University of Iowa
From the SelectedWorks of David J Depew
2010
Revisiting Richard McKeon’s Architectonic Rhetoric: A Response to ‘The sU es of "Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts’ David J Depew, University of Iowa
Available at: https://works.bepress.com/david_depew/51/ Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric
Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges
Edited by Mark J. Porrovecchio
I~ ~~o~:!;;n~~:up 2(11) NEW YORK AND LONDON 36 Barbara A. Biesecker Chapter 3
47. "Barack Obama's Acceptance ~peech," N May L All the following citations are froIl! this transcript. Revisiting Richard McKeon's "The President as Sign," in The Republic of Signs: Liberal and American Popular ClIlture University of Chicago Architectonic Rhetoric 87-121. "no" that, in refllsing to elaborate itself into sense as A Response to Richard McKeon's "The nation, or program for action functions as an empty or signifier (a signifier that thereby does not submit to Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: whose perlocutionary force is to traumatize the Copjec, Imagine; !v1aoti, "The Performative"; Architectonic Productive Arts" Rubenstein, rhis is Not. 50. Alain Sadiou, "Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts," David Depew trans. Steven Corcoran, Theory and Euent 6 (2002): 2. This, again, marks Sadiou's disavowal (in its stricrest Freudian sense of deliherate not-flo tic of his own theoretical militancy in the midst of a critique of militant terrorism, 51. Borch-Jacobsen, Llcan, 137. As Borch-Jacobsen rightly notes, "This is Like several other essays that Richard McKeon wrote in the late 19605 also why Lacan always formulates his examples of fllll speech in the sec and early 1970s, "The Uses of Rhetoric ill a Technological Age: Archi ond person singular (which, strictly speaking, is nor at all necessary, since tectonic Productive Arts" argues that the times call for rhetoric to one most often gives one's word in the first person), "This YOll," he "is become an architectoniC productive art, as McKeon says it did Oil two ahsolutely essemial in full speech, What Lacan llleans to emphasize is the necessary co-relation or co-respondence between the you and the I, the earlier occasions: Rome as it l110rphed from republic to empire and the latter insri!llting its idenrity only hy investing the former with the power of Renaissance as it tried to overcome the constraints of what it effectively responding (or not)" [137], My argument that Lacan's conceptualization and dismissivdy constructed as "the Middle Ages," [will try to say what of full speech is rhetorical through and through is lent additional support McKeon took an architectonic productive art to be, what these earlier this unequivocal assertion (presented as a single-line paragraph, which eras had in common with his, and why McKeon thought that his time, virtue of its very form signals its significance) in Ecnts: "For the fum: tion of language in speech is nor to unlike its previous analogues, ca lied for an architectonic rhetoric that 52, See Ernesro Laelau and Chantal would take upon itself the offices of first philosophy, replacing meta Towards a Radical DemOCrLllic l J o/ltics, trans, Winston Moore and physics, I [ say "his time" intentionally, A lot of water has flowed under Camlllack (BllfY St. Edmunds, UK: Tbetford Press, IY~S), Insofar the hriclge in the last four decades. So [ will go on to reflect on as Laelan cominues to think democracy as "ever-receding horizon," the time has hrought forth what McKeon called for and whether his call cominued influence of Heidegger makes itself felt. To sharpen the distinc tion between Laelau's thinking on democracy and my own, is to sav that remains timely an evemal rhetoric perlocutionary effect (what it docs hy the I begin with some reflections on the genre of this text. The speaker in is to discursively evacuate or empty the place of Power hy giving it this and many other McKeon texts is not an "I" but a channel through to the people nor in the form of all earnest answer to the Real-however which some sort of "we" does the talking. This voice is fond of passive progressive, radical, or evell utopian-hut in the form of the (ter constructions and seems allergic to emotional appeals. One might be rifying) open qHestion (Che vl/oi?) that renders its receivers as the answer to the Real. This theorization of evemal rhetoric thereby articulates in tempted to infer that this was simply characteristic of the man himself. interesting ways with Claude Lefort's formula of democracy: "('ower is In an earlier essay on McKeon, I noted the near disappearance of the and remains democratic lonly] when it proves to belong to no one," Claude first person even in a that purported to be autobiographical!l Yet Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Min rereading "The Uses of Rhetoric" from a distance of almost forty yeus nesota Press, 1988),27, I have been struck by its tone of urgency. The intellectual history that 53. Jacques-Alain Miller, te Neueu de Lacan (Paris: Verdier, 270, Cited in Slavoj Zizek, In Defense oftost Causes, 41~, warrants its call for a post-metaphysical architectonic rhetoric is not 54, fcrits.265, overtly founded, to be sure, in what to be done to resolve a par ticular issue that has presented itself to a well-identified here and now, as it would be in a straightforward piece of deliberative rhetoric. We forced to follow subtle clues in reconstructing what was bugging Richard McKeon in the 1960s and 19705. Still, this is indeed a piece of deliberative rhetoric. Admittedly, the text's tendency to move directly 38 David Depew Revisiting Richard McKeon'S Architectonic Rhetoric 39 from history to call without pausing to identify a specific problem that paradigm arts. Does that mean that doctors, lawmakers, generals, and licenses the speaker to issue a concrete solution picks up some overtones public speakers are practicing architectonic arts? These arts are cer of the decidedly modern genre of the manifesto. In manifestos paramount in the technical sphere itself. The art of bridle mak is portrayed as already bringing forth a solution that the speaker, ing, Aristotle says, is subordinate to horsemanship and horsemanship to construed as a sign reader, is merely channeling. In McKeon's military strategy." But as we climb up from this and similar sequences however, it is people not history that are called upon to do what is into the sphere of normative action (praxis), Aristotle says that politics for and who might well fail to do it. (po!itike) is architectonic over military strategy, lawmaking, medicine, McKeon's call for rhetoric to be an architectonic productive art works and rhetoric.' McKeon interprets this to mean that politics, since it plays against the background of Aristotle's influential distinction between an architectonic role in the