Over the next six years Macksoud devoted progressively more of his time and energy to an intensive study of language, rhetoric, and interpretation. As part of this growing interest a former student of John’s and a lifelong friend and colleague, Craig R. Smith, recalls that John began to hone his skills at argumentation by participating in the UCLA intercollegiate debate program. Involvement in this program brought Macksoud into contact with professors of speech and communication. They eventually persuaded him to enter into graduate study with them and he emerged in 1964 with a PhD from the UCLA Department of Speech.

    In the fall of that same year Macksoud accepted an appointment to the faculty of the Speech Communication Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Here, almost immediately, his focus on language gathered new momentum as it encountered, first hand, a source of familiar inspiration. At the invitation of the university, Kenneth Burke had become that year’s Regent’s Lecturer and from late October to early December Burke delivered four speeches at Campbell Hall. These lectures became chapters two through five of Language As Symbolic Action—subsequently published in 1966. Macksoud was intimately familiar with Burke’s thinking, having just completed a dissertation entitled “The Literary Theories of Kenneth Burke and the Discovery of Meanings in Oral Interpretation.” During the course of Burke’s lectureship the two men met and began a long friendship. After reading Macksoud’s dissertation Burke commented, “You are the only one who has understood me.” Given the volume and complexity of Burke’s writings, this remark was an exceptional compliment. And given Macksoud’s heightened attunement to the peculiar shortcomings of language revealed through years of research, few could have appreciated the potential for misunderstanding more acutely than he.

    However, while Macksoud’s dissertation generally explains and praises Burke’s work it also offers critical examination of his thinking on language. In the dissertation Macksoud makes a broad separation between early and late stages in Burke’s development as a language theorist and aligns himself with the early Burke while distancing himself from the late Burke. Beginning with Counter-Statement and proceeding through Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, The Philosophy of Literary Form, and ending with portions of A Grammar of Motives Burke develops what Macksoud calls “the doctrine of perspective.” With the word “perspective” Macksoud notes that Burke has in mind the “inescapable selectivity of any linguistic description [emphasis added].” The word “doctrine” is Macksoud’s choice and he explains, “from the fact that [for Burke] the mere acceptance of the idea of perspective—as an inescapable dimension of every situation—structures all reality, we are justified in the use of the quasi-religious term.”

    With the doctrine of perspective Burke offers a particular kind of “epistemological relativism” that, according to Macksoud, emphasizes the “impossibility of saying everything about an object and/or work that is central, rather than the impossibility of knowing everything about the object.” On the basis of this linguistically bound epistemological relativism Burke arrives at a position from which it makes sense to claim that a purely descriptive, phenomenological, or empirical inquiry is impossible. In his dissertation Macksoud refers to this kind of linguistically bound epistemological relativism as “lexical relativism” and it provides the foundation for an early version of his rhetorically based theory of language and interpretation.

    The impossibility of purely descriptive modes of observation and inquiry, the impossibility of “saying,” results not from “what is included in the verbal equivalent of an event, but rather what is omitted.” The selectivity of what is included in a description is guaranteed by the necessity of omitting something. Craig Smith notes that this selectivity constitutes a form of editing and Macksoud believed this editing invariably (by default or by design) expresses a point of view. And the expression of a point of view, whether as reflection or as exhortation, is a defining quality of rhetoric, understood as the art of persuasion. Consistent with Burke’s notion of framing, editing and the expression of a point of view in effect re-construct context, from a de facto infinite context, through and around which whatever is communicated acquires partiality, slant, or—to use the current vernacular—spin. This discovery of the limits of language reveals that within any mode of commentary that makes use of language, contrary to the claims of the current media sensation Bill O’Reilly, there can be no such thing as “the no spin zone.” The consumer of media rhetoric, in Macksoud’s view, is left to sort out the messages according to their degree of persuasiveness.

