INFORMAL LOGIC xv. I , Winter 1993

The Revival of Rhetoric, the New Rhetoric, and the Rhetorical Turn: Some Distinctions

DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR University of Illinois

Key Words: Rhetoric; rhetorical tum; new rheto­ were authorized to grant doctoral degrees. ric; revival of rhetoric; rhetoric of inquiry; consti­ As the American teachers of public tutive rhetoric; figural language; ideology. speaking set out to revive rhetoric, there al­ Abstract: Each of the three phrases-the revival ready existed considerable literature on the of rhetoric, the new rhetoric, and the rhetorical study of rhetoric. It consisted of two dis­ turn-points to a rediscovery of rhetoric in con­ tinct types. First, there was abundant peda­ temporary thought. However, the scholarly work, gogical material on the art of public motivation and commitments associated with speaking and on other forms and tech­ each phrase invokes and puts into playa different niques of effective communication. This notion of rhetoric. In this paper, I explore those differences with a view to showing how the "rhe­ pedagogical literature is part of what torical tum," unlike the "revival of rhetoric" and George Kennedy caIls the tradition of the "new rhetoric," repositions rhetoric as a "technical rhetoric" whose roots can be "metadiscipline." Thus, it signifies a radical shift traced with remarkable continuity all the in the self-understanding of rhetoric. way back to the handbook tradition of the ancients. This pedagogical and technical tradition, always susceptible to the chang­ I. The Revival of Rhetoric es in climate of opinion, has been periodi­ cally renovated, and sometimes mutilated, Although the idea of a "rhetorical turn" in response to the dominant intellectual is of recent vintage, there has been inter­ and cultural influences of the time. But on mittent talk about a "revival of rhetoric" the whole, this tradition has survived intact since the beginning of this century. Such with an identifiable core of discursive an anticipation of a revived rhetoric be­ precepts and practices since the demand came an institutional and disciplinary real­ for practical training in communicative ity in the first quarter of this century with skills has remained relatively constant the establishment of separate departments throughout the Western cultural history. of Speech (later known as "Speech The second type of literature dealt with Communication") in some of the leading the history of rhetoric. There was no sepa­ American universities. l Although these de­ rate study of rhetorical theory as such. The partments were initially driven by the ped­ theoretical understanding of rhetoric was agogical ideals of imparting effective equated with a mastery of the history of communicative skills, especially those of rhetoric, or to be more precise, a mastery public speaking, debate and argumenta­ of key texts within the rhetorical tradition. tion, in response to the growing specializa­ Hence, the traditional method of tion and professionalization of higher historical/theoretical studies in rhetoric education, they gradually turned to a may be characterized as that of the history scholarly study of rhetoric in its theoreti­ of ideas. Two books by Charles Sears cal, historical and critical dimensions. In Baldwin, a professor of Rhetoric at the due course, some of these departments Columbia University-Ancient Rhetoric 54 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Poetic (1924) and Medieval Rhetoric terrain of a given age, the Speech Commu­ and Poetic (1928), both bearing the nication scholars began to study it in terms subtitle "interpreted from representative of what was most distinctive about it, works"-provided the model for this sort namely, its persuasive dimension (as con­ of historical/theoretical scholarship.2 stituting a relatively autonomous sphere of The students of rhetoric within the symbolic action).5 Moreover. this conflu­ Speech Communication field continued to ence of interests between an historically operate along these two lines of scholarly grounded study of public address and a endeavor suggested by the existing litera­ theoretically motivated concern for ture. They added a new arena of inquiry rhetorical criticism paved the way towards which gradually came to dominate the establishing an indigenous scholarly tradi­ research activity within the field-the tion within the field, a sign of emerging study of public address. They undertook to maturity. examine public discourse, especially To be sure, during this period research political oratory, in its historical and bio­ in rhetoric was also being conducted by graphical context. Such concentration on a scholars in other fields, especially in clas­ specific object of study in turn gave rise to sics, Renaissance studies, and the modern a distinctive mode of critical practice languages and literatures. Here the motiva­ called "rhetorical criticism." The evolution tion was quite different. These scholars of the relationship between public address were not seeking to revive rhetoric and to studies and rhetorical criticism is itself a establish it as an autonomous discipline. complex subject which requires further They were drawn to a study of rhetoric be­ study.' But one thing is clear. It is by cause it so happened that an understanding means of historical and critical study of of rhetoric was indispensable in making public address more than any other subject sense of the texts and times they were ex­ that the American Speech Communication amining. And through such studies they departments as a whole were able to place came to appreciate rhetoric as a ubiquitous their distinctive stamp on the study of rhet­ cultural process that stretches across the oric. This is not to suggest that the Speech whole of Western civilization. A great deal Communication scholars were the first to of first rate historical and textual (theoreti­ study oratory and other forms of public cal) scholarship in rhetoric thus originated discourse. Nor am I claiming that they in­ in fields outside of Speech Communication vented the genre of "rhetorical criticism." and was unencumbered by disciplinary One can find the rudiments of a rhetorical anxieties. criticism of oratory as early as Longinus's It is against this background of modern astute observations on Demosthenic style.4 academic scholarship in rhetoric that one Cicero's Brutus and De Optimo Genere has to examine the idea of a "rhetorical Oratorum furnish additional evidence of a turn." In the literature broadly identified critical impulse that sought to examine or­ above, one is unlikely to come across the atorical discourse in terms of its suasory claim regarding the centrality of rhetoric in qualities. But within the ambit of modern contemporary thought, a key presupposi­ academic scholarship, it was clearly the tion of the rhetorical turn. To find the prec­ Speech Communication scholars who first edents for such a claim one has to return to attempted to treat oratorical discourse as the classical texts. It is the sort of claim an autonomous cultural artifact worthy of Plato ironically ascribes to the sophist critical attention. While the historians and Gorgias who, when asked by Socrates (0 political philosophers were content to ex­ specify the subject-matter of rhetoric, spa­ amine oratorical discourse as documentary ciously declares that it deals with "the evidence in reconstructing the ideological greatest of human concerns." and thal it. Rhetoric: Some Distinctions 55 the greatest good because it insures "not like Shorey said it, but rather that this tell­ only personal freedom for individuals, but ing phrase serves as the inaugural epigram also mastery over others in one's own fifty five years later to George Kennedy's country" (Gorgias, 451-452). Similarly, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (1963), the youthful Cicero, in De lnventione, de­ the first in a multivolume historical study scribes the orator as a culture-hero who by of classical rhetoric and its abiding cultural employing his powers of "reason and elo­ influence. Kennedy, while manifestly sym­ quence" (ratio and Of"atio) once taught men pathetic to his subject, nevertheless assumes, that "wandered at large in the fields like as it were unconsciously, a defensive pos­ animals and lived on wild fare" to volun­ ture by citing Shorey'S dictum without tarily give up their savage ways and to comment or irony.8 It was unlikely that any found political communities in which they scholar would have ventured to anoint could engage in "every useful and honora­ rhetoric as the queen of cultural studies ble occupation," and "submit to justice within such a climate of opinion. without violence" (I. ii. 2-3). Later in the Renaissance we find Lorenzo Valla fulmi­ nating against philosophy as he "revives II. The New Rhetoric Quintilian's claim that philosophers originally stole from oratory, and wishes This defensive posture persists in the that Cicero 'would have attacked the twentieth century academic scholarship on thieving philosophers with the sword of rhetoric. The Speech Communication eloquence-queen of all things-entrusted scholars, the group most explicitly com­ to him, and had punished the mitted to a revival of rhetoric, were more malefactors"'.6 But these were generally concerned about the viability of rhetoric in polemical and promotional claims (what the modern age than its alleged centrality_ Vickers calls laus eloquentiae), frequently There was genuine anxiety about concep­ found as commonplaces in the "accessus" tual ossification-an uneasy perception section of the ancient rhetorical treatises, that rhetoric had not progressed signifi­ and obviously never meant to be argumen­ cantly beyond what the ancients had enun­ tatively secured.7 However, in the modern ciated. There were periodic calls for a new, era almost from the time of Descartes, es­ conceptually refurbished rhetoric better pecially in the academic scholarship of the adapted to the exigencies of the modern age. 19th and the 20th centuries after the Thus, the idea of a "new rhetoric" came Romantic upsurge against rhetoric, one into vogue. The relevant writings of a rarely finds rhetoric given a pivotal plaee group of scholars-LA. Richards, Kenneth in cultural architecture. The genre of laus Burke, Richard McKeon, Richard Weaver, eloquentiae virtually disappears. Rhetoric and Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts­ is increasingly treated as an historical phe­ Tyteca-acquired canonical status as con­ nomenon rather than as a living force, de­ stituting the new rhetoric. Although none spite its continuing cultural role in politics, of these writers came from the speech literature, and education. Those who un­ communication discipline, their ideas dertook to study rhetoric felt compelled to came to dominate whatever theoretical justify their present interest by reiterating speculation there was in the discipline. But its historical significance. Some scholars their ideas, even in the popularized ver­ went so far as to justify a study of rhetoric sions that were initially disseminated in the in order to overcome it. "We are freed from Speech Communication journals, did not rhetoric only by study of its history," wrote cohere into a conceptual whole. Perelman Pual Shorey in 1908. What is intriguing and Olbrechts-Tyteca, the only ones with a about this statement is not that a Platonist programmatic statement to offer, wanted to 56 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

