Rhetoric

Short Schrift

preterite Rhetoric

(For The Happy Tutor.)

Is it belaboring the obvious to acknowledge that blogspace is theatricality, networked? What if we add to that acknowledgment the observation that under theatricality, no rhetorical act is merely self-evident; that every assertion, by its existence, calls attention to its rhetorical exigency and demand that the careful reader ask: does the fact that this needed to be said indicate that there is a countervailing perception? Does Pliny’s praise of the emperor Trajan send the message that the emperor Trajan is somehow in need of praise; that there is a common perception that the emperor Trajan is somehow not worthy of praise? (This question is one of the core foci of Shadi Bartsch’s argument in Actors in the Audience.) Under theatricality, should the act of posing a question qua question indicate to us that it’s actually an assertion wearing a mask?

Consider another example from imperial Rome (again, via Bartsch’s Actors in the Audience): Nero made a regular habit of disguising himself as an ordinary citizen and wandering out into the city at night and engaging in robbery, assault, rape, and murder. Reports of the effectiveness of his disguise vary, but there is agreement among historians that Nero occasionally encountered resistance, whether his subjects recognized him or not. In one instance, Nero assaulted a senator, who recognized him but did not initially acknowledge that recognition, and fought back forcefully, giving Nero a black eye. Weeks passed with Nero remaining out of public view until the eye healed. When he returned to public life, the senator apologized to Nero for fighting back, and here the reports diverge: the senator either realized that he had violated imperial theatricality’s illusion and put himself to death, or he was encouraged by Nero’s court to put himself to death. In either case, the senator violated the rules of imperial theatricality by removing his own mask of being deceived by Nero’s disguise. The lesson from Nero’s time seems clear: under the regime of theatricality, there will always be some who wear masks, thereby leading to environment in which all wear masks, and must be treated in accordance with their masked personae, rather than being treated as who we might feel them to truly be.

The ongoing carnival at Wealth Bondage is perhaps the ideal blogspace instance of the regime of wholly masked theatricality — and yet The Happy Tutor, in his cussedness, continues to confuse matters and blur those lines even after his apparent retirement and the death of The Author Function.

In such a context, the known knowns are as follows.

  1. As the Deputy Editor notes, “the Author Function died hacked to death in his cell, an apparent suicide, while under the protection of the Forces of Homeland Freedom Optimization.”
  2. The Happy Tutor as apparently disembodied rhetorical process — a sort of satirical floating signifier, perhaps — continues “beating his stick upon an empty drum,” shaping debate by pointing to the debate and making the case for his own superfluity in that debate, and thereby offering a peerless and unprecedented lesson in fashioning authorial ethos wholly out of rhetorical praeteritio. Debate over the possibility of argument under hegemonic regime, the Tutor suggests, is impossible, and even were it possible, he could not add to it, since his function as fetish action figure authorial persona was to engage that debate. In so suggesting, the Tutor simultaneously forecloses and initiates the debate over its own possibility.
  3. Under the regime of academic theatricality, forthrightness is only possible when all parties concerned agree to engaging in similar and concerted mask- or non-mask behavior as a component of the generic conventions of the festschrift. In other words: forthrightness in praise here is (and must be) a function of genre.

But don’t 2 and 3 contradict one another? Isn’t avoidance of that contradiction what all those masks and fetish action figures are about? And, once more: under theatricality, should the act of posing a question qua question indicate to us that it’s actually an assertion wearing a mask? As is his habit, the Tutor in his self-conscious act of semi-retirement leaves us with more questions than conclusions. He’d likely blacken my eye for saying so, but it seems to me the highest praise possible to propose that the Tutor’s rhetorical performance of identity has itself become a literary trope in process: the act of placing himself and his interlocutors sous rature.

It may here be needlessly and painfully earnest — it may, in fact, violate the conventions of theatricality and perform the rhetorical equivalent of breaking the fourth wall — to point out that even in the apparent earnestness of encomium, we ought to attend to the masks, the inversions, the play. I share the Deputy Editor’s observation: the Tutor isn’t one to rest long. He’ll soon return to the play.