    Beginning with the latter part of A Grammar of Motives and the writings of the 50s and 60s, Burke moves progressively in a direction away from perspectivism and toward a view of language that appears to model itself on a version of epistemological realism whereby words, more so than objects or events, take on the property of “facts.” Words may function as facts, Burke argues, insofar as what someone says or writes can be more accurately or factually cited and referred to than can non-verbal phenomena. Burke explains, “We can but infer what the diplomat did. But we can cite ‘factually’ some report that says what he did.”

    But Macksoud saw a problem in Burke’s assumption that words can be factually cited. His complaint centers on the notion of repetition combined with the notion of context. Concerning the way in which words function, Macksoud saw relevance in the Heraclitean adage that the same stream cannot be crossed twice. The flow of time insures a moving and shifting context of occurrence that precludes the possibility of genuine repetition. Something new is always added in any apparent repetition. And this newness can be relied upon to alter in some way the substance of what would appear to be unaltered repetition. Although the extent of this alteration may vary, its potential significance in the case of language and the process of interpretation of words and texts must never, according to Macksoud, be underestimated.

    A practical illustration of the controlling importance of context over repetition in relation to the use of language emerged recently in an interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. When asked if he thought the Court would ever allow its sessions to be televised, he answered “not likely.” He justified this response by noting that while gavel to gavel coverage might be acceptable, the appended sound-bytes that would inevitably make their way into various news broadcasts would sufficiently fragment and alter the context of what was being said to the point that the Court’s commentaries would likely appear distorted beyond recognition and would only fuel contempt for its deliberations. In other words, selected repetitions, Scalia argued, could be relied upon, through altered contexts, to be anything but adequate repetitions.

    By 1973 Macksoud had succeeded in formulating his views on language into an engaging little book entitled Other Illusions: Inquiries Toward a Rhetorical Theory. The three precepts about language-using already mentioned loom large in this work: 1) descriptions are always partial (in the dual sense of incomplete as well as biased), 2) utterances cannot be repeated without a difference, and 3) texts can never be read apart from context, only in another context. Surprisingly, these precepts form the core of what later came to be called deconstruction. They are among the essential insights put forth in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Although Of Grammatology was published in France in 1967, it was not made available in English translation until 1974. Macksoud was not aware of Derrida’s work when writing Other Illusions, and so the two men developed similar positions toward language independently at about the same time. Something must have been in the global air.

    In his review of Other Illusions Craig Smith remarks that, “because the book is so very well written, even if a little cryptic, because it is so cogent, so tightly reasoned, so charmingly persuasive, it is the most subversive work on rhetoric since the Gorgias.” As Smith points out, the book is subversive because it conducts a frontal assault on the foundations of both philosophy and science. In this regard, Macksoud is also similar to Derrida and no doubt just as maddening in his relentless dissections of treasured assumptions. Macksoud conducts one of the most thorough and exasperating critiques of scientific method to be found anywhere in the postmodern age. His agility with argumentation is astonishing. Just when the reader thinks that he has argued his way into a closed corner, he finds a way out. Smith gives maximum praise for this skill when he proclaims in resigned astonishment, “Macksoud is irrefutable; he could deter a bullet with his words.” I first had the same impression when, as a student, I witnessed Macksoud, over a two day session, demonstrate beyond refutation to those present that there may well be no instance of suicide that involves a genuine suspension of the will to live. On the face of it, this claim may seem perverse, but you had to have been there.

    By the end of the book Macksoud has stripped away so many assumptions that the reader seems to be left with only words. He in fact concludes that “Rhetoric may be reformulated as an end in itself.” So it would be easy to accuse Macksoud of what Derrida has often been accused of: that there is “nothing outside the text.” But it turns out that in conjunction with this conclusion he offers a bit more—not only words, but an attitude. And that attitude takes us well beyond words and into the heart of life. But before revealing this attitude, it is worth pointing out one important respect in which Macksoud offers something more than Derrida.