reconstitute rhetoric along the lines of determined to challenge the modernist topicallnonformal reasoning by recuperat­ fact/value distinction Which, they believed, ing a tradition stretching from Aristotle to had severely attenuated the possibility of Whately. Kenneth Burke wanted to recon­ the public use of reason in ethics and poli­ stitute the hidden history of rhetoric by re­ tics. In rhetoric, they found, not an alterna­ interpreting the tradition of debunking tive to reason but an enlarged version of it stretching from Bentham to the three mod­ that could address and negotiate the vexing ern masters of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche, questions of public life. Writing as they and Freud. Whatever the merits of did in the years surrounding the Great War, McKeon's ideas, the prose of this im­ the new rhetoricians were searching for a mensely erudite classical scholar was for­ cultural form and practice that would pro­ biddingly inaccessible. Only a few of his mote social cohesion without erasing dif­ historical essays on rhetoric were to have ferences between the contending forces an abiding inf1uence. In the early I 970s, within and among communities. Here, McKeon's essay on rhetoric as an "archi­ once again, they turned to rhetoric. To im­ tectonic productive art" received consider­ agine and to promote rhetoric in this en­ able attention but its implications were larged sense as a constitutive cultural never spelled out in sufficient detail.9 In praxis, as McKeon recognized, one had to his provocative little book, The Philosophy be a pluralist both in politics and in philos­ of Rhetoric, I. A. Richards reduced rheto­ ophy. Apart from such broad affinities, the ric to metaphor and thus repeated a gesture "new rhetoricians" did not share, nor did so characteristic of that historical pattern, they generate, a common fund of ideas, noted by Genette and Todorov, marking principles, perspectives, and whatever else the progressive shrinking of rhetoric from it takes to mobilize an intellectual its five ot1ices (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, movement (revivalist, or otherwise ).12 memoria, and pronuntiatio) and three The fact that the new rhetoric remained functions (docere, movere, and delectare) at best a scattered set of ideas and texts to just one office (elocutio) and to just one (and at times a mere slogan) can be partly function (delectare).10 Of the five people explained in terms of its essentially reac­ whose names are invariably associated tive character. The new rhetoric, surprising with the new rhetoric, Weaver was the least as it may seem, entails a defensive rather problematic. He was conceptually accessible than an aggressive stance. 13 To begin with, and politically congenial (conservative), the idea of a new rhetoric itself is not new. but his writings did not open up new vistas The first book recommending itself as a for rhetoric. His essays, written in an en­ new rhetoric appeared sometime in the gaging style, celebrated the traditional values Middle Ages. Thereafter, there were many of humanistic culture, of which rhetoric is attempts to modernize rhetoric throughout a constituent part, against the growing its turbulent history. The general impetus domination of a scientistic world view. But for a new rhetoric was always the same, an there was little that could be regarded as anxious conviction that the prevailing conceptually innovative; Weaver reiterated rhetoric was outmoded both in terms of so­ the Platonic subordination of rhetoric to cietal changes and intellectual develop­ dialectic in his famous essay, "The ments. Hence, one can observe throughout Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric." I I its history an obsessive preoccupation with What these five "new rhetoricians" had the decadence and seeming irrelevance of in common was a commitment to refocus contemporary rhetoric and a feverish urge contemporary attention on rhetoric in a to modernize so as to catch up with the world increasingly dominated by science changing times. This is evident, for in­ and the scientific method. They were stance, in George Campbell's Philosophy Rhetoric: Some Distinctions 57 of Rhetoric which was hailed by George ready-made shoes. In short, what we have Saints bury as "the most important treatise in Aristotle is a clear instance of conceptu­ on the New Rhetoric that the eighteenth al innovation that springs from a crisis in­ century produced. "14 Upon reading Camp­ ternal to rhetoric; and moreover, the bell's careful and laborious prose one proposed solution to that crisis does not could hardly think of it as an instance of a emanate from an alien metaphysic but feverish urge to modernize; and yet, it is as looks empirically to the natural grounds of clear an instance as any of the "reactive persuasion. Ordinary people, according to theorizing" so very characteristic of rheto­ Aristotle, learn "to defend themselves and ric. By reactive theorizing, I mean those to attack others" verbally "either at random instances where the impetus for conceptual or through practice and from acquired hab­ innovation comes from intellectual devel­ it. Both ways being possible, the subject opment taking place outside of a discipline can plainly be handled systematically, for rather than originating from within, say, as it is possible to inquire the reason why a result of an internal crisis. some speakers succeed through practice Aristotle's Rhetoric provides an excel­ and others spontaneously; and everyone lent counter-example to "reactive theoriz­ will agree that such an inquiry is the ing." Aside from responding to the function of an an" (Rhetoric, 1354a). challenge issued by Plato in Phaedrus, and In stark contrast, George Campbell's also, if we are to believe Cicero (De Oratore, attempt to construct a "new rhetoric" was 3.35.141), unwilling to let the fate of rhet­ precipitated not by any perceived internal oric be decided by the then dominant school deficiency in rhetoric but by a shift in the of Isocrates, Aristotle was impelled to com­ philosophical predilection of the day in fa­ pose his treatise out of a genuine dissatis­ vor of the new science of human nature. In faction with the way rhetoric was taught by fact, Campbell believed that the ancient his predecessors and contemporaries: theorists had "developed practical rhetoric Now, the framers of the current treatises on to near perfection." IS However, he felt that rhetoric have constructed but a small por­ rhetoric as embodied in the received tradi­ tion of that art. The modes of persuasion tion lacked a sound philosophical ground­ are the only true constituents of the art: ing, especially in light of the new science everything else is merely accessory. These of human nature. Since all arts and scienc­ writers, however, say nothing about en­ es were to flow out of principles of human thymemes, which are the substance of nature, rhetoric if it aspired to the status of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials. The arousing of prejudice, an an, must also conform. Accordingly, pity, anger, and similar emotions has noth­ Campbell "holds that the science of human ing to do with essential facts, but is merely nature is the foundation of rhetoric as an a personal appeal to the man who is judg­ an, and that rhetoric's leading terms and ing the case (Rhetoric, 1354a). principles are really located in human na­ In Sophistic Refutations (183b-184a), he ture and authorized by it; consequently, the similarly complains against the sophistic discovery of rhetoric's basic principles re­ practice of teaching set-speeches, i.e., quires the examination of human having the pupil study and memorize a nature."16So thorough a grounding of rhet­ series of model speeches singled out by his oric in the intellectual fashion of the day is teacher. This type of instruction in not without cost. It severely attenuates the rhetoric, says Aristotle with disdain, distinctive character of rhetoric. Lloyd resembles that of a cobbler who, when Bitzer, a leading Campbell scholar and the asked by an apprentice to teach the an of modern editor of his treatise, notes that making shoes, offered him a collection of "Campbell's discussion