sequence that rllns from bridle making to scientific knowledge of invariant essences (episti?Jni> in the sphere of horsemanship to military strategy, is in this respect not only an art, but the()ria), practical knowledge of how to behave on particular occasions an architectonic art, albeit an art that springs from and responds to the without compromising ethical values (fJhronesis in the sphere of praxis), ethical norms of praxis. and technical knowledge, which issues in products, procedures, or poli This is a possihle, but problematic interpretation of Aristotle.6 Even cies that reliably achieve their aim because they come abollt not by acci more problematic, but consistent with this reading, is McKeon's parallel dent or rote training, but through "how to" knowledge of causes claim that for Aristotle metaphysics, the highest of the purely theoretical in the sphere of poiesis). The standard translation of teclme as "art" sciences (e{Jistemai), can also serve as an architectonic art, albeit one can be misleading. Even though he uses it, McKeon might well have that looks to and proceeds from theoretical knowledge. His argument pointed out that the narrowing of "art" to mean "fine art" is a legacy of is as follows. Aristotle clearly says that it is the {)()/itikos or statesman the Renaissance. Accordingly, we must hear in mind that for Aristotle who determines which arts and sciences are to be practiced in the st
or IJe rhetoric. McKeon knew as well as anyone that Aristotle's Rhetoric the objective foundations of knowledge that Aristotle was the last great is a line-drive argument asserting against Plato that rhetoric can be an art to take for granted was so pervasive that it was dulling the native at all only if it is limited in scope and profollndly subordinate to [Jraxis hue of resolution. Cicero's proto-pragmatic appeal to rhetorical norms and theoria. Precisely the enlarged role for rhetoric that Aristotle ruled argumentation transformed Aristotle's distinctions between theoreti out in the waning decades of the fourth century BCE, however, is what motivated questions about whether something is, what it is, why for in the waning decades of the twentieth century it is, and what kind of inquiry can answer questions about it into the lineaments he took to be as eter four issues, stases, or constitutions that were eventually made canonical invariant. In consequence, pure theoria must be invariant as well for rhetorical students by Qnintilian. Aristotle's four questions and so cannot be the object of either techm? or /Jraxis, which Aristotle into the issues of definition, significance, and forum, the latter says bring intelligence to the sphere of the changeable. 11 Moderns, on the determining what venue, court, or judge is qualified to hea r the case at other hand, live, move, and think in a cultural milieu in which change is hand.!7 In this and other essays in this period, McKeon repeatedly points assumed to be more basic than permanence.l1 In this context, McKeon's out that ill Cicero's practice-oriented epistemic regime for rhetoric to become an architectonic productive art with a "theo replaced first principles by serving as means for inventing persua retical orientation" means that in our technological age rhetoric must sive arguments addressing particular rhetorical situations. The play the role that Aristotle assigned to theoretical philosophy. It must of arguments figure in enthymemes that apply these topics to assume the burden of "producing suhject matters and organizing them else McKeon's new architectonic rhetoric is to do, it is in relation to each other and to the problems to he solved."1l this topical fashion. The accent here is on "producing." Instead of discovering or uncover- case was the Renaissance, when rhetoric beC1I11e ,1 n the eternally constant boundaries, principles, and domain-speci fic architectonic productive art with aesthetic intent. III the Renaissance, problems of the sciences, practices, and arts, rhetoric as a productive art it was not only theorid that was missing, but praxis too. The monastic with theoretical orientation must now create these very boundaries, prin culture of medieval Europe had more or less destroyed the very notions ciples, and problems. If problem solving requires crossing, blurring, eras· of citizenship and political deliberation that had given Cicero his sllbject or redrawing disciplinary boundaries, let them be crossed, blurred, position. The problem now was to recreate a secular sphere. The Renais or redrawn. If it requires new techniques and technologies, let sance soilltion was to make rhetoric an architectonic productive art that invented. This must be a rhetorical task because, as McKeon carry out the value-laden functions that had earlier been assi argued in a closely related essay that he published two years either to theory or practice by distinguishing within the sphere of pro later in Philosophy and Rhetoric, rhetoric is inherently creative in ways duction itself between fine and vulgar arts and by extension fine and philosophy is not. It is at home with the fact that "we do not vulgar people. Our notion of what is architectonic about architects still subject-matters ready made nor do we encounter problems dis reHects this turn. The creativity of fine artists-creativity is the Roman precisely in fields."14 Rhetoric employs commonplaces (tOf!oi), tics' new word for rhetorical inl'entio-is responsive to subtle norms of definitions, to frame issues, work through problems, and in ways that house framers, roofers, and dry wall installers are judgments.!' Focused as it is on judging cases, problems, and not. The Renaissance thus gave us productive architectonic arts informecl situations, topical argumentation does not swing wildly between essen by what was called aesthetics, thereby "reuniting eloquence and certainties and the skeptical, positivist, or even nihilistic "revolts wisdom in [finel art." IS Aesthetics prominently included belles against metaphysics" that inevitably follow, as philosophy does.16 the beautiful exemplification of 1 that stood in contrast to the McKeon's argument for his call is based on an analogy with two prior of the Medieval scholastics. In modernity, aesthetics has eras in which in his opinion rhetoric had ascended from its usual fered the norms of taste, value, and cultural capital on which the modern 19 dinate position to serve as an architectonic productive art. The first case social hierarchy itself rests. Since the seventeenth century, Aristotle's was the late Roman republic, in which rhetoric became an architectonic Poetics and Rhetoric have been interpreted in ways that bend them to productive art with practical intent. McKeon, who was a better reader this purpose. of Cicero than of Aristotle and indeed one of the best Cicero readers In spite of its distinguished career, McKeon intimates that