Today’s plan:
- Secondary Source Presentations
- Discuss Quintilian
- Quintilian and Postpedagogy
- Bob’s self-named “shtick”
- Break
- An Answer Given By Way of a Long(ish) Speech: Why I Love Lanham’s Strong Defense
Quintilian’s Rhetoric
This was the first semester that I used this Murphy translation, and I admit that I am a bit disappointed. The chapters he selected focus on pedagogy (and that will be useful for me below), but leave out many of Quintilian’s more direct treatment of oratorical/rhetorical theory.
I did want to highlight a few important passages from Murphy’s introduction, and highlight a few passages of importance that are left out of the Murphy.
In his introduction, Murphy stresses that Quintilian’s articulation of humanism was instruction in both methods and values (ix):
Quintilian not only describes for us the educational processes which he had inherited […] but he explains to us why these processes are superior to alternatives and what they can accomplish for society by educating citizens who are both humane and effective. (x)
Methods and values. Humane and effective. The cornerstone of the Roman Humanities, then, (and perhaps in distinction to the Greek Liberal Arts) is the emphasis on education as “an instrument of public policy […] their service was a benefit to the state” (xi). Murphy concludes:
Isocrates rather than Plato or Aristotle is the ultimate inspiration for this Roman collation of methods. Stressing the trilogy of Talent, Education, and Practice, Isocrates promoted a broad educational program using language study as a means of preparing for citizenship as well as for the communicative skills themselves. By Cicero’s time the Roman study of rhetoric, technical thought it might have been when taken by itself, was already imbedded in a larger socio-political framework for which the schools were the training ground. Each teaching unit, in other words, was not used for its own sake alone but was intended as part of a larger whole. Effective oratory for public citizenship was the aim, and even though history shows that the ideal of citizenship was stifled under the empire, the schools continued to provide thorough training even if their later graduates often had oratorical objectives which Isocrates and Cicero would not have approved. It is this effective system which Quintilian describes.
Here one can read Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber’s Ecological, Pedagogical, and Public Rhetoric as performing the obligations that Quintilian (and Cicero) would lay down for rhetorical training: that more than just education in thinking and elocution, rhetorical education is an education in the systems, policies, institutions that one must navigate in order to foster change. Rivers and Weber are suspicious of “critical” (think Latour here) coursework that ends with changing how a student thinks about a problem. Rather, they endorse a “constructive” approach that requires students do something to change that problem. As I will address further below in my discussion of the Strong Defense, this distinction should not be under-appreciated.
Murphy has focused on parts of the Institutio Oratoria that focus on pedagogy–and I am never loathe to discuss pedagogy (which I will do a bit below, highlighting the postpedagogical resonances I heard in Quintilian). But in doing so, Murphy has excised some of the passages that deal with rhetoric’s scope, purpose, and import, and I want to point to a few of them here. Some come from Book XII, which I encourage you to read if you want to focus on Quintilian in your final paper.
Here’s a link to the material on Quintilian from the wikibook. Let’s look at a few of these passages that speak directly to the questions re: rhetoric/oratory we have followed this semester.
Here’s a link to Book XII. It is the first long paragraph that contains the passage worthy of examination (vir bonus dicendi peritus).
Finally a few passages that resonated for me with postpedagogy:
- II.4.6, and the idea of developing joy in composition. Q returns to this in II.7, on the euphoria of delivery
- II.8.2, recognizing and tailoring instruction to the talents and perceived limitations of each individual student
- II.5.16, and the idea that practical experience trumps teaching precepts
- II.6.6-7, picking up the same idea as above: “But when they shall appear to have formed themselves sufficiently on their model, a few brief directions may be given them, following which they may advance by their own strength without any support. It is proper that they should sometimes by left to themselves, lest from bad habit of being always led by the efforts of others, they should lose all capacity of attempting and producing anything for themselves. […] Something of this kind we see birds practice when they divide food, collected in their beaks, among their tender and helpless young ones; but, when they seem sufficiently grown, teach them, by degrees, to venture out of the nest, and flutter round their place of abode, themselves leading the way; and at last leave their strength, when properly tried, to open the sky and their own self-confidence.
