Attempt to Situate my Own Rhetoric Position
“Rhetoric” may have been argued from Plato’s re-creation of Socrates's dialogue with Gorgias as persuasion, but it should be more clearly articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the environment or opportunity to persuade. Aristotle understood that in that environment, rhetoric was simply a tool that may be used within a social setting to engage and reveal one author’s point of view, and that no actual persuasion may actually take place -- in other words, even with skills used by the Sophists who were aware of the articulation and gestures appropriate to public oration, no techné was guaranteed to produce a result of real persuasion. Further, as Aristotle explained for all tools, rhetoric could be used for good or evil (only virtue was exempt from this possibility) and therefore may include components of logos, pathos, and ethos but would not necessarily be “reasonable” in the agora. Because of these limitations of the ancient discussions of rhetoric, we must look to something more approachable, especially in a more modern, egalitarian western society.
The eighteenth century, post-Ramus, English rhetoricians, including Campbell and Blair, were more Sophistic in their approach as well -- they recognized a need to a) improve the status of up-and-coming young men from Ireland and Scotland in the English mercantile scene, b) improve the efficacy of the otherwise boring church liturgical performances, and c) continue the discussions from the coffee and chocolate houses and the journals such as Rambler, Tatler, and Spectator in more public venues such as town meetings and other, larger, political discourse. The period’s elocution movement was dependent on Cicero’s canons (invention, etc.) and more concerned with gesture and pronunciation than with actual reasoning and the ancients’ controversio. Though the students of rhetoric oratory found some limited success, this kind of rhetoric was also parodied by Swift and others, and eventually found disfavor in the face of more discursive conversations from the Scots. Still, Blair’s primary texts made their way to the American continent and were immensely influential throughout the nineteenth century, where “rhetoric” was seen -- following two millennia of similar agonistic discourse -- as a representation of the American aristocratic masculinity and was largely an oral practice in the academy until after the Civil War, when land-grant universities opened up to more merchant-class and then agrarian-class students. Connors argues that as women came into the academy (he implies that women “couldn’t handle” the pressure of weekly oral argument), and as these non-upper-crust men had less exposure to the larger literary questions of western civilization, the focus on oral rhetoric shifted to a written form, essentially codified by Harvard’s first writing class of 1885. Since then, it has been the “duty” of the academy to initiate the masses into some form of rhetoric based on the circumlocutory argument that “rhetoric” strengthens democracy and “democracy” is the combined rhetoric of its citizens.
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| Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 34, Saturday 14, 1750. London |
The concern, though, is what rhetoric means in the 20th and then 21st centuries. What has been called current-traditionalism saw rhetoric-cum-composition as a means of “correcting” the native, immigrant, minority, working class rhetorics of all students, and when colleges began open admissions in the latter half of the century, the field saw itself at a crisis. The Dartmouth Conference of 1966 saw a schism between the Brits and the Americans, where the latter saw “English” as the study of belles lettres and the former saw English as the study of the text, especially how students produce texts. Then the Wingspread Conference of 1970 saw a division between Communications and Rhetoric, with the latter still concerned about public persuasion while the former looking at a (what we know now) more progressive approach to modalities, situation, and publics. Shaughnessy, for all her humility and empathy, still saw the rhetoric of the basic writer as flawed and presented useful means of “correcting” their errors, yet her argument was still an essentialist one -- one form of rhetoric was correct; all others are corrupt. Compositionists such as Emig, Lauer, and Flower and Hayes began to argue that composition was a socially reflective act -- that through cognition, heuristics, and appropriate teacher intervention, the student’s writing could be trained. Social constructivists such as Bruffee then adressed what they felt as the dead-end of cognitivism as explaining -- as Plato did two thousand years before -- that the rhetor is both informed by her language and modifies her rhetorical space because of language. Like Heath’s Way with Words, these constructivists saw rhetoric as having a social function based on environment, values, class, race, etc. Bruffee, like Vygotsky, felt that students expressing their rhetoric to each other -- small writing groups, teacher consultations -- demonstrated how language is really learned and managed in a social setting. It took Trimbur and Ashton-Jones to counter the assumptions of these social constructivists -- that consensus is always the best thing, that knowledge is always socially constructed -- to bring composition as rhetoric into a more public relationship. Emily Donnelli critiques Trimbur even further, however, claiming that even though he acknowledges post-process, he limits the rhetorical situation to the individual, where Donnelli sees all rhetoric as public, interpretive, and situational -- the canons of the post-process movement.
And so this is where I position myself -- as a post-process, public writing rhetorician. A confession, though, based on a warning from Sue Thomas -- Thomas argues that if educators do not write publically with their students, they risk a “trickle-down” effect -- that the students will not only see through the hypocrisy, but that the will not have the modeling needed for their own public writing. And public rhetoric is not just writing for the academic journals. It expects what Atheneans expected in their very politically limited way (male, of age, property-owning, non-slave, citizen, etc.). I feel that I am only beginning to engage my own self as rhetor in the public, and often influenced by my own students’ work. First, there are too many false-starts in public rhetoric -- Mathieu, Flower, Rose and Weiser, Emily Isaacs, Welch all discuss various ways to “write publicly” including community literacy programs, service learning, critique of public texts, oral history, more radical engagement with national policy, etc. Each of these public rhetorical attempts has several limitations, including the problem of a 16 week semester, town/gown misconceptions, and the threat of politicizing of the course. Still, rhetoric must again be turned back to the public -- as the Sophists and Second Sophists knew, and as Aristotle assumed, though did not practice.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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