of rhetoric often can hardly be distinguished from his 58 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar discussions of human nature."17 According evident in St. Augustine'S refiguration of to Bitzer: rhetoric in the service of Christianity, or Two critical assumptions are apparent in the way rhetoric responded to the coming Campbell's project. First, he assumed that of bureaucracy in the Middle Ages by mu­ a general theory of rhetoric (a universal tating into ars dictaminis, the rhetorical art theory of communication) must receive its of letter writing, and later into ars notaria. fundamental principles and processes from Nor am I critical of rhetoric drawing con­ rhetoric's foundation science of human na­ ceptual material from other fields to refur­ ture .... The second implication is that in no bish itself. All disciplines to do this. It is sense is the rhetorical art itself, when care­ fully inspected, found to be the source of one thing to borrow conceptual material some of its own fundamental principles. IS from sister disciplines when appropriate, but it is quite another thing to be a perenni­ Thus, having to conform to an alien episte­ allatecomer conceptually. This is a persist­ mology, the "new rhetoric" is left with nei­ ent historical pattern, repeated time and ther "specificity" nor "autonomy." again, that informs attempts to construct Sometimes such conformity to an abstract "new rhetorics," a pattern of conceptual doctrine (science) leads to practical absurd­ scavenging and subservience that cannot ities. as Bitzer's discussion of Campbell's be wished away, but needs to be confront­ classification of four types of discourses in ed. Such a confrontation does take place in terms of four faculties of the mind makes the so-called rhetorical tum to which we clear.19 These are some of the pitfalls of now tum. "reactive theorizing" characteristic of the so-called "new rhetorics." Looking at the career of rhetoric, a cul­ III. Rhetoric as Metadiscipline tural historian of materialist persuasion would be sorely tempted to generalize that In the second half of the twentieth cen­ the anxieties stemming from the "cultural tury, the new rhetoric selectively began to lag" so characteristic of ideological struc­ shed its defensive posture, and thus the tures is nowhere more acutely evident than way was paved for the so-called rhetorical in the history of rhetoric. This historical turn.20 This is evident in two key texts of anxiety that announces the essential con­ contemporary rhetorical theory-Kenneth servatism of rhetoric has given rise to a Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) and persistent scholarly topos about the rela­ Chaim Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's tionship between the old rhetoric and the The New Rhetoric: a treatise on argumen­ new rhetoric which Helen North once de­ tation (1958; English tr.1969). Burke's scribed, by recourse to an old proverb, as project for reconstituting the hidden histo­ "the old salt in a new bottle." Unlike phi­ ry of rhetoric is motivated by the territorial losophy, which periodically denounces its metaphor of recovery and reclamation. To past (Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and recover the territory that once belonged to Derrida to name a few) in a radical gesture rhetoric but now was held under the regen­ of self-purification, rhetoric clings to its cy of usurpers, naturally calls for an ag­ past even as it struggles adapt to the dis­ gressive posture. In Perelman and continuities of the present. Olbrechts-Tyteca's work, rhetoric is of­ Here I do not want my position to be fered as an alternative theory of argumen­ misconstrued to mean that rhetoric ought tation that can provide grounding for not to respond and adjust to external philosophy, jurisprudence, and the human changes. In fact, one of the virtues of rhet­ sciences in the wake of that colossal failure oric is that it continually adapts itself to ex­ of the logicist tradition in philosophy from ternal changes in social formations. This is Descartes to logical positivism. In this Rhetoric: Some Distinctions 59 scenario, which has its counterpart in the White, who has figured prominently in the literature on the rhetorical tum, rhetoric is making of the rhetorical tum. In the context resituated, in the words of Calvin Schrag, of legal pedagogy, White argues that rhetoric "at the end of philosophy. "21 In this curious is a "constitutive art" that not only molds adaptation of the Nietzschean and Heideg­ individual personality but creates and sus­ gerian vision of the end of philosophy, one tains culture and community. He writes: hears faintly the staggering steps of that I think it (rhetoric) should be seen not as a ancient humanist discipline, rhetoric, com­ failed science nor as an ignoble art of ing out of an ill-deserved cultural obscurity persuasion (as it often is) but as the central to the rescue of the discourse of the human art by which culture and community are sciences which have been left stranded on established, maintained, and transformed. the ruins of philosophy. This kind of rhetoric-I call it "constitutive This is not the place to determine the rhetoricH-has justice as its ultimate subject, and of it I think law can be seen as extent to which either Burke or Perelman a species. "22 or any of the other new rhetoricians antici­ pated the coming of the "rhetorical tum." In his elaboration of this theme in a series Unlike the new rhetoric that remained of essays White clearly assigns to rhetoric largely entangled within the disciplinary a metadisciplinary status in relation to the problematics of the old rhetoric, the idea of discourse of law. the rhetorical turn makes a clean break Second, rhetoric is transformed from a from the previous discipline-bound no­ discursive instrument of politics into that tions of rhetoric. It opens up new possibili­ whieh is constitutive of political discourse ties for rhetoric, not entirely unimagined, itself. This transformation is mediated but long dormant and never before system­ through a certain equation between rheto­ atically enunciated. ric, politics, and ideology. The equation The idea of a rhetorical tum involves a reads roughly as follows: 1) Political dis­ metadisciplinary move. It calls for a series course insofar as it is "interest begotten" of transcendences that set rhetoric free discourse is preeminently ideological. 2) from its traditional confinement within the Ideology as a relatively autonomous sym­ three distinctive fields of activity­ bolic system (and not a mere epiphenome­ education, politics, and literature. Rheto­ nal reflection of the political economy) is ric, however, does not abandon its three rhetorically constituted. A series of routine distinctive fields of engagement but rather ideological operations, such as, the "natu­ refigures them. ralistic fallacy" (the representation of the First, as a pedagogical practice, rhetoric historical as the natural), the disguising of is no longer viewed as a merely technical particular interests under the general inter­ discipline for imparting communicative est, the reifications of polysemous political skills. It is now seen as the medium par terms (such as, "rule of law," "public inter­ excellence for molding the human person­ est," "equality," etc) into interest bearing ality. The two ends of rhetorical pedagogy eulogistic "god terms" or dislogistic "devil are the preparation of the citizen and the terms," are shown to have a decidedly rhe­ creation of community, and this ideal is torical structure. 23 In this line of reasoning reminiscent of the educational mission of the distinction between the "rhetorical" the older sophists and their successors and the "ideological" is blurred as rhetori­ within the rhetorical tradition-Isocrates, cal considerations are brought to bear on Cicero, Quintilian, the Renaissance hu­ the whole of what Marxists call the "ideo­ manists, and Vieo. A contemporary ver­ logical structures" of society. By the same sion of this pedagogical vision can be logic, rhetorical analysis or criticism found in the writings of James Boyd comes to be equated with ideological 60 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

