Unstable Rhetoric

I’ve got my little red Loeb editions left scattered all through the apartment. I’ve been scouring the Web for references by Pliny and by Cassius Dio to Domitius Afer. I’ve compared three different versions of Quintilian. And I still got nothin. But I’m getting there: I’m working on my response to Wayne Booth’s book — specifically to the intersection of ethics and rhetoric — for the rhetorical carnival at Collin’s place.

My angle, mostly, has to do with how rhetoric intersects with power and the production of individual subjectivity, and how rhetoric serves as a technology of the self and as a technology of alterity under political relations that offer varying degrees of individual freedom. I want to use Roman rhetors and rhetoricians to suggest that Booth’s subtitle “The Quest for Effective Communication” may unnecessarily limit the domain of rhetoric and also to suggest that a deeper understanding of the material and political contexts of Roman rhetoric might help us, today, to move beyond attempts to apply Quintilian’s bland feel-good pronouncements to our various pedagogies, and instead imagine a more diverse array of theoretical contexts for the enactment of a sophisticated and politically engaged rhetoric — one that might even go beyond some of Booth’s suggestions.

But I’m not there yet. Right now, all I got is a few dozen Post-It notes scattered through a bunch of books, and an observation from Shadi Bartsch’s brilliant Actors in the Audience that seems to me to apply extraordinarily well to the rhetoric of The Happy Tutor:

[T]he strategies that enable flattery to be used as blame render all praise ever more suspect, helping to create conditions of reception in which such eulogy becomes increasingly unstable, increasingly prone to be taken as its opposite by emperors and audience alike.