this since the £leo-Ciceronian Hume, saw Cicero as working to resolve per tion has failed us. It failed us because our technologically dominated vasive problems of communication which, if solved, would lead to world is now sundered into two noncommunicating subcultures.21 One judgment and wise political action in a world in which skepticism about is the aesthetic regime that evolved to deal with "values." The other is 42 David Depew Revisiting Richard McKeon's Architectonic Rhetoric 43 the technoscientific sphere whose instrumental rationality brings with the calculating machine."l? He speaks of techniques in "public rela it seductions that aesthetic sensibility is never quite powerful enough to tions, propaganda, and political advertising" and of the rise of systems counter. The reason for this split, McKeon says, is that, having limited analysis and techniques of data storage and retrieval in corporations and rhetoric to literary art, modernity's technological arts developed with other institutions. He might have mentioned the uses of psychotherapy out rhetoricY Accordingly, "The old dichotomy between eloquence and and other dialogicaltechniques in the interpersonal sphere. Presciently, nature reappeared as a distinction between values and facts and between he notes the rise of computational arts "that are practiced by machines," t he humanities and other sciences."21 although he could hardly have foreseen the extent to which the digital In developing this theme, McKeon cites the notorious midcentury revolution would transform our world and lead to the very kind of new "two cultures" disputation between the literary critic F. R. Leavis and technologically permeated interdisciplines for which he was calling, sllch the science-minded novelist C. P. Snow as an example of the problems he as the "cognitive science" that now thrives at the boundary between wants his architectonic art to help resolve.24 That this rift has not digital complltation, visual enhancement, and neurologyJ9 At the same resolved since he wrote, but has in fact has grown worse, is evidenced time, McKeon was anxiously aware-this is, I think, the source of the the fact that the same issues recycled fOllr decades later in the urgency that permeates his essay-that none of these new tools, tech "science wars" of the 19905. If he had witnessed this unseemly episode, niques, and technologies is by itself an art, let alone an architectonic art. McKeon might well have remarked on the dishearteningly repetitive Their potential as sources of invention and tools of inqlll ry cannot quality of debates that pit humanistically construed arts against techno realized unless and until a universal rhetoric of communication that is as logically construed sciences. One lesson tallght by "The Uses of Rhetoric philosophically ambitious as Cicero's mitigates, mediates, and ultimately in a Technological Age" is that these debates can be expected to recur, resolves the conflict between the humanities and technosciences. As a giving off more heat than light, if we do not return for perspective, clari case ill point, McKeon protests that sender-channel-message-receiver fication, and new ideas to the older controversy between rhetoric and models of information flow will continue to treat communication merely losophy that gave them birth. Philosophy, after all, is the mother of the operation of a machine" unless the relevant technologies "are natural sciences and rhetoric is the mother of the literary humanities. to inquiry into what is the case" rather than as devices for break Here, then, is the current predicament as McKeon sees it: "As we ing down, transmitting, and reassembling what someone (or something) enter into the final decades of the century we boast of a vast Olltput in said.lll (If ever anyone doubted that McKeon remained Dewey's disciple, the arts, and we are puzzled by the absence of interdisciplinary connec this remark should be enough to caLIse a change of mind.) tion and the breakdown of interpersonal intergroup and intercllitura Because the rhetorical art he calls for is to have "a theoretical orien commllnication."25 Note that McKeon takes communication " assuming the office of managing disciplinary boundaries that to be the central problem. In this diagnosis he was consciously follow Aristotle assigned first to philosophy, we might well ask what McKeon ing the lead of his teacher John Dewey and other public intellectuals thought about the uses of twentieth century academic philosophy. Could who in the wake of World War I believed that, in the famous line from it help create or even become such an architectonic communicarive art? Cool Hand Luke, "what we have here is a failure to communicate." The McKeon was cognizant of the powerful "linguistic turn" by which same topical resources circulated after the World War II. On this view losophers working in the wake of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Aus of things, which McKeon shares, communication breakdown has pro tin were spurning speculation abollt things and introspection into private duced violence, mass murder, and injustice on a hitherto unimag psychological processes and were turning instead to analyze the public scale. It now threatens nuclear annihilation. It follows it truth conditions on which the very meaning of propositions depends and academics who created the field of communication studies and resitu the ways in which speech itself performs actions. The ways of things, ated the dormant study of rhetoric, newly construed as a communicative thoughts, and words are close to what Kenneth Burke, McKeon's long art, within it) that restoring and enhancing communication is the path time friend, called "terministic screens." They are ways of framing how to safety. questions are perspicuollsly asked and satisfactorily answered that hold McKeon argues that the solution to cultural fragmentation "in a tech sway in different cultural eras. Change from one terministic regime to nological age is technology itself given a rhetorical transformation."16 another occurs when an argot that had once seemed fresh and reveal Resollrces for refiguring technology rhetorically are springing up every ing comes to be felt as stale and as a fetter on insight. In distingUishing where if we learn to look in the right places. "Our rhetoric," he says, the fregean-Russellian-Wittgensteinian-Austinian way of words from "finds its commonplaces in the technology of commercial advertising the Aristotelian way of things and the l.ockean "new way of ideas," 44 David Depew ReVisiting Richard McKeon's Architectonic Rhetoric 45
