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Re-Situating and Re-Mediating the Canons: a Cultural-Historical

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Re-Situating and Re-Mediating the Canons: a Cultural-Historical Webtext Core Text Re-situating and re-mediating the canons: A cultural-historical remapping of rhetorical activity An earlier version of this argument was presented February 6, 2005 by Paul Prior in a plenary talk at the Santa Barbara Conference, Writing Research in the Making. Contributors: Paul Prior, Janine Solberg, Patrick Berry. Hannah Bellwoar. Bill Chewning, Karen J. Lunsford, Liz Rohan, Kevin Roozen, Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, Jody Shipka, Derek Van Ittersum, Joyce Walker Introduction The five classical canons listed below (with first their Latin and then their Greek names in parentheses) have offered a map for rhetors and a frame for rhetoricians for at least two millennia. • Invention (inventio, heuresis) • Arrangement (dispositio, taxis) • Style (elocutio, lexis) • Memory (memoria, mneme) • Delivery (actio/pronuntiatio, hypokrisis) The first three emerged earliest and have remained the most robust in the last several centuries. Whereas other maps that ancient rhetoricians 2 bequeathed to us (e.g., forensic, deliberative, and epideictic discourse; ethos, pathos, and logos; the topics; tropes) identify types of discourse, the canons are unique in that they aim to map rhetorical activity. It is probably that emphasis on activity that has associated the canons so closely with both rhetorical practice and pedagogy. In this webtext, we argue that it is time to look to a new mapping of rhetorical activity, one that acknowledges advances in our understanding of language, semiotics, human development, technology, and society. We should start with two clarifications. First, this argument primarily addresses the canons of rhetoric from our perspective as writing studies researchers rather than from the perspective of classicists. As writing researchers, we approach classical rhetoric, much as Roland Barthes (1988) suggested, as a matter of a history. It is in part to address the freight of this history—woven, often tacitly, into our languages, institutions, and practices—that we take up the canons of rhetoric and propose re- situating and re-mediating them. Second, as we examine the map that the rhetorical canons have offered and propose a new mapping, we must acknowledge that we do not believe that this new mapping has only recently become necessary. The digitization of semiosis has certainly made the limits of the canons more palpable, but we would argue that the problems were there from the start. In other words, without in any way discounting the insightful intellectual labor of 3 rhetoric’s classical pioneers or the value of studying the products of that labor to enrich our understanding and practice today, we suggest that the canons offered only a partial map even of the rhetorical and political worlds of Ancient Greece. Delivery problems As many scholars have noted (e.g., Crowley, 1998), current- traditional rhetoric effectively shrank the canons to arrangement and style. As Writing Studies emerged in the 1970s as a distinct site of disciplinary activity, attention to invention merged powerfully with attention to cognitive process in the formation of the process movement, a movement that linked theory, research, pedagogy, and practice. In the last decade or so, another of the classical canons, delivery, has been reanimated as the field’s attention has turned to electronic and digital media. In light of this renewed attention, we take up delivery as a strategic example to illustrate the kinds of fundamental problems that we (and others) have found with the classical canons. Through an analysis of delivery, we aim to identify the broader problems deeply embedded in the texture of the classical map, and we argue for remapping rhetorical activity, for re-situating and re-mediating the canons, rather than continuing to pour ever more, and ever more alien, content into those ancient vessels. 4 Under the prototype of oratory, delivery was about gesture, stance, gaze, dress, voice quality, intonation, and so on. As writing seemed to overtake talk as the dominant mode of civic-legal life, the canon of delivery fell into neglect, along with memory—understood to be about recall for lines of argument in oral debate and/or memorization of set speeches. Observers as diverse as Barthes (1988) and George Kennedy (1994) could agree that the last two canons became peripheral in a literate age. (What use are gestures, dress, stance, vocalization, and memorization to a text?) Consider, in contrast, Lev Vygotsky (1997), who saw externally mediated memory systems, like those of writing, as a matter of the revolutionary reorganization of memory, a key step in human history. This fading of delivery and memory tells us much about how firmly rhetoric has been anchored in a narrow range of contexts for specific sociocultural conditions and with a prototypical mode. Rhetoric was tailored to the public life of Greece, then Rome, then the Church. Speech