analysis and critique. If it is through the re­ Words Eloquence hath invented, are for sources of rhetoric that the dominant ideo­ nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas. logical meanings are fixed and made move the Passions, and thereby mislead the judgement; so indeed are perfect cheat.25 plausible against the natural polysemy of language, then, one must resort to rhetori­ With the emergence of Romantic aesthet­ cal analysis and criticism to unpack and ics, given its stress on genius and sponta­ debunk those meanings. Thus rhetoric as a neity, even the value of technical mastery critical practice is made to set its course on of tropes and figures for effective use in lit­ the road to suspicion and becomes the dis­ erature was challenged. Thus, the school­ cipline par excellence of debunking and master's mania for elaborate classification demystification. In this critical frame, of tropes and figures came to be viewed as one's interest in discovering how rhetoric artificial and labored. The condemnation structures ideologically motivated political of these classificatory systems has been so discourses is determined almost exclusive­ universal in the modern era, says Vickers, ly by one's desire to unmask it. One at­ that even the friends of rhetoric are prone tends to the "constitutive" rhetoric implicit to denigrate it,26 in political discourses only to reveal their At any rate, the proponents of the rhe­ routine and quiet deceptions. In certain re­ torical turn have challenged this persistent spects the literature on the rhetorical turn denigration of rhetorical tropes and figures pulls in two different directions. On the and classificatory minutiae that go with it. one hand people like James Boyd White While scholars like Paul de Man have initi­ stress the constitutive function of rhetoric ated a revaluation of the Romantic hostility in molding individual character and in cre­ towards rhetoric, the proponents of the ating and sustainIng political communities, rhetorical turn have devoted most of their while, on the other hand, people like John energy to questioning the normative con­ Nelson and Michael Shapiro resort to the finement of tropes and figures to the "pe­ rhetorical lexicon in order to deconstruct culiar" language of literature. To begin and debunk the constitutive myths and fic­ with, they deny that tropes and figures are tions that stand in the way of individual artificial creations of the schoolmaster's emancipation and the possibility of a classificatory mania. They point out that genuine community. 24 tropes and figures are a common feature of Third, as a stylistic system of tropes "ordinary" language rather than the special and figures, rhetoric is traditionally con­ feature of "literary" language. Illiterate fined normatively, if not in actual practice, peasants are as inventive with them as the to what is called the "peculiar" or the "lit­ most refined literati. 27 Du Marsais, writing erary" language of imaginative discourse, in 1730, declared that "nothing is more especially of poetry. The use of figures and natural, ordinary and common than fig­ tropes in discourse addressed to the under­ ures: more figures of speech are used in standing (seeking knowledge) as opposed town square on a market-day than in many to discourse addressed to imagination days of academic discussion. "28 Du Marsa­ (seeking pleasure) was regarded as illicit. is was by no means the first to recognize In the anti-rhetorical philosophical tradi­ this connection between figures and every­ tion, John Locke best expresses this posi­ day life. According to Brian Vickers, the tion in his Essay Concerning Human idea that tropes and figures derive from life Understanding (1690): and are no more than a mode of systema­ But yet. if we would speak of Things as tizing natural eloquence "can be found in they are. we must allow that all the Art of Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus, Putten­ Rhetorick, hcsides Order and Clearness. all ham, Abraham Fraunce, Sidney, and no the artificial and figurative application of doubt others. "29 Vickers himself, following Rhetoric: Some Distinctions 61