McKeon seems to have been struck by the fact that the twentieth century (noumenal or transcendent, essentialistic, substrative, and phenomenal). is not the first time in which the way of words had become ascendant. Although, as we have seen, selections are characteristic of whole eras, Intriguingly, it was also ascendant in the two prior periods in which, speakers and writers can be counted on to frame their arguments by according to McKeon, rhetoric rose to become an architectonic produc spontaneously choosing principles, methods, and interpretations that tive art. The connection between the present and his two analogous eras differ in only one or a few respects from those adopted by their oppo now becomes clearer. McKeon seems to have thought that rhetoric can nents. This makes for well-organized cases and perspicuously stated dif not become an architectonic productive art unless and until it is linked ferences, since differences wider than that often fail to "statiate" arollnd once more with a linguistic tllrn of some sort.ll a clearly defined issue. But close contestation of this sort also leads those I have argued elsewhere that in linking the linguistic tllrn with his involved in debates and controversies to rei fy their schemes and to insist call for an architectonic a[t that would serve the philosophical needs on precisely the wrong thing-the truth of the preferred conceptual of the present technological age, McKeon was influenced, though far scheme itself. Their opponents typically follow suit by seizing upon the from bamboozled, by the "philosophical semantics" that Rudolf Car arbitrariness of the frame in which a contested claim is encoded in order nap brought with him to the University of Chicago, where McKeon was to discredit or marginalize not only the frame, but all too often the claim a dominating figureY Having arrived there in 1936 in flight from the encoded in it. In doing so, they, no less than those they are challeng, Nazis, Carnap reformulated his logical positivist views about meaning ing, turn frames into supposed facts, committing fallacies of misplaced and truth conditions in ways that resonated with the pragmatic strain concreteness with depressing regularity. Very often the driving motive in American philosophy. Specifically, Carnap thought (in a rather Kan for conceptual overreach is to gain control of a discipline by identifying tian way) that (I) no empirical claim can be made without a conceptual one's preferred framework, or paradigm if you will, with the boundar framework and (2) empirical claims can be objectively true or false ies of the field itself, thereby minimizing one's exposure to refutation if conceptual frames are arbitrary, content free, and devoid of truth refusing to confer standing (the stasis of forum or venue) on one's conditions. To use the simplest possible example, it is as true as true call opponents. be that two plus two equals four in a conceptual framework of whole An example 111lght help. Advocates of genetic redllctionist versions of numbers and a few formal operations on them, but there is no way of Darwinism encode claims about how DNA relates to genes, traits, and deciding the truth value of the framework of whole numbers or any organisms in an atomistic conceptual scheme (actional principles, com conceptual scheme and system of rules or of putational methods, substrative interpretations) in which genes are said someone to adopt one. They are products of invention and convention. metaphorically to be "selfish," that is, to be naturally bent on replicating It seems to me likely (I cannot prove it) that McKeon's chosen name for themselves. II In this way "selfish gene theorists" explain phenomena that his own approach to conceptual schemes, "philosophical semantics," had remained puzzling to earlier Darwinians. They explain cooperation was appropriated from Carnap. There was, however, a big difference. among social insects, for example, as a consequence of natural selection Whereas Carnap's, and after him Willard Van Orman Quine's, concep operating at the level of additive genetic contribution to the next gen tual schemes were narrowly restricted to mathematical models and rules eration, therehy reconciling the cooperation, even altruism, we useful to the natural sciences-Quine once quipped that "philosophy of observe in nature with the Darwinian presumption of self-interest. It science is philosophy enough"-McKeon's semantic schemes embraced is not individual organisms that are self-interested, but genes. 16 Oppo discursive practices and methods from theology and literature to poli~ nents of the selfish gene hypothesis are often quick to point out how tics, technology, and science. 33 ill-founded and metaphorical the genocentric framework is. But in doing The key to McKeon's philosophical semantics is found in his recogni so its critics sometimes tend to overlook or marginalize findings, about tion that all discursive practices are constituted by arguments and that cooperation, for example, that any acceptable When extended beyond the range of the issues and cases they explicate traditional claims of philosophy to "preside over culture," in Richard perspicuously they all threaten to become empty and irrelevant general Rorty's phrase, are diminished by conceptual relativity. Admittedly, a izations. And so it goes, real knowledge precipitating out bit by bit only pluralistic philosophy is not the same thing as an architectonic art. But by a process in which the reach of the competing conceptual frames that if this art is to assume functions that were performed by philosophy encode small T truths is excessive in ways that later generations have no when the world was presumed to be static, it can press its claim to be a trouble spotting at a glance, but that participants in controversies defend specifically rhetorical art only if the conversations it facilitates and the to the death. controversies it helps resolve make extensive use of the conceptual rela For McKeon, successful communication must now result from cul tivity thesis. It must do so in order to prevent discursive flow in contested tivating an art of recognizing that conceptual frames are conventional situations from freezing up under the undue influence of illusory and and, having done so, trying to find common ground, real nubs of dis excessive efforts to make one conceptual frame true for all contexts. It agreement, and hopefully shared judgments on the issues at hand, even if is just such excesses that characterize the "science wars" and "cultural not on everything, or even anything, else. Separating conceptual frames wars" of our own times. McKeon wanted to put an end to such episodes. from substantive proposals will help restore or advance communication He thought rhetoric was up to the job. I would add: rhetoric only when it across cultural and disciplinary divides because, once it is cultivated as is freed from the shadow cast by philosophy's old ambitions. an art, the habit of making frame-content distinctions will deter those At this point I would like to make a critical remark. McKeon's fidelity engaged in controversies, as well