What is rhetoric? Good question. I thought I had a pretty good handle on it before I began this course: it was the art of persuasion. I ultimately thought of it in an Aristotelian sense: rhetoric was about moving an audience to action. I took a rhetoric class at Clemson with Dr. Martin Jacobi, so there was probably an ethical component in there somewhere, via Augustine or Quintilian. But since then, Bitzer has made rhetoric situational, Ramus has disconnected the canon, Astell has privatized rhetoric, Richards has made meaning contextual, Weaver has tried to reconnect rhetoric to Platonic thought in a modern context, Burke has replaced persuasion with identification, Gates and Holmes have expounded upon black rhetorics, Foucault has made it mainly about power relations, Bahkin has insisted that rhetoric is inescapably social and situated, Anzaldua and Campbell have focused it on the concerns of gender, embodiment, and identity, Zappen has connected it to digital technologies, and Lunsford and Ede have argued that modern rhetoric does not represent a radical departure from classical rhetoric after all. So in a sense, I had to start over. Here’s what I think rhetoric is now: a dialogical way of knowing through discourse. Let me unpack my definition: Rhetoric is dialogical in that it always involves a conversation. This can be a standard rhetor/audience relationship, where the rhetor seeks to persuade an audience of what s/he already knows (Aristotle), or it can be a conversational interaction (Bahktin), or it can be a mutual meaning-seeking interaction (Lunsford and Ede). It can be a mediated conversation (reader/composer). I can be identification (Burke). It might even be a conversation with oneself. But meaning-making always involves more than one voice. Rhetoric involves knowing because it is finally a way that we make meaning in the world. Rhetoric, in other words, is epistemic. Since rhetoric is cognate with language (Weaver and, by implication, Richards), rhetoric is inescapably ideological, and language is imbued with meaning. So rhetoric can be used, in the old Ciceronian terms, to move, to educate, and to delight, but these are actually modes of knowledge: we are moved because we believe something different; we are educated; we are delighted because we see something in a new way. Rhetoric uses discourse because it is communication, but communication is not confined to words. Zappen points out Kress’s use of the term semiosis to replace discourse, which is tempting but, in my view, unnecessary here. Discourse need not confine itself to speech and text, but can encompass the multiplicity of visual, tactile, aural, and embodied modes that comprise modern rhetoric.
What do we know about it? This is a difficult question to tackle in a page, but we will try to do so in broad strokes. Rhetoric, as it was envisioned by Aristotle, contained five canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. If we retain the canon intact, we have epistemology in the canon of invention. We focused on this area a lot at Clemson: epistemology, in rhetoric, can take two main forms: anti-foundationalism (exemplified in the sophists, like Gorgias), and foundationalism (exemplified in Plato, and later picked up by Weaver). Antifoundationalism holds that all truth is constructed by discourse, and prefigures the constructive, dialogical nature of 20th and 21st century rhetorics. Foundationalism maintains that truth is discovered, not constructed—there exist eternal verities that rhetoric urges upon audiences, rather than co-creates with them. If we disconnect the canon, as Ramus and Astell did, we are left with various constellations of arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Rhetoric is no longer epistemic, but is merely ornamental: a good rhetorician is a good stylist. Others disregard the canon entirely, and at this stage, we begin to see new systems of rhetoric. Richards held that rhetoric was more than just persuasion—that rhetoric is about language. Burke concurred, but saw rhetoric as a way to induce identification (which overturns the traditional idea that rhetoric is mainly agonistic) 1. Burke admits, however, that persuasion and identification, along with communication, bleed into one another. Foucault focused more on the systems of power and control that discourse creates, and Gates keyed on the particular rhetorical patterns of African Americans, especially signifying, which turns on indirection. Bahktin saw rhetoric as situated and dialogical, always occurring in conversation (even when one thinks, she thinks in mental conversation with an implied partner). Anzaldua found meaning in overlapping identities. But all of these rhetorics, to one degree or another, follow Weaver’s idea that rhetoric is cognate with language. In other words, they depart from Aristotle in that they are not systems of persuasion, not handbooks of rhetoric. Instead, they treat rhetoric (and many do not even specifically mention the term) as more or less synonymous with meaning in language. And this brings us back to our proposed definition: rhetoric is a way of knowing through discourse. Perhaps a good way to understand anti-foundationalism (see theorists in previous two paragraphs) is to say it involves using discourse to know, while foundationalism (Plato, Weaver, Ramus, Astell) involves using knowing to create 1 Although Burke saw himself as building on Aristotle, his system was different enough, in my estimation, to warrant placement in this category.
discourse. It’s a chicken-or-egg question in a sense: does reality construct language, and make it possible? Or does language construct reality?
Why should we study it? We should study rhetoric because it helps us understand how discourse works, it helps us to do discourse better, and it helps us understand how knowledge—even many parts of the human experience—are constructed. Firstly, it helps us understand how discourse works. Language is slippery, and polyphonic, and heteroglossic, and fraught with possibilities. Aristotle and Bitzer gave us tools to see the dynamics of rhetorical situations, and other theorists have given us nuance: Foucault reminds us that language is tied to power; Bahktin helps us not to oversimplify the rhetor/audience relationship; Weaver shows us that people are emotional, and that pathetic appeals are not necessarily manipulative—sometimes we do not feel strongly enough about the right things. And this understanding of the function of discourse helps us to become better language users (and hopefully, better language teachers). Rhetoric takes us to the deep structure of language, and we wend our way through etymologies and archaeologies, perorations, linguistic paradigms, grammars, and psychological frameworks. We reference theologies, epistemologies, sociologies, and histories, and we ultimately look for knowledge about how the world shapes language, and language shapes the world. Do I lapse into poetry? Good: let it be in the service of rhetoric. It is an inescapable fact that humans are symbol-using animals. Perhaps it is a doomed enterprise to separate rhetoric from poetry, or writing from designing, or even dialectic from rhetoric—maybe it’s all language, it’s all discourse, it’s all semiosis—but rhetoric gives us something unique, and that’s a meta conversation about it all, a language about language. And that, finally, is what rhetoric provides: while we might be tempted to throw up our hands and call the inner machinery of language ineffable, unknowable, maybe even unteachable, rhetoric does not accept that. It doggedly continues to try to codify what exactly this thing is that we are doing. What does it all mean? Why is language so powerful? How and when does meaning emerge? And most importantly, how do we harness it to the right goals? While literature tells its stories (and should), and poetry mixes its beakers of words (and should), rhetoric drinks a cup of coffee, rolls up its sleeves, and goes to work.