Ong’s Ramus and Rhetoric’s Slow Death
We should note the extent to which the death of rhetoric at the hands of Ramus is influenced by contextual, political, and institutional conditions. Ramus taught in the scholastic era, in which philosophy was indistinguishable from theology, in which only those sanctioned and ordained could teach philosophy. But before students advanced to philosophy, to metaphysics, they first needed to be taught how to speak and write. This was the task of the lower (often secular) faculty. Thus, Ramus found himself in a place where he could teach “writing” but not thought. A tough place indeed. And his resulting institutional-philosophical classification, that rhetoric is an art of style, that thought *and* arrangement are proper to philosophy, is, Ong and I would argue, very much a reflection of this context.
I wanted to pay attention to the tension Ong exposes between scholastic traditions of formal logic and early Renaissance Humanism (see particularly 57, 59, 60, and 62). Ong notes that formal logic is a desire for Socratic dialogue *without* the all important hesitancy and doubt, without probability. Thinking back to Vitanza, formal logic is the ultimate attempt to count to one (answer; recall that Ong reminds us that “in dialectic, one is in constant contact with all the multitude of things as these are in God’s mind. This ascent of the mind to God via dialectic brings one to the spirit which Virgil says feeds the universe from within, to Plato’s world soul… (189)). The trinity, logic, dialectic, rhetoric understood as the One.
But I want to stick to my thesis that much of Ramus’ system is the result of institutional pressures. Let’s read Ong:
Why is it that our manualist, moving through all this maze, thrusts aside by a kind of sleight of hand all question of probability and regards the concern of dialectic or logic to be certainties alone? Basically, because he is a manualist, supplying the need for a handbook for the teen-age medieval student. In this he differs from Aristotle, whose Organon treatises are hardly to be assimilated in their entirety by teen-agers. A logic cast in terms of certainties and oriented toward scientific demonstration–such as applies in mathematics–is the perfect type of logic and hence the simplest. Because logic was an elementary subject and because grammar and rhetoric were even more elementary, the central scholastic tradition of the arts course as it was actually taught to young boys has little real place for the nice theoretical distinctions between logic, dialectic, and rhetoric […] (p. 62)
Ramism, then, is easy to teach (see 194, “just learn it,” memorize, internalize, obey–resonances to Augustine; perhaps now we can better appreciate the radicalness of Kant’s cry: think but obey, since Ramus, and Augustine, command us to think as obedience). This passage recalls for me another, a passage from Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins:
Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between. [All thanks to Ryan Weber]
Ramist, too, wanted no grey areas, no noise. Rhetoric is equally a matter of certainty as dialectic or science. As Ong notes:
In Aristotle “proof” of a general truth by citing an example had been the rhetorical equivalent of induction in science, a movement from a singular to a universal truth. In rhetoric, however, a truth which was universal, unlike a universal truth of science, was probable, not certain. Ramus follows no such line of thought. Consistent with his view that there is only one logic ruling all, example becomes only a truncated induction, one which omits expressing all of its parts. (187)
But once rhetoric is stripped of the commonplaces (see 212-213), even arrangement (275), it finds itself even more impoverished that even Plato would imagine. Invention is reduced to inventing the right words for the situation. There is nothing epistemic about rhetoric at this point. This is the absolute death of the oratory that Cicero offered us (or the oratory that I, working from Latour and others, imagines him offering us). Ong concludes:
In this economy where everything having to do with speech tends to be in one way or another metamorphosed in terms of structure and vision, the rhetorical approach to life–the way of Isocrates and Cicero and Quintilian and Erasmus, and of the Old and New Testaments–is sealed off into a cul-de-sac. The attitude toward speech has changed. Speech is no longer a medium in which the human mind and sensibility lives. It is resented, rather, as an accretion to thought, hereupon imagined as ranging noiseless concepts or “ideas” in a silent field of mental space. Here the perfect rhetoric would be to have no rhetoric at all. Thought becomes a private, or even an antisocial enterprise. (291)
Thus the strong defense is now doubly dead, for no longer is truth a matter of public action (or at least deliberation), but now rhetoric, thought, communication, is emptied of all risk, all encounters with the other-as-judge. If ambiguity of thought is a sign of the Deceiver, then the play of signification is a trace of an original sin that, rather than celebrate, we must work to overcome in order to achieve redemption. For in the Ramist disposition, grounded in the shadow of mathematical logic yet clamoring for clarity, ambiguity of any form becomes the prime evil (a trace of the deceiver, the son of perdition). Discourse, Ong notes, must be rid of all ambiguity (191). Risk and uncertainty are not an essential elements of (human) beings’ unfolding, but rather the byproducts of sloppy minds and imprecise terminology. Thus begins, for real this time, the fetish for clarity, the “plain style” (p. 4, see particularly pg 120, 283-284). There will be no Phaedrus to acknowledge the necessary power of eloquence or oratory. To watch Ramus separate thought from language, speaker from responsive audience, oratory from civic action is to witness in slow motion the death of rhetoric.
