Today’s Plan:
- What is Rhetoric?
- I will read something long
- Rhetorical Analysis
- For Next Class
What is Rhetoric?
I’m going to be honest with you. This semester is something of a curricular experiment. I have taught rhetorical theory at the graduate and undergraduate level for a decade now. The class typically spends 8 weeks reading the Greeks:
- 2 weeks reading Plato (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Apology, Repulic VII and/or X
- 2 weeks reading Aristotle (Rhetoric, smattering of Poetics and Ethics)
- A week reading Isocrates (selections from Antidosis)
- A week reading Gorgias (greatest hits tape)
- Two weeks reading about 20th century reappraisals of Sophistry (in light of postmodernism, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and all the other posts)
Then we move onto Rome, spending time with Cicero and Quintilian. Jump forward a few centuries to St. Augustine. Then to Renaissance France and Italy, contrasting Ramus to Vico and Bruno. We end in Enlightenment England with Locke, Hume, Campbell, Whatley, and Blair, and watch as rhetoric (what Lanham calls architectonic rhetoric, what I consider rhetoric, not bullshit about style and decorum) dies on the altar of transcendent Truth.
Throughout that grand survey, you learn to discern two very different rhetorical traditions. On the one hand, you have the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, carried forth by Augustine and then Ramus, and calcified by 18th century England. This tradition sees rhetoric as persuasion, as a set of devices and competencies used to communicate a message or make an argument. Rhetoric, for these folks, is at best a tool. At worst a weapon, used to manipulate and control. Philosophy is the art used to discover truth, rhetoric at best a means of communicating that truth. At worst, a means of deluding the (ignorant, naive, etc) public and obfuscating truth. Typically, when I teach this class, it is a 16 week program designed to demonstrate why, with every fiber of my being, I say fuck those dudes (and they are all white dudes).
Rhetoric has another tradition, however. Plato was not the ubiquitous voice of philosophy/rhetoric in Ancient Greece. In fact, Plato was in a struggle with sophists such as Isocrates and Gorgias as to exactly how philosophy should be defined (as a study of the abstract or the practical, the certain or the contingent). However, there is certainly much truth to philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s claim that all history can be read as a mere footnote to Plato. He wins the struggle and as such sets the ontological and epistemological stage that dominates the West’s intellectual horizons for the next two millennia.
Let me quickly describe that stage for you: Plato’s ontology (the study of what is real) divided existence into two realms. This realm, the real world, was a fallen copy of a transcendent Ideal realm. Most people lacked the intellectual capacity to see this world’s false and fallen state (see, for instance, the “Allegory of the Cave” or the Phaedrus). Philosophers, through use of dialectic and reason, can escape this false reality and perceive Truth. So, we arrive at epistemology (ontology is what you think is real, epistemology is what/how you consider knowledge). Truth, for Plato, was absolute, eternal. Unchanging. The main reason we know this real world is inferior to the Ideal realm is that it changes. Change is bad. Ideals are unchanging. Truth was logical (of the logos); rhetoric was dangerous because it clouded logos with irrational elements of identity (ethos) and emotion (pathos).
But, even in his own day, the sophists pushed against Platonic Idealism. They were relativists. They didn’t believe truth was absolute, unchanging, or universal. They believed that identity and emotion were natural parts of human existence, not things to be excised from our theory or navigation of the world. Ontologically, they questioned whether we had direct access to this world, or whether language and identity clouded/haunted/played with our perceptions. Epistemologically, they didn’t believe truth was something we discovered beyond the boundaries of this world, but something we crafted within it, hence the Protagorean fragment “man is the measure of all things.” That line opened his masterwork. Unfortunately, it is the only line from the book we have, since early Christians burnt all copies of his works.
While Whitehead might have remarked that history was a footnote to Plato, Nietzsche, whose hatred of Plato is rivaled only by his hatred of Christianity, dismissed Plato. Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols:
Plato is boring. In reality my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept ‘good’ is already the highest value with him,—that rather than use any other expression I would prefer to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the hard word ‘superior bunkum,’ or, if you would like it better, ‘idealism.’ Humanity has had to pay dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among the Egyptians (—or among the Jews in Egypt?…) In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that double-faced fascination called the “ideal,” which made it possible for the more noble natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the bridge which led to the ‘cross.’