An Answer Given By Way of a Long(ish) Speech: Why I Love Lanham’s Strong Defense
If I could only select five essays to represent what I think essential to rhetorical education, then I would select:
First, Jennifer Edbauer Rice’s “Unframing models of public distribution: From rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies.” This essay provides us with a materialist methodology for rhetorical analysis, approaching analysis less as the dissection of static objects and more in terms of tracing how something moves through and is transformed by a local context. It reminds us, then, that rhetoric deals with what Quintilian calls “reality,” “the law courts” or “the battle, the fray” and isn’t designed for the order of the laboratory, the obedience of the lecture room, or the quiet of the library. Because rhetoric (or, to anticipate below, the strong defense of rhetoric) is something that concerns action, and because action occurs in (real) time and in particular places, then it behooves us to develop analytical methods that acknowledge how language and appeals move through spaces and times.
Second, Burke’s “Terministic Screens.” This essay begins asking us to acknowledge the ways in which languages work on us as much as how we work with language. Terminologies (which here loosely represent what Levi-Bryant explicates via Luhmann as “systems” or which we could cautiously identify as “discourses”) shape the way we perceive reality. But I also like the essay because, while it opens on this note (via the famous reflection/selection/deflection passage), it closes by reframing this ontological/epistemological explication in terms of ethics (drama/conflict/victimage).
Here’s the Burke for comparison:
The dramatistic view of language, in terms of “symbolic action,” is exercised about the necessarily suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures. And we shall proceed along these lines; thus: Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function as a deflection of reality.
If action is to be our key term, then drama; for drama is the culminative form of action…. But if drama, then conflict. And if conflict, then victimage. Dramatism is always on the edge of this vexing problem that comes to a culmination in tragedy, the song of the scapegoat.
Here Burke echoes Levinas’s skepticism toward language’s ability to capture the infinity of any moment/Being, that violence is the price of manifestation in the movement from the infinity of the saying to the crystalization of the said–and I think he does a much more concise job of laying out the ethical implications of how signification and ethics are inexorably linked.
Third, Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” Television includes a recounting of a time when a bunch of socialist revolutionaries interrupted a lecture by Lacan to cuss him out for being part of an elitist, bourgeois intellectual class. To which Lacan responded: “Revolutionary aspirations have only one possibility: always to end up in the discourse of the master. Experience has proven this. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one!”
This might be a strange way to set up Burke’s explication of Hitler’s appeal, however Burke locates the power of fascism and the scapegoat not in any particular rhetorical strategy deployed by Hitler so much as within our own human frailties (which aren’t to be attacked or lamented! only recognized) and desire (for security, for safety, for the Right path through the chaotic ramble, for a Master). The desire to turn everything into a return of the Same.
Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” I’ve spoken of this essay ad nauseum this semester. Every semester. But I would point to it here once again to highlight how Corder would extend the scope of rhetoric to ethics, and show that more than mere precepts, evidence, heuristics, logos, etc., the province of rhetoric extends to the shaky foundations of (the human) Being, to acknowledging how virtually any discursive encounter with alterity generates affect (as part of the process Burke/Levinas describe).
And, of course, 5th on this list is Lanham’s “The Q Question.” What I want to highlight is how Lanham’s strong defense radically challenges the ontological/epistemological tradition of Platonic AND Aristotelian rhetoric (note that Lanham tosses Isocrates in here, too, but I think he is wrong to do so). In those latter traditions, truth is something that exists in the world. It exists prior to the rhetorical encounter. *One* (all puns intended) can *hold* a truth. But, for Lanham, this is inevitably leads to a weak defense of rhetoric, in which rhetoric is at best the means for better communicating a previously discovered, held belief. Lanham doesn’t exactly phrase the weak defense as such, but I think this is what he is (or could be) driving at.
“[…] I shall call ‘the Strong Defense’ [that] which Samuel Johnson summarized with his usual absence of cant as “sir, you do not know it to be good or bad till the Judge determines it” (156). That is, like Levinas’s self, Lanham’s truth is dependent upon an unpredictable other. It is not autonomous. What Lanham works toward is a strong defense of rhetoric–one that clearly has resonances to Latour’s ontological/constructivist project in Politics of Nature, or, as Graham Harman describes it, for Latour something is only real in so far as we can trace how it touches or, perhaps more importantly, how it “moves,” something else. The ontological/epistemological ramifications here are staggering: truth isn’t something *one* *holds* but is something that *we* *do*. I do not think it possible to understate how radical this shift actually is: to move from prioritizing thought to action. And here I would distinguish how this priority for “philosophy,” for intellectual labor, differs even from that of Levinas. Levinas would have our first obligation be to trace out the obligation to the other based on my debt to the Other, to emphasize the desire to squelch the O/other’s noise (see Lingis for explication of ontology and noise). All this he calls ethics. Latour and my reading of Lanham/Cicero/Quintilian would dictate a different primary obligation for intellectual labor.