as those judging them from the subject both to Dewey's project of reforming philosophy and to his own effort position of citizens and other interested publics, from demanding that to revivify rhetoric seems to me a source of difficulty. The former gets their opponents must subscribe not only to a concrete point or policy, but, in the way of the latter by underestimating the agonistic, situated, and unreasonably, to the speaker's preferred conceptual frame or disciplin contingent cha racter of rhetorical invention, a rgumentation, a nd judg ary rhetoric. The spirit of pragmatism survives in McKeon's proposal. It ment. Philosophical appropriations of McKeon's work are typically in was no doubt propelled by his experience working with UNESCO after the service of a reinvigorated /J/;iloso/Jhia /Jerennis. According to this World War II. view, when conventional elements are removed it can be seen that seem McKeon's interpretive matrix emerged over a long period, but had ingly opposed philosophies are often saying "the same thing."42 This is a been fully worked out by the time he wrote "The Uses of Rhetoric." Yet genuine aspect of McKeon's thought.41 Ever since studying with Etienne he does not mention it there. Indeed, most scholars who have developed, Gilson in post-World War I France, he had been attracted to the notion used, or defended McKeon's expanded semantic scheme have taken up that convergent philosophies have emerged in all cultures and still illu its uses for philosophy, not its relevance to a new rhetorical art. His for minate the human condition. "The Uses of Rhetoric," however, makes a mer colleague at the University of Chicago, Elder Olson, remarked that different claim. Even if it does not explicitly treat the semantic scheme as McKeon had "produced a key-hinting at the key-to all philosophy."lH a resource for inventing new arts and arguments, McKeon's architectonic According to his former student Walter Watson, McKeon's expanded rhetorical art "with a theoretical orientation" must employ the interpre philosophical semantics is "the most significant philosophical discovery tive resources of that scheme to find common judgments in situations of the present century." McKeon, he explains, discovered the grollnds in which differences are as important as samenesses, and vastly more of philosophical pluralism, namely, "that the truth admits of more than important than the recurrent samenesses that a philosophia perennis one valid formulation and the reason for this fact in arbitrary and con prizes. "Rhetoric in all its applications," McKeon rightly notes, "focuses ventional elements inseparable from the nature of thought."l~ on the particular, not the universal."44 Yet in ways that McKeon does not It is understandable that the implications of McKeon's interpretive sufficiently stress it seems clear that any such art must treat the relativity schema for pluralizing philosophy would have come to the fore. He him of frame to content not as a context-free philosophical discovery, but as self presented the most fully articulated version of his semantics in an itself relative to the specific rhetorical situations and controversies that essay devoted to its uses for philosophy.40 Nor is it difficult to see why the proposed art helps us negotiate. A rhetorical art with cognitive ambi his followers would stress this project. The issue of pluralism was very tions in a changing world whose cultural core is technologically perme much on the minds of philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s. 41 Yet even if ated knowledge production will replace Cicero's and Hume's personal McKeon himself tended to think of philosophical pluralism as different skepticism with a communal, constructivist, relativist, pluralist, prag from his proposal for a new rhetorical art, the two are demonstrably matic, transdisciplinary45 conception of knowledge. If this art does what intertwined. Rhetoric can have a "theoretical orientation" only if the it is supposed to do, it will be responsive to specifically rhetorical, not 48 David Depew Revisiting Richard McKeon's Architectonic Rhetoric 49 philosophical, norms of argument. This art will encourage, facilitate, tools by which we mediate between innovation and tradition. Yet while and render intelligible, for example, an aspect of rhetorical argumenta he certainly provided a richer and deeper conception of rhetoric and its tion that has been underplayed by many philosophers: the invention and pre-aestheticist historical relation to the humanities than had been deployment of the metaphors and other tropological figures that even in customary in the age of belles lettres, Gadamer did not open a path knowledge-oriented enterprises mediate between a conceptual scheme toward reconciliation with the natural sciences. That is perhaps because and a problematic site of inquiry. The catachrestic images of his rhetorical hermeneutics gave premodern tradition primacy over the genes" and "natural selection" are cases in claims of innovation to which the modern natural sciences Did McKeon's proposal, we may now go on to ask, nml resonance By following Heidegger's reduction of science to technology, and beyond his immediate disciples? One thing is for sure. Beginning in the treating the latter more as a way of darkening than of opening the world, 19705, just after he published "The Uses of Rhetoric," American and Gadamer undercut the thorough conceptual relativity on which McKeon European modes of thought and expression suddenly took a decidedly rightly insisted if scientific and humanistic cultures are to be given antifoundationalist turn. It is worth noting that, whether he was as and intertwined standing as sites for inventive problem solving. alert to this sea change as his own former student Richard Rorty, who It is not surprising, then, that McKeon in fluenced the formation of developed an antifoundational philosophy that made use of some of his the ne\'/ field of rhetoric of science, notably in the pioneering work of themes, McKeon was in fact participating in a cultural shift of some Lawrence Prelli.4 7 The gambit of rhetoric of science is that in our post Rorty originally undertook his neopragmatic project in Kuhnian times rhetoric Notwithstanding, the very simplicity, even superficiality, of rhetoric's speakers. True, the novel arguments of post-structuralism had not yet traditional vocabulary has led Dilip Gaonkar to throw cold water on been invented. I suspect, however, that even if they had been the intel rhetoric of inquiry's and rhetoric of science's approaches to lectualist, or one might say Aristotelian biases of McKeon's own suhject criticism. He argues, first, that by purporting to explain everything in position might well have blinded him to possibilities that so far have general a universal rhetoric explains nothing in particular, and, second, better explicated by voluntarist forms of analysis, which treat us as that you cannot get deep, context-dependent interpretations, judgments, desiring more than thinking animals. and critiques out of terms and concepts that were designed merely to I trace this difficulty to McKeon's assumption that a universal, if rela itate the limited, even pedagogical, productive art of giving speeches. 