a suggestion of Gerald Else, characterizes great historians (Michelet, Ranke, figures functionally as "modes of the Tocqueville, and Burckhardt) and the great expression offeeling in language."3o philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, The proponents of the rhetorical turn, Nietzsche, and Croce). White further com­ while lacking Vickers' historical grasp of plicates this formalist scheme of four the tradition of elocutio, agree with his "master tropes" by noting their concord­ general thesis that tropes and figures de­ ances with Northrop Frye's four "modes of rive from life and that they are discursively emplotment" (romance, comedy, tragedy, unavoidable. However, they are not con­ and satire), Stephen Pepper's four "modes tent to view figures functionally as psycho­ of explanation by formal argument" (form­ logical channels for representing emotions ist, organistic, mechanistic, and contextu­ and feelings in language. They place a alist), and Karl Mannheim's four "modes greater stress on the cognitive function of of ideological implication" (anarchist, con­ tropes and figures. Donald N. McCloskey, servative, radical, and liberal).33 This is not for instance, claims that the discourse of the place, nor am I competent, to assess the economics is heavily metaphorical.3 1 He virtues of this complex formalist combina­ notes that "models" representing economic toire to account for those vast and varied behavior so central to economic theorizing narrative monuments the nineteenth centu­ are in fact metaphors. McCloskey sees ry historians have left us. To explore that metaphors everywhere-the supply and technical question the readers can turn to demand "curves," the production func­ the substantial amount of critical literature tions, the "invisible hand," game theory, White's controversial book has already etc-they all turn out to be metaphors of generated. For the present purpose it is suf­ one sort or another. Moreover, according to ficient to note two things. First, it appears McCloskey, when someone like Gary that White privileges tropes over the other Becker (whom McCloskey calls the elements in his combinatoire. As David "Kipling" of economic empire) startles us Carroll notes: by comparing children to "durable goods" or by calling human skills "human capital" For while neither the level of emplotment, he is being more than ornamentally meta­ the level of formal argument, nor the level of ideological implication is ultimately de­ phorical. In fact, what Becker is doing with termining for White, beneath these surface metaphors in economics is precisely what levels lies a deeper. more profound level Max Black says metaphors can do-they which is not historically, philosophically, function as "a distinctive mode of achiev­ or ideologically determined, but is ulti­ ing insight." McCloskey goes even further mately determining of them-the metahis­ and suggests that the mathematical reason­ toricalleveL White distrusts all claims made ing so frequently employed by economists in the name of the "truth" or the "real"; and the metahistorical level supposedly avoids to enhance the scientific status of their such claims by being entirely concerned discipline is thoroughly metaphorical. with language, that is to say, form. 34 In an immensely complex work, Meta­ history (1974), Hayden White does for his­ This preoccupation with linguistic form toriography what McCloskey does for leads White to derive from the rhetorical econornics.32 By imaginatively synthesiz­ tradition four master tropes that he believes ing the ideas of Giambattista Vico and "prefigure and thus determine the histori­ Kenneth Burke, White comes up with a cal field". "In short," White writes, "it is quarternary tropological scheme (meta­ my view that the dominant tropological phor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) mode and its attendant linguistic protocol to account for the deep structure of histori­ comprise the irreducibly 'metahistorical' cal writing in the 19th century by both the basis of every historical work. "35 62 Dilip Parameshwar GaOflkar