    In a conversation I had with Derrida in the early 1990s I asked him a question about Wittgenstein’s work. To my surprise he replied that he had not read Wittgenstein, only a few commentaries on him, and so did not feel competent to comment on his work. He explained that he did not want to begin reading such a formidable body of work unless he could devote a great deal of time to it and, at present, he could not find that much time. So he declined to even begin the task. Macksoud, however, invested a great amount of time in the study of Wittgenstein’s work and, because of the similarity of his views to Derrida’s, he provides a deconstructive confrontation with Wittgenstein.

    Ross Altman, a former graduate student and longtime friend, points out the complexity of Macksoud’s appreciation of Wittgenstein when he comments that “he was drawn to Wittgenstein in the first place in the search for ways to attack scientific positivism”—a position he believed was inadequate as an approach for investigating and understanding not only the natural world but also language. So Macksoud initially sides with the late Wittgenstein against the early Wittgenstein and the positivists but then turns against even the late Wittgenstein as he moves further in the direction of what can now be described as a deconstructive approach to language. As Altman expresses it, “John dismantled positivism with Wittgenstein, then dismantled Wittgenstein with [the early] Burke, and only then did he begin to stake out his own positions, which went beyond Burke in terms of epistemology.”

    In 1973, the same year as the publication of Other Illusions, Macksoud published “Ludwig Wittgenstein, Radical Operationism, and Rhetorical Stance.” This essay offers several compelling criticisms of Wittgenstein’s view of language—a view which Wittgenstein himself characterized as “operating with signs.” With this phrase he meant to point out the sense in which language, as a means of communication, may be adequately understood as a process of using words without necessary conjunction with the mental realm of meanings and intentions. One of the famous examples Wittgenstein offers to support his view consists of the following experiment: “Say and mean the sentence: ‘It will probably rain tomorrow.’ Now think the same thing again but without saying anything.” The difficulty or impossibility of fulfilling this injunction is supposed to demonstrate for the subject the absence of any necessary connection between “thought” or mental activity and language-using.

    In response to this “experiment” Macksoud asks a simple but disarming question: “Suppose that when directed to perform this operation the subject acknowledges performance of the operation?” Confronted with this reply, how will the experimenter respond? He will want the subject to provide some verification. But it is difficult to see what form the verification could take. If asked to produce some manner of observable mark, expression, or sign, the subject will have been asked to do precisely what the experiment directs not to do. If the experiment is to be verifiable it must involve some process that is overtly measurable. Macksoud exposes Wittgenstein’s “experiment” to be nothing more than a suggestive ruse precisely because the outcome he favors—failure to perform the operation—is unfalsifiable. And since completion of the operation is incapable of verification the experiment can yield no empirical information and thereby does little more than record Wittgenstein’s analytical insistence that no “thought” need accompany words or be relevant to the use of signs.

    Since much of Wittgenstein’s case for the operational view of signs depends on similar kinds of “demonstrations” and “experiments,” Macksoud’s objections undermine much of the platform upon which the case is built. What is at stake can be understood more pointedly by examining what has become perhaps Wittgenstein’s most famous illustration: the beetle box analogy. “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language? If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.” (Philosophical Investigations, 293).

    In light of this example Wittgenstein concludes that if the grammar of certain expressions is understood in accordance with binary models of the following sort—“mental object and sign,” or “concept and sign,” or “mental image and sign,” or “sensation and sign,”—the mental part, the part corresponding to potential differences of subjects’ thoughts, feelings, intentions, or intuitions, may be dropped from consideration as irrelevant. These differences are irrelevant, Wittgenstein claims, from the standpoint of communication. But Macksoud disagrees and, even though he has not written directly about Wittgenstein, Derrida would no doubt disagree as well. In fact, they both advocate a view of language-using that not only finds such potential differences to be relevant but of paramount importance. For it is precisely through the potential for and real effects of such differences, independent of any necessary association with particular subjects’ thoughts or intentions, that language moves and has life. On the basis of the possibility of such differences, words, on the one hand, convey meaning in repetition from context to context and also, on the other hand, convey meaning by remaining open to shifts and deformations through context that allow for and stimulate new, alternative, or supplemental understandings.