I had a professor who liked to say that there’s only two original philosophers in all of history: Plato and Nieztsche. He’s wrong of course. But he knew he was wrong. He used this hyperbolic division as a way of introducing thinking about thinking. To establish a binary that would complicate our thinking about a lot of things. Certainty. Contingency. Idealism. Relativism. Self. Others.
Victor Vitanza succinctly sums up the sophistic (ancient and contemporary, from Gorgias to Cicero to Vico to Nietzsche to Derrida) opposition to certainty. Why are sophists so skeptical of certainty? Why do they eschew individualism and focus so much energy on social performance and identity? Victor Vitanza explains:
The negative–or negative dialectic (and ontology that identifies what something is by identifying what it is not, i.e., Platonic-Aristotelian ontology) –is a kind of pharmakon, and in overdoses, it is extremely dangerous (E.g., a little girl is a little man without a penis! Or an Aryan is not a Jew! And hence, they do not or should not exist). The warning on the label–beware of overdoses–is not enough; for we, as KB says, are rotten with perfection. We would No. That is, say No to females, Jews, gypsies, queers, hermaphrodites, all others. By saying No, we purchase our identity. Know ourselves. By purifying the world, we would exclude that which, in our different opinions, threatens our identity (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, 1997, 12-13).
And Vitanza: what we seek, then, is an identity, a home, a space/place in which we are free of contingency, of uncertainty. We want to know who we are, why we are here, and what keeps us safe. But language, our relation, to ourselves, our relation to the world and its horizons–none can be objects of positive knowledge. There is always what Derrida calls “play,” interpretive ambiguity, indeterminacies, undecidables. Vitanza: “My position is […] that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations” (157).
Finally Kristeva: “To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts.” (Strangers to Ourselves, 191). This is pretty much my favorite quote ever. It inspired another awesome quote, this one by Lynn Worsham:
The desire to give meaning, to explain, to interpret certainly plays a fundamental role in human experience and characterizes our ordinary relation to the world, but it is never innocent. It is rooted in our need for meaning when confronted by meaninglessness, our need for mastery when confronted by what we fear most: the enigmatic other that exceeds and threatens every system of meaning, including the individual identity. (83)
I could keep writing about this, but already I fear this grows a bit long. Because this isn’t the course I’m going to teach this semester. Not because I don’t want to, or that I don’t think it is important. Those quotes from Vitanza and Kristeva changed my life.
I’m not going to teach this course because of a line from another, contemporary philosopher. Bruno Latour. In his 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam,” Latour laments the incredible disconnect between academic labor and real world problems. He notes how hyper-critical 20th century theoretical movements–for all of their acumen–had failed to remedy, or perhaps even exacerbated–political and social problems. He writes: “there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the PC challenges of the present one” (231). And, folks, I don’t know how much attention you are paying to the world, but We’ve. Got. Challenges.
Let’s Review the Syllabus
Rhetorical Analysis / Sample Text
I’m hoping we have about 25 minutes of class time left. Content Warning: racist, sexist, homophobic language.
David Chappelle, SNL monologue.
First, let’s think about the standard questions we associate with rhetorical analysis:
- Logos
- What is the argument?
- What evidence is presented?
- What is the nature of that evidence? Stats, scientific, personal experience, common wisdom, historic example)
- Ethos
- Who is speaking? Why are they credible? What kind of voice are they? What grounds their authority?
- Who are they speaking to (and how do you know this)?
- Who are “we” (are they speaking to us or to another audience through us? Or both?
- Pathos
- What emotions does the speaker feel? Assume we feel? Assume the target audience feels?
- How would you describe the speaker’s emotional state/style?
- What emotions does the speaker attempt to engender?
- How do you feel as you listen to the speech?
- Kairos
- Why is now the right time for this speech?
- What historic/contextual information would someone need to know to understand this speech in 10 (or 100) years?
- What must we do after the speech is done?
Homework
For next class:
- Read Herrick, Overview of Rhetoric
- Begin reading Lanham. Write up #1, on Lanham, due Friday
- Both readings can be found in the files section on Canvas