All hail Ramus, the champion of the weakest of all defenses.
Feedback to The Second Round of Papers
Logos
Yes to the idea that the definition of logos for Gorgias is contested (and ultimately indeterminate, har har har). Whether we should read it–as someone like Schiappa would–as a path to Platonic logos or hear it as something more akin to our contemporary notions of discourse, whether flavored by poststructuralism or historic materialism, is what was at stake in the 90’s.
[On Platonic logos]: to appreciate Plato’s foundational epistemology, one also has to consider his transcendental ontology (that is, that the world is an imitation of a pure realm of Ideas, that the matter of the world is animated by this higher realm). For Plato, knowledge, truth, is a matter of gaining access to this higher realm of unquestionable, absolute truth (and dialectic is the method that takes us higher).
Kairos
#2 I like the extent to which your reading of Jarratt anticipates Lanham’s strong defense here. I think you have found the right disciplinary home. What you do with kairos is interesting here in that it focuses on kairos from a posthuman framework, along the lines of challenging human agency. Carolyn Miller has done some of this work, as has Herndl. I tend to think of kairos through both a more traditional humanist lens and through ecological notions of context. That is, kairos can be defined as a human ability to notice opportunities to change their current environment. Kairos also signifies the ability to influence the emergence of such abilities (to create what the philosopher might call an aporia, which in turn creates what Bitzer and 20th century rhetorical theory would call an exigence). To be clear–I don’t think we are arguing different things, only that you are highlighting the extent to which kairos transcends and complicates human agency and I am focusing on how, despite those complications, humans are left with opportunities to act (I think my reading probably resonates closest with your explication of McComiskey).
Kairos means both space and time! What a handy term! A question that often circulates around kairos is whether, or to what extent, it is something we can create or whether it is something we can see.
Is Latour a Sophist? What is a Sophist?
#2 If I could have a conversation with Latour, this would be my first question–when did he first start thinking about the Gorgias dialogue? It isn’t until Pandora’s Hope and Politics of Nature, two of his later works, that he begins to think about sophistry, and he never really uses the term “rhetoric.” My guess is that, despite his pragmatism, he has inherited philosophy’s deep aversion to the term. […] But would Latour agree with us? Can a philosopher ever admit that rhetoric–and not only rhetoric, but sophistry– is a term and practice that we need to rehabilitate? Let us call it “assemblage” and quietly smirk every time we hear the term.
I might suggest that Latour’s ambition to (re)shape public politics speaks directly to the sophistic tradition. But, to this point, he has been unable to practice what he preaches, so to speak.
Yes, here we see the term “sophist” being used by both Plato and Isocrates similar to how we might use the term “charlatan,” someone who sells a fantasy. […] McComiskey is correct that we should be cautious about grouping these “other” theorists together. And the added complication here is that the term was also used pejoratively by so many of the theorists we have read–Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates–all refer to the sophists in terms close to “charlatan.” So when we name Gorgias as a sophist, we have to be very careful to articulate what we mean by that.
Sophistry for me basically means three things. First, the prioritization of material context and affective disposition, that persuasion isn’t something that we control, but something that flows. We might be able to direct the flow, shape it, but we can’t grasp and master it. Second, a big thing that determines the sophists is not only their collective investment in the importance of material context, but also their opposition to transcendental (whether mythic or logical reached) truth. Truth, for a sophist, isn’t a matter of finding something beyond the realm of human existence, but rather of making something impactful with other humans; thus my third principle of sophistry–that the aim of our efforts isn’t to reach something up high, or beyond, but something right around us. (And here I am playing with Latour’s language in Rejoicing). Finally, I would insist that sophistry is a recognition that language shapes experience rather than merely transmits it–language is constitutive and formative, not merely communicative. And language always an expression of thought, values, and emotional disposition (logos, ethos, pathos).