But I think Cicero and Quintilian bring us to this different obligation, this shift that Lanham would foster–that is precisely what is novel about their philosophy, a philosophy that harkens back to Isocrates’ resistance to Socrates/Plato’s monopoly of the term (and again, I’m not a fan of Lanham’s sweeping past Isocrates). Remember Isocrates’ attempt to reclaim the term “philosophy” to name not abstract logic and argumentation, but rather a commitment to public deliberation and policy formation. Anything but policy formation for Isocrates was mere intellectual navel gazing.
We conclude this semester with Grassi’s examination of Italian Humanism, noting how it deviates from the traditional “philosophical” (or weak, in this context) rhetorical tradition. One thing to stress here is how [Cicero’s/Quintilian] Humanism undergoes a radical transition under the hands of Petrarch (1304-1374). In his letters addressed to Cicero, Petrarch (channeling an inner Socrates), admonishes Cicero for engaging in civil strife:
What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions? Ah! how much better it would have been, how much more fitting for a philosopher, to have grown old peacefully in the country, meditating, as you yourself have somewhere said, upon the life that endures for ever, and not upon this poor fragment of life; to have known no fasces, yearned for no triumphs, found no Catilines to fill the soul with ambitious longings!
And again:
You lived then, Cicero, if I may be permitted to say it, like a mere man, but spoke like an orator, wrote like a philosopher. It was your life that I criticised; not your mind, nor your tongue; for the one fills me with admiration, the other with amazement. And even in your life I feel the lack of nothing but stability, and the love of quiet that should go with your philosophic professions, and abstention from [Page 250] civil war, when liberty had been extinguished and the republic buried and its dirge sung.
Petrarch admonishes Cicero for his dedication to the polis, and urges him instead to a life of solitude, a personal exploration of the majesty of God via introspection and thought. It is too hard to be a Good (hu)man in a fallen world (and Petrarch’s everyday world was as fallen as could be). Petrarch’s individualism will be exported out of Italy (as Grassi shows, Italian intellectual/humanist traditions remain far closer to their Roman roots), to France and then to England where it is wed to the Idea of Reason (and, from there, to Germany and to America).And so begins/ends the war of the Humanists.
Lanham would re-open the discussion. Anticipating the next two weeks of reading, Lanham notes that “to read [Ramus] is to learn how the “humanities crisis” started, how the conception of language as value-free and ideally transparent underwrote the modern world” (157). Lanham:
Value-free language and the possibility of a self-contained discipline make possible both modern science and that mapping of humanistic inquiry into a scientific model which has created modern social science as well. And they create a concomitant problem, one Richard McKeon, in a discussion to be noted later, finds characteristic of our own time: they render problematic the relation of thought to action. Thought now had its own disciplinary arena. Knowing could now be a self-enclosed activity all by itself, pursued “for its own sake,” a claim that simply makes no sense in the rhetorical paideia, tied as it was to public action. (158)
As I suggest above, and have reinforced all semester, we must see the crisis (the death of rhetoric) as more than just a matter of language–it is also tied to a conception of the subject and to an Idealist (transcendent) ontology. And that epistemology is quite hostile to the strong defense of rhetoric, to the idea that Thought is always in the hands of the other, the judge. Idealism–especially the kind championed by Socrates at the end of the Gorgias dialogue–is a desperate attempt to think alone. Recall Lanham, that
Socrates is the secular messiah; we are apostles studying the book that chronicles his deeds, sayings, and martyrdom; and we do so in a monastery that shuts out a fundamentally corrupt and irredeemable world. (178)
Nevermind that Lanham likely describes Plato and not Socrates. Let us return to the three together–language, subjectivity, and ontology–and note how they produce a very particular epistemology. Sophistry–in all the various forms we have examined it this semester–understands this responsibility to the other’s judgement (even if all our various sophists–Gorgias, Protagoras, Isocrates, Jarratt, Vitanza, McComiskey, Latour–would have us acknowledge and act upon that responsibility in quite different ways). As Bulter reads Levinas, we are all hostage to each other. Rhetoric is/as hostage negotiation.