'l philosophy can coexist with an architectonic rhetorical art One underlying reason for dissent of this sort is not hard to find or to "theoretical orientation." Any rhetoric with philosophical ambi appreciate. Among the stimuli to the antifoundationalist sea change of tions must in the nature of things deconstruct rather than reconstruct 14 1970s were not only the critique of technocracy that arose in philosophy, contrary to what McKeon, following Dewey, hoped. Until of the Vietnam War and the expansion of the Civil Rights move even the shadow of metaphysics is abandoned, in other words, prospects ment to address economic and cultural, and not simply legal and politi for the sort of architectonic rhetorical art for which McKeon called can cal, dimensions of injustice, but the rise of second wave feminism and of not he realized. In imagining such an art, I am far from concluding that post-colonial cultural critique. In subsequent decades these discourses McKeon's semantic system is necessarily caught in or limited to a totally reorganized American academic life. They have made it representation that takes the sovereign thinking and speaking sub clear that claims and practices about gender roles, sexual preferences, for granted. Rather, an old saying might be germane to McKeon's and cultural privilege that seemed natural not only to Aristotle, but to call for rhetoric to be an architectonic productive art: "Be careful what Dewey, Gadamer, and McKeon himself are now inescapahly recogniz you wish for. You might get it." I say this because a good case can he as the work of convention. Since Foucault we have known that that there is no better characterization of post-structuralist these prejudices have heen made to appear natural by suhtly dispersed rhetorical theory and practice than as an architectonic productive art in forms of power that enter into the very formation of subjects. It is not which rhetoric displaces, rather than supplements or parallels, philoso to a depth hermeneutic along Gadamer's line that Gaonkar and others in producing and iustifying claims to knowledge. call attention, then, nut to an optic that sees into the deeper rhe If this is so, consequences follow for recent rhetorica I theory and criti torical processes that produce heterosexual normativity, gender roles, cism. It might seem at first sight that relativizing the claims of Nietzsche, class positions, and the imperial gaze that underlies the very idea of race. and other "post-humanists" to the rhe In recent decades, rhetorical studies has been employing conceptual situations they evoke and the controversies in which they tools provided by appropriations of Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, Der as my version of McKeon's call recommends, might well have the effect rida, and others to bring these processes of of minimizing the profundity and permanence of the hard won and still In this respect, rhetorical theory and criticism have been making llse by these thinkers. For this very rea the universal "grammatology" offered by post-structuralism to uncover son, those who have painfully acquired the relevant insights-those, for a no universal rhetoric that produces, through a pervasive "technol example, who have denaturalized gender, sexuality, and cultural privi ogy of deliberation," not speeches, decisions, or policies, but lege-tend to assert the truth of these insights in a philosophical tone themselves, who in this respect are effects of discourse rather of voice. They absolutize, that is to say, the conceptual frames that help causes or users. 53 them encode these precious insights. They invest Saussurian linguistics, It is also clear that the rhetorical technology of subject formation has Lacanian psychology, and Derridan deconstruction, for example, with entered into the sinews of nearly every science and form of inquiry. the same high degree of ontological commitment that they themselves any project for a rhetoric of inquiry or an architectonic productive art criticize in the logocentric, androcentric representationalism that for so must be responsive to themes in contemporary rhetorical theory and rendered our critical knowledge of the discursive dynamics of race, critical practice in which discourse makes speakers at least as much as gender, sex, and ethnicity inaccessible, illegible, and unintelligible. speakers discourse. McKeon was prescient in seeing that it is not The "science wars" suggest why this is a trap. When they realize that enough in our times to say that theoria must be displaced by praxis. Both post-humanist critics are misperforming the decorous roles humanists must be displaced by techne. But there isn't even a hint in McKeon or his are supposed to play while real knowledge is produced elsewhere, sci legatees that teclme would enter into the making of subjects, agents, and entistic opponents of post-structuralism (which they ree:ularlv confuse 52 David Depew Revisiting Richard McKeon's Architectonic Rhetoric 53 with post-modernism) emit angry spasms of uncritical representational attempted with some success to clarify and defend this notion in Garver, realism. To verify whether the law of gravity is socially constmcted, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). they taunt, perhaps YOll should try throwing yourself off a tall building. 7. Aristotle, Nlcomachean Ethics 1.2.1 094a27-b5. In this way, the two cultures debate has reared its ugly head once more. 8. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 46. Is there any way, I ask in concluding, to think that the frame-content 9. McKeon's warrant for this claim is not a textllal reference, but an argu distinction that McKeon hoped to shape into an architectonic rhetori ment to the effect that tlsers of techl1ai are themselves practitioners of an cal art with theoretic orientation might serve as a tool for articulating, art ("The Uses of Rhetoric," 46). Textual support for that claim is not enhancing, and disseminating our new critical insights into both Ollr sci given and might be hard to find. 10. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 53. ences and our knowledge of ourselves? Can it help us grab the insights 11. NiconUlcheall l:thics VJ.3.1139b20-24. It is important to realize that for and flm? Aristotle the essential definitions or first principles that govern each sphere Perhaps it can. The office of rhetorical studies is to recognize that of knowable objects double as boundaries of the science of those objects. claim-making, argument-performance, and truth-telling make no little Aristotle is aware of what this claim implies: (a) There are no subject mat or no sense beyond the bounds of the controversies within which insights ters of science that exist apart from the sciem:e of thost~ subject matters; (b) until the first principles of a discipline are fully articulated in an essential are invented, debated, and judged. That is why we can clarify claims only definition neither are the boundaries of the relevant 1II11uirv well by disputing about them. For its part, rhetoric of science claims that the (c) when these boundaries have been flllly drawn epistemological and cultural interpretation of science will benefit from See Michael ferejohn, TIle Origins ol Aristotelian Science (New I laven, toward judgments of particulars and away from the residually CT: Yale University Press, 1991). An interesting twist on this view of sci ence is fOllnd in William Whewell's Philosophy of the llldllctiue Sciences theocentric ambition to reify and absolurize general theories. The same (1840). \Vhewell, a seminal nineteenth century philosopher of scielKe, mllst be true of poststructLlfalist rhetorics. The insights they offer about took even modern "inductive" sciences to be aimed at finding Aristotelian the discursively performed lives of human beings are not especially safe definitions of classes of objects. This led him so arduously to affirm the in the hands of those who wish to find conrext-free philosophical, psy invariance of the world that he dissociated inductivism from enlpiricism, chological, or linguistic grounds for them. In fact, to the extent that rhe the latter, and denied the very possibility of evolutionary theory torical studies is showing itself more effcctive in encoding these c\aims on the that species cannot change. 12. This is a made repeatedly. It was also made by Kenneth than related fields of inquiry it is a performative contradiction ro say Burke. somcthing other than rhetoric licenses them. In this respect McKeon U. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 48. might not have known what he was calling for. But it turns out to have 14. Ibid., 57. been a pretty good call anyway. L5. Richard McKeon, "Creativity and the Commonplace," Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): L99-210; reprinted in Richard McKeon, Rhetoric: Essays ill II/uel/tion and Disc()uery, ed. Mark Bachman (Woodbridge, CT: Notes Oxhow Press, 1987), 25-36. See also McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 55. L Richard McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Archi 16. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 55. tectonic Productive Arts," in The Prospect of Rhetortc, cds. Lloyd F. Bitzer 17. Ibid., 47. See also Richard McKeon, "Creativity and the Commonplace." and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), 46. This The line of transmission from Aristotle to Cicero is a bit shaky. McKeon essay has heen reprinted in Richard McKeon, Rhetoric: Fssays ill Illuensays nothing about the fact that the corpus Aristoteliclln/ was unknown to tion and Discouery, ed. Mark Bachman (Woodhridge, CT: O~h()w Press, Cicero. It was rediscovered by the violent Roman general Sulla in Cicero's 1987), 1-24. All references are to the own time, but not yet edited or republished. What Cicero knew of Aris 2. David Depew, "Between Pragmatism and Realism: Richard McKeon's totle were his epideictic speeches to general audiences, which were lost Philosophical Semantics," in Pluralism ill Theory and Practice: Richard after the treatises were rediscovered and have never been found since, even McKeon amI American Philosophy, eds. Eugene Garver and Richard though some of them have been reconstructed from bits and pieces. Buchanan (Nashville, TN: Vanderhilt University Press, 2(00). 29-53. 18. !vlcKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 50. 3. Aristotle, Politics VIU.1325b16-23. 19. On this claim, see Pierre BO\1rdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the 4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I. 1. 1094a1 L-15. 1udgmeut of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (984). 5. Ibid., 27a-b5. 20. McKeon, "The Uses oi Rhetoric," 50. 6. It is far from dear in the passage on which McKeon relies (Nicomachean 21. Althongh we associate the notion that we live in a technologically domi Ethics LI.1094al-10) that Aristotle is identifying a hierarchy exclw>ively nated world with Heidegger's "The Question of Technology," it has been composed of arts. The idea of a "practical art" was raised and debated in commonplace since the 1950s. Since McKeon says nothing to justify the post-Aristotelian times. Eugene Garver, a former student of McKeon, has claim, I presllme he too is appealing to it as a topos. :>4 Uavid Depew Richard McKeon's Architectonic Rhetoric 55 22. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 52-53. 45. 1 say tnlllsdisciplinary rather than Interdisciplinary hecause McKeon inti 23. 50. mates that the latter term pays too much homage to the fixity of the disci 24. Ihid., 52. that it relates. 25. 52. 46. Richard Rorty, "A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor," Review of Metaphysics 26. 52-53. 24 (InO): 39-55. 27. McKeon, "Creativity and the " References to this text are 47. Lawrence J. Prelli, Rhetoric of Science: Im1entillg Scientific Discourse to its reprint in McKeon, Rhetoric, 34. (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 28. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 53. 48. I would argue that rhetoric of science contexrualizes science hetter than 29. Ibid., 57. of science, which tends to reullee arguments to context rarller 30. Ihid., 63. than defining context by argument. Some rhetoricians of science stress 31. Ibid., 57-58. tropological framing, others situated argumentation as it unfolds in con 32. David Depew, "Between hagmatism and Realism," 45. troversies, others still political and ideological issues. far from being 33. For McKeon's canonical survey of his philosophical semantics as an art of mutually exclusive, all of these aspects are in play in every persuasive con see McKeon, "Philosophical Semantics and trihution 10 the field. " in Richard McKeon, Freedom and History and Other Essays: All 49. John Nelson, Allan tvlegill, and [Deirdrel McCloskey, cds., Rhetoric to the Thollght of Richard McKeon, ed. Zahava K. McKeon HllmalJ Sciellces: Language alld Argumellt ill Scholarship alld Puhlic University of Chicago Press, 1990),209-21. AftiJirs (Madison: University ofWiscOllsin Press, I My own familiar- of the pseudo-Medieval atmosphere and architecture of the with McKeon's work dates from a year at the University of Chicago Chicago contains an implied swipe at McKeon. See Rudolf ill his COl1lmittee for the An;llysis of Ideas and Study of Methods, Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, cd. Paul Schilpp (Chicago and I,a Clnd another year at the New School for Social Research working with his Open Court, 1963). former studcnts to develop and te:1Ch a McKcon-lIlfluenced undergraduate 34. There is some ambiguity about a fourth sort of terlll in addition to the curriculum. This experience was doubtless p,utially responsibk for my ways of things, thoughts, and words. Rilles is a good guess. subsequent :lffili,uion with and enthusiasm for the Project on the Rhetoric 35. I have developed this example in David Depew, "Darwinism's Iv1ultiplc of Inquiry, which ill recent years I have served as Executive Director. Danuillism alld Philosophy, cds. Vittorio Hosie and 50. See, for example, Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Ecol1omics, 2nd Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 20(5), ed. (tvladisol1: Ul1lvcrsity of Wisconsin Prcss, 1998). 