was the prototypical mode, though rhetoric has certainly adapted to new modes. Orality was partly eclipsed by literacy (a process obvious with the medieval ars dictaminis, the manuals of letter writing), and both now feel the pressure of the digital age. However, rhetoric has only recently and partially begun to theorize mode. It is instructive to attend to recent attempts to rehabilitate delivery. When Robert Connors (1993) sought to revive delivery, for example, he 5 did so in another local institutional context and mode, exploring the delivery aspects of the student research paper—the type of paper, the typography, margins, printer options, and so on. Kathleen Welch (1990, 1999) has been arguing for two decades that we should reconceive delivery as medium, understood especially through the theories of Walter Ong (1982) and Marshall McLuhan (1994). In Electric Rhetoric, Welch (1999) notes varied media, but Ong’s electracy leads her to focus primarily on retro-fixing rhetoric to address television, with delivery becoming an important televisual domain—add panning cameras, newsroom furnishings, corporations, and postmodern HUTS (houses using televisions) to the old issues of delivery. In short, when delivery becomes unfixed from one set of institutional contexts, one mode, it is typically refixed in another institutional context and mode. It is important to recognize that rhetoric was already multimodal for the ancient Greeks; they didn’t need the printing press or the web. Early in Plato’s (1989) Phaedrus, Phaedrus reads Lysias’s speech on love to Socrates, who has guessed Phaedrus would have the written text hidden in his cloak and would have been poring over it for his studies. In fact, Socrates insists that Phaedrus read the speech on love so he can get a precise representation of it. He tells Phaedrus he has no interest in Phaedrus practicing his oratory on him when “Lysias himself is here present” (p. 477). For Plato then (and this in spite of his sharp criticism 6 of writing later in the same dialogue), writing was not only a familiar, expected pedagogic practice, but also a valued means of storing precise, detailed representations of discourse. Re-mediating and re-distributing delivery Like Welch, we propose theorizing delivery, but we are offering a different name to start and a different mix of theoretical lenses. Delivery might be reconceived as mediation. By mediation, we are thinking of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (1999) remediations close to McLuhan (1994), but also of Vygotsky’s (1987, 1997) cultural-historical approach to mediated activity, and Bruno Latour’s (1999) accounts of technical mediation—detours, delegations, and hybrids. Latour, interestingly, begins with another Greek, Daedalus, the crafty engineer. What mediations, what kinds of detours, might delivery of a text involve? Do we write a text to be read silently, read aloud (as a speech), recorded on a DVD, or performed by various groups of actors on a stage? What typeface do we use? What color? Do we deliver the document on paper, on the screen, or in some other medium? If on paper, by mail or by hand? If by hand, do we do it ourselves or do we have someone else do it? Do we synchronize the delivery with some other event? Or perhaps we deliver it (think espionage; think, like Erving Goffman, 1974, of the stratagems of con artists) by allowing others to find it in another place. Do we need to deliver the text first to 7 an intermediary (editor, publisher, boss) for review to get it out to a public of some size? Or do we want the text to be distributed in encrypted formats to a small select distribution list? Or do we divide up the delivery of the message so that the chances of illicit use are limited? (Think about systems to deliver the authorization codes for nuclear weapons.) As these questions begin to suggest, delivery seems to encompass two related but distinct types of issues: mediation and distribution. In Jody Shipka’s (2005) account of her activity-based, multimodal approach to composition, we see how she invites her students to conceive of their work as engineering rhetorical events, and we glimpse the truly complex means of mediation and distribution the students devise to achieve specific rhetorical effects. Moreover, her work highlights the fact that mediation is not necessarily singular, a choice of “this means or that.” It may involve a distribution of means, a configuration, a dispersion. We may pursue rhetorical goals through a variety of genres, in different media, with different distributions across a series of events and texts. As an idealized map of rhetorical activity, the canons invite a sequential reading: The rhetor invents, arranges, crafts style, memorizes, and finally delivers. However, as in Burke’s (1950) pentad or Jakobson’s (1990) model of communication (which offer 8 simultaneous, multifunctional accounts where all of the elements are always co-present though in varying degrees of prominence or relevance), current thinking about the canons (and key elements of historical practice) reject that linear reading.
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