    If language worked in accordance with Wittgenstein’s operational model, it would ideally reduce to something like a rigid mathematical grid in which communication would resemble a calculation or an exchange of money. The word “justice,” for example, would have a certain exchange use and discussions of its “meaning” or “application” for particular cases would be limited to the exchange value it is supposed to have according to the communication codes authoritatively fixed by the governing conventions of a society. Within such an approach to language, justifications for what “justice” means or how it ought to be applied are precisely what could quickly become “irrelevant.” The reality that each person may have a different item in his or her “justice” box may go a long way toward explaining the disagreement and argument often encountered in assessing particular applications of the word. And acknowledging and respecting the potential for a different content in every “box” may go a long way toward preserving and enhancing the processes that work to continually push toward regulatory destabilization and thereby potential improvement (while also not precluding potential deterioration) of the understanding and practice of justice. In other words, the social model of how language works may be a crucial factor in determining the possibility for dynamic quality and creative and adaptive development of human community and human relations. This latter possibility underscores the importance of the work of Macksoud and Derrida in relation to the way in which their views expose connections between rhetorical theory and the structure of human community. And this connection returns the focus again to the question of attitude.

    The kind of calculus based on conventional and automatic language practices implicit in the Wittgensteinian view of language advances a simplified model of decision-making. What has gone before tends to become the primary justification, or at least motivation, for what must follow after. This model places value too exclusively on convention, ritual, and conformity. According to Macksoud, this model is compatible with the decision-making process built into the most pervasive piece of postmodern technology—the computer. As antidote he suggests making a comparison: “Consider yourself alongside the [post]modern computer. It is more powerful… [and] in many cases more beautiful and sought after than you. The one thing that you can do that the computer cannot is to question yourself in certain ways. And that is not because the computer which cannot speculate cannot be built, but because there would be no point in building it. The computer is the ultimate anti-tolerance instrument. It gives the answer, or a definite range of answers, and cannot function with ambiguity or paradox. In short, it is built to achieve decision; and if it is a danger to humanity, it is not because it is more efficient than men, but because it is efficient at all; because it enshrines the decision process itself.”

    Macksoud goes on to press further the point he makes in his analysis of Wittgenstein’s work, that language-using is not only often conceived of as analogous to the function of a computer but also believed to be at its best when functioning as reliably and predictably as a computer. But Macksoud cautions: “Could it be that we conceive language incorrectly, or at least incompletely; that language may function to avoid final decision—not to relate information, but to create it? This is not an apology for revelry in speculation alone, but rather for speculation as instrument, not of decision, but of discovery and not of discovery of answers, but of new questions.” The attitude implicit in this approach to life may be difficult to name. It has much to do with a sense of “not knowing,” an abiding practice of looking with an eye of wonder and a fearless but seasoned openness to every manner of “other.” Macksoud was tempted to call it “curiosity”—a word that he uses in the last line of his book: “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but at least the cat had lived.” For Macksoud, the heart of a life well-lived is the steady pulse and drive of a profound attitude of curiosity.

    On this note it also becomes clearer why Macksoud’s words, cited at the beginning—“I am now in the process of changing a lot of life metaphors”—reflect a lifelong preoccupation. At Binghamton he shifted metaphors and even genres, moving away from rhetorical theory toward aesthetic practice. He expanded his oeuvre to include plays, musicals, short stories, and poems—some of which may find their way into future publications. For those who knew him, he will be greatly missed. And, hopefully, for those who knew him, as well as for those who did not, he will continue to live through his stimulating, challenging, and always “curious” work.

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