5 I. Gaonkar's critique of Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey is fouud ill Dilip 36. The lows classiClis is Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd cd. (Ox ford, its Double: Reflections on the Rhc UK: Oxford University Press, In9). tori(;ll Turn in the lluman Sciences," in The Rlletorical Turn: IIll/ellti()/l 37. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusioll (London: Bantam Press, 2(06). (/nd /'erslI.lsioll ill the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herhert Simons (Chicago: 38. Elder Olson, "Richard McKeoll," in Remembering the Unil'ersity University of Ch icago Press, 1990), 341-66. I t is repri nted i11 COlltelll Chicago, ed. Edward Shils (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1991 /l0r£lry Rhetorical T/leory: A Reader, cds. John I.ouis Lucaites, Celeste 306. Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 39. Walter W,l[son, The Architectonics of Meaning: fo/tlldations of the New 94-212. Gaoukar's critique of rhetoricians of science, Pluralislll (AlkHlY, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), ix. I recommend this hook as Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and I.awrence Prelli, is found ill a rich source of examples of how to lise McKeon's philosophical semantics of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," in Rhetori(al Hermeneutics: within a philosophical, hut not Illuellt/(m and InterpretatIOn ill the Age of Science, eds. Alan G. Gross 40. for explorations of philosophical pluralism in lvlcKeon's mode, see (in ,lIld William M. Keith (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 25-85. The first addition to Watson, The Architectonics) Eugene Garver and Richard Ruch the topos that explaining everything explains anan, Pluralism ill Theory and Practice: Rit'hard McKeon and American pathos, logos, and other such terms are (Nashville, TN: Vanderhilt University Press, theory oi interpretation and so cannot he 41. There was, for example, a "pluralist" revolt in the 1980s against the hege extended far beyond their traditional role as aids to making public-sphere mony of analytic philosophy in the American Philosophica I Association. speeches. Oddly, the first line of argument is more relevant to Caonbr's Significantly, it occurred just when analytic philosophy itself was critique of rhetoric of the natural sciences and the second to his away from ordinary language philosophy back to new defenses of scien of POROl-style rhetoric of the social sciences. In both cases, however, tific rationalism. This shift sent ripples of fear through American his hasic ohjectlon is that the rhetorical art's ancient and self-consciously tists and Continental phenomenologists just when they were limited role as an aid to making speeches il1 the public sphere "views of the insights of feminism and multiculturalism. speaker as the seat of origin rather than a point of articulation" (Gaonkar, 42. point is most fully developed in Watson, The Architectonics. "The Idea of Rhetoric," 32). 43. McKeon, "A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery," in McKeon, Rhetoric, 52. Sec, for example, Judith Butler, Gender TrOllble (New York: Routledge, 206. 1990); Bodies That Matter: 011 the DiSClJrsil.le Limits of "Sex" (New 44. McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric," 53. York: Routledge, 1993). 56 David Depew Chapter 4 53. See, for example, Barbara Biesecker, "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situa tion from Within the Thematic of Differance," Philosophy and Rhetoric Our Premature Burial 22 (1989): 110-33; Ronald W. Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 25 (1998): 21-40. A Response to Lawrence W. Rosenfield's 54. I argue for this point in "Between Pragmatism and Realism." "An Autopsy of the Rhetorical Tradition" Robert S. litis I,awrence Rosenfield's assessment of the state of the rhetorical tradition in 1971 focuses on the split between rhetoric and philosophy, and the consequences of that split for rhetoric. To build his case he pro vides a sweeping review of the history of the relationship between the two fields. Episodes in that history, he argues, posited either by or rhetoricians, had systematically rent the tongue from the brain, with the latter lIsually having gone to philosophy. Rosenfield's survey of that history in this short essay is selective, with praise going to the ancient Greek conception of the individual speaker as empowered to address and move the /)(dis, where common sense was the ground for politics, spectacle enabled communal truth to emerge in its moment of display, and where exhilaration and curiosity over the wonderment of talk pre vailed. He criticizes Plato's focus on being, Augustine's focus on divine Locke's focus 011 sense perception, and substitution of "historical consciousness" for history. In addition to addressing individual philosophers, Rosenfield assays the contributions of intellectual periods writ to the demise of rheto ric. The scholastic tradition in philosophy detached thought "from the mundane realm of appearance," and discounted rhetoric for its con cern with "the fleeting sector of public action."l Under Enlightenment epistemology, renewed appreciation for the realm of sense perception revalued appearance, and brought to question principles tradition and history. Rosenfield notes Hannah Arendt's influ ence on his argument by acknowledging her work in Between Past and Future (1961). Arendt also argues the point about being and appearance in The Human Condition (1958). Being and appearance became sepa rate, Arendt argues, with a subsequent loss to the public sphere, when Adam Smith's market economics reduced human action to the power to exchange material goods. The specific loss was to the "potentiality" of corning together "in speech and action."2 Philosophy and science, equally committed to separating appearance from being, both came to disregard rhetorical theory because it presumed