Second, at a later date (1978) in the in­ tropes and figures; so far from being the troduction to a collection of his essays, "perfect cheat" that they were to Locke, White extends this sort of privileging of they have become the "necessities of the tropological analysis from historiography human mind" that they were to Vieo. to the whole of the human sciences. He These are the threefold enlargements writes: by means of which rhetoric becomes a The essays in this collection deal one way metadiscipline. What is involved here, as or another with the tropical element in all Leff has rightly observed in a related con­ discourse, whether of the realistic or the text, is a metonymic reversaL Rhetoric is more imaginative kind. This element is. I transformed from a local artifact (or phe­ believe, inexpungeable from discourse in nomenon) contained within the fields of the human sciences, however realistic they education, politics, and literature into a may aspire to be. Tropic is the shadow from which all realistic discourse tries to global process that in turn contains and flee. This flight, however, is futile; for trop­ constitutes themY In this way rhetoric sets ics is the process by which all discourse out to play the role assigned to it by constitutes the objects which it pretends McKeon, "the architectonic productive only to describe realistically and analyze art." Thus, the phrase "rhetorical turn" objectively.36 nifies something more than what is implied This sweeping statement (which I am not by the two previous phrases, the "revival of about to explain or to justify) gives an indi­ rhetoric" and the "new rhetoric." It signi­ catation of how the proponents of the rhe­ fies a radical shift in the self-understanding torical turn have reversed the status of of rhetoric.