Vitanza’s sophist and/as hauntological historiography: Obviously, Vitanza is complicated. I would argue that Vitanza isn’t interested in “understanding this group,” if by that you mean studying the sophists as they were in the past. Rather, and this is a difficult concept to grasp, Vitanza offers the term sophist as an opening, a kairotic opportunity, for us to invent a future that allows us to see our past differently and thus change the way we live in the present. That’s a lot to swallow. But Vitanza’s point (and he is borrowing this from Derrida) is that the past is often overdetermined by the future-we-would-will, the future-to-come. Vitanza would have history begin as a willful approach to the future(s) before us (har har).
If you are going to explore tragedy, then you want to spend more time with Aristotle’s poetics–I think the two major themes of that work, mimesis and catharsis, have great importance to rhetoric. In fact, given my interests in rhetoric and/as the study of identification, I find Poetics such a richer text than the Rhetoric. It sounds as if psychagogia, especially given your paragraph on Jaeger, connects to catharsis here. I’d be curious to know if there is a philological connection between the terms.
On Theory and Scholarship
My advice to you as you move forward as a theorist is to be hesitant to make absolute claims. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, or misremembering, but I would encourage an approach to theory and problems that offers us things to consider, that points to forces that shape and that require attention. Frame your insight, your research, as shedding light on an issue, without claiming to “know,” to have solved a problem, to offer an absolute. It might seem insignificant to reframe your position as something like: “Butler’s theory shed light on the extent to which discourse in/forms subjectivity” but such qualifying work, such hesitancy, is precisely what distinguishes (and this is me speaking, so plenty of folks might call bullshit) rhetorical theory from philosophy. We aren’t looking for The answer or the Theory, we are only looking to–excuse the awkward phrase–persuade people to consider a theory, to attempt to realize a potential solution.
An example, instead of writing:
“The conveyance of knowledge by the sophist accomplishes at least three other goals, none of which Susan Jarratt, Bruce McComiskey, Victor Vitanza, or Bruno Latour address. Those goals: performance, platform, and publicity, might be far too obvious for those aforementioned cultural commentators to reiterate and explicate. I shall try.
Try:
For Jarratt and McComiskey, sophistry marks training for a local form of democratic government, while for Vitanza sophistry speaks to a potential resistance to the totalizing and homogenous impulses of Idealism. I, however, want to conceptualize the power of sophistry across three distinct goals/concerns: performance, platform, and publicity.
I learned from Thomas Rickert that scholarship is driven by a scholar’s investment in particular problems, problems that might show up for them and not for others. And that the most productive way to approach scholarship is to distinguish your problem from that of others. Thus, it isn’t so much that there are right and wrong interpretations of other works, but that different interpretations are formulated in response to different problems (and, that said, it is fine to argue that a particular interpretation can be dangerous, etc. But in general, one shouldn’t begin by denouncing, one should begin by acknowledging the nature and purpose of another scholar’s work–remember, this is how I approached Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates).
Another example:
Although Jarratt gives us these helpful terms that allow us to identify and analyze sophistic arguments, she notably fails to use the methods herself when outlining her own politics. […] Vitanza points out that the flaw in Jarratt’s argument is that, by advocating for a woman-centered sophistry, she is reverting back to seeing the world in binaries.
Fails and flaw are harsh words here. I would do something like this:
Although Jarrett gives us these helpful terms to identify and analyze sophistic arguments, she adopts an aggressive stance toward the Platonic tradition that perhaps sustains the kinds of epistemic violence that she would seek to eradicate. It might be that, for Jarratt, there is no escaping the reality of (gendered) ideological violence, and so she would train all students–but especially feminist students–to engage the fight. […] Vitanza, however, suggests that such a presupposition (that violence is essential, unavoidable) only ensures that we sustain cycles of violence. He would have us change our orientation, and work to recognize that violence isn’t an essentialism, but rather a consequence of particular (Platonic) ways of thinking. Vitanza would invent an identity politics that transcends our reliance on identification and division.
I say this because R/C is a very small world. You will meet these scholars. As you develop as a scholar in our field, you should imagine sitting face to face with the people you criticize because it is quite likely at some point that you will sit face to face with the people you criticize. Make the adjustment from critique to construction now.