Notes

Karl R. Wallace (ed.), History of Speech 1973). For a critical perspective on the rela­ Education in America: background studies tionship between rhetorical criticism and public (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954). address, see Stephen E. Lucas, "The Renais­ sance of American Public Address: Text and 2 Charles Sears Baldwin published three impor­ Context in Rhetorical Criticism," Quarterly tant books on the history of rhetoric and liter­ Journal of Speech 74 (1988), 241-260. ary criticism: Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: interpreted from representative works (New 4 Longinus, On the Sublime tr. W. Hamilton York: MacMillan, 1924); Medieval Rhetoric Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University and Poetic: interpreted from representative Press (Loeb Library), 1927). works (New York: MacMillan, 1928); Renais­ sance Literary Theory and Practice: classi­ 5 For a sustained use of oratorical texts in con­ cism in the rhetoric and poetic of Italy, France, structing history, see, Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: and England. J4(}()·/600 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1939). These three volumes Vintage, 1948). were reissued by Peter Smith (Gloucester, 6 Brian Vickers, "Territorial Disputes: Philosophy MA) in 1959. versus Rhetoric," in Rhetoric Revalued ed. Brian Vickers (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and 3 For an overview of the evolution of rhetorical criticism in the Speech Communication disci­ Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1982),260. pline, see Charles J. Stewart, "Historical Survey: 7 Brian Vickers, In Defense ofRhetoric (Oxford: Rhetorical Criticism in Twentieth Century Clarendon Press, 1988), 11. America," in Explorations in Rhetorical Criticism ed. G.P. Mohrmann, Charles 1. 8 George A. Kennedy. The Art of Persuasion in Stewart, and Donovan Ochs (University Park, Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1963),2. The epigram from Shorey is from his Rhetoric: Some Distinctions 63

essay-"Physis, Melete, Episteme," Transac­ communication scholars who read it largely as tions of American Philological Association 40 an extension of Aristotelian rhetoric. (1908), 185. 14 A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in 9 Richard McKeon, "The Uses of Rhetoric in a Europe, 3 vols. (New York: Dodd Mead, and Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Co., 1905), 2:470; cited by Lloyd Bitzer, Arts," in The Prospect of Rhetoric eds. Lloyd "Editor's Introduction," in George Campbell, F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL: NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971),44-63. Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, 1963), vii. 10 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936). 15 The Philosophy of Rhetoric, lxxv.

II Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric 16 Bitzer, xix. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953).3-26. 17 Bitzer, xix. 12 For an excellent but brief account of new rhet­ 18 Bitzer, xxv. oric, see, Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman. 19 Bitzer, xx-xxi. 1990),260-310. 20 The literature on this topic has grown rapidly 13 Here one has to be careful to distinguish be­ in recent years: George L. Dillon, Contending tween the achievement of new "new rhetori­ Rhetorics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer­ cians" and the manner in which their work sity Press, 1991); John S. Nelson, Allan came to be integrated into the disciplinary ma­ Megill, and Donald McCloskey, cds. The trix of speech communication. My characteri­ Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: language zation of the "new rhetoric" as "reactive" and argument in scholarship and public af­ refers primarily to the early reception of their fairs (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin work within speech communication. The con­ Press, 1987); R.H. Roberts and J.M.M. Good, tributions of Burke. McKeon, and Perelman to eds., The Rediscovery of Rhetoric: persuasive the making of contemporary rhetorical theory discourse and disciplinarity in the human sci­ is enormous. Each of them came to recognize ences (Charlottesville, VA: University of Vir­ the importance of rhetoric through a different ginia Press, 1993); Herbert w., Simons ed. route and deployed it to resolve different sets Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (Newbury of problems: the early Burke to critique the Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989); Herbert aesthetic ideology of "art for art's sake"; W. Simons, ed. The Rhetorical Tum: invention McKeon to overcome the limitations of a pure­ and persuasion in the conduct of inquiry ly dialectical approach to the study of "histori­ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). cal semantics" (the history of ideas and methods); and, Perelman to articulate a mode 21 Calvin O. Schrag, "Rhetoric Resituated at the of reasoning about justice that went beyond le­ End of Philosophy," Quarterly Journal of gal formalism. There is nothing arbitrary or id­ Speech 71 (1985), 164-174. iosyncratic about the place of rhetoric in their respective corpora. But the manner in which 22 James Boyd White, Heracles' Bow: essays on their work was initially appropriated in speech the rhetoric and poetics of the law (Madison, communication failed to grasp the complex in­ WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985),28. tellectual itinerary that had led them to redis­ For other versions of constitutive rhetoric, see. cover rhetoric. This is particularly evident in Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: the early reception of Burke. The new rhetoric University of Chicago Press, 1983),83-101; was seen simply as a generalized humanist al­ Maurice Charland, "Constitutive Rhetoric: ternative to the hegemonic discourse of "for­ The Case of the Peuple Quebecois" The Quar­ malism," "positivism," and "scientism." Only terly Journal of Speech 73 (1987), 133-150. recently, scholars such as Conley have noticed 23 Michael Calvin McGee, "The 'Ideograph': A an emergent "Ciceronianism" in the work of Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology," The some of the "new rhetoricians." If "new Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980). 1-16. Ciceronianism" is a decisive feature of the new rhetoric (Conley makes a convincing case for 24 John S. Nelson, "Political Theory as Political it), that feature eluded those early speech Rhetoric" in What Should Political Theory Be 64 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar

Now? ed. John S. Nelson (Albany, NY: State 32 Hayden White, Metahistory: the historical im­ University of New York Press, 1983), agination in nineteenth-century Europe (Balti­ 169-240; Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Representation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 33 White, Metahistory, 1-42. 34 David Carroll, "On Tropology: The Forms of 25 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed. John W. Yolton, 2 vols. History," Diacritics 6 (1976),59-60. (New York: 1961), Book 3, Ch. 10, \05-106. 35 White, Metahistory, xL

26 Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 294. 36 White, Tropics of Discourse: essays in cultural criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 27 Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 299. To sup­ port his claim, Vickers cites Cicero, Orator, University Press, 1978), 1-2. 24. 81 and QuintiIian, Instiwtes of Oratory, 37 Michael Leff, "The Habitation of Rhetoric," in 8.6.75. Argument and Critical Practices, Proceedings of the Fifth SCAI AFA Conference on Argumen­ 28 Cited by Vickers, "Territorial Disputes," 257. tation; ed. Joseph W. Wenzel (Annandale, VA: 29 Vickers, "Territorial Disputes," 257. Speech Communication Association, 1987), 4.

30 Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 296-297. DILiP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR 31 Donald N. McCloskey, "The Rhetoric of Eco­ DEPT. OF SPEECH COMMUNICATION nomics," Journal of Economic Literature 31 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS (1983),434-461; The Rhetoric of Economics 244 LINCOLN HALL (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 702 S. WRIGHT ST. 1985),54-86. URBANA, ILLINOIS 61801

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