Mostly Harmless

preterite Academia, Rhetoric

Michael Bérubé has some interesting things to say about discourse and power following dust-ups in various comments sections across the interblogowebs. I’m a longtime lurker at Bérubé’s and consistently enjoy his writing, and I felt uncomfortable reading his account of his engagement with Et Alia: Et Alia, in a previous internets identity of his, offered me a great deal of extremely insightful commentary on my blogged struggles with the dissertation, and in fact led me to an insight that profoundly shaped my chapters 4 and 5. And I’m familiar with the rhetorical bombast Bérubé indicts and Et Alia exhibits, having often seen and engaged in it here and at Wealth Bondage and elsewhere: after all, there’s a reason for this place’s Latin name and its translation. But Et Alia’s over-the-topness in that first comment Bérubé cites goes way beyond anything I’m comfortable with, even inasmuch as I get how he’s trying to push the boundaries of the discussion with his polemic. And, of course, polemic is useful in that it gets people’s attention, but it also puts its author in the position of having various audiences wonder how serious one might be. I figure any scholarly colleagues of mine who read here know I’m mostly harmless, despite the occasional ill-considered rant or fit of bombast — but these days, as a brand-new professor at a rather unique institution, I also watch what I say in a manner substantially different from when I was blogging as a graduate student.

And on that topic, Bérubé has much to say: the following portion of his post, where he engages Turbulent Velvet, takes some dark and interesting turns in reflecting on the interactions among power, rhetoric, position, and persona. Certainly, it seems self-evident to say that who you are determines how you speak, how your words are received, and how you interpret what others have to say — until one considers the concrete situation of, say, Caesar listening to Cicero’s oration on behalf of Ligarius, where Caesar was essentially both plaintiff and judge, and Cicero’s explicit invocation of Pharsalus and the fact that he, like Ligarius, had sided against Caesar backs Caesar into a rhetorical corner wherein he can adopt only one role: the merciful and indulgent imperator rather than the severe and just iudex. But in that situation, even Cicero’s position was predetermined for him: given the public perception of his identity and position, he could adopt no persona other than the scandalously oppositional orator in relation to Caesar. In much the same way, I think, oppositional discourse in weblog comments is performance and play, largely based upon the perception of one’s self-image; both who one wants to be and who one feels one must be. Which is what all that business about “celebrities” and conduct and identity seems to be. Certainly, Turbulent Velvet comes across as petulant and obnoxious, but he’s making an important point: someone with Bérubé’s position and status is pretty much (can I do the sous rature thing here and use a term while simultaneously acknowledging its problematic nature?) interpellated — like Caesar — into being open, indulgent, and engaging, while entrants to the conversation, those with less established status, are free (and, in fact, expected) to say outrageous things and toss rhetorical Molotov cocktails.

Think about Pliny and the way he has to bend over backward to even seem sincere in his praise of Trajan in the Panegyricus, because of the way that power relations shape discourse. If you’re someone who’s not recognized as carrying significant status in a conversation, and you praise those who are, there’s no way you’re going to be seen as anything other than fawning and obsequious.

Declamation and the Digital

preterite Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

In Lester Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (CE October 1986, 527-542), this analogy stopped me:

In organizations where computer technologies have become commonplace, people have taken advantage of opportunities for horizontal communication on topics of their choice through computer ‘bulletin boards,’ which function like radio call-in programs. (538, emphasis mine)

It’s an early metaphor, certainly, and a notion that’s been addressed in various ways in our nascent literature about writing and blogging. But I love the shift there, the look to older technologies, and the way we understand those older technologies today as the domain of an apoplectic Rush Limbaugh or a low-key Tom Ashbrook. (No offense, Tom: I like your show a lot. But NPR, as the smart counter to Rush, sometimes tries too hard to make its programming chamomile-tea mellow and inoffensive.) Usenet as late-night call-ins from the cranks and tin-foil hat crowd.

Blogs, of course, have been widely represented as the same, and I hope we’re past that now. But what about the aspect of declamation? What about the late-night crank phone call to the radio station where the listener offers a half-hour raving systematization of gray aliens, the Zionist Occupational Government, black helicopters, man-hating bra-burning feminists, the United Nations, and the general incompetence of teachers of writing?

What happens if we understand those as instances of Seneca the Elder’s suasoriae and controversiae in the context of their relation to the hegemonic force of mainstream discourse? As, in fact, counterhegemonic uses of genre that in their deployment of genre serve to either (1) indict the way that discourse functions under an oppressive regime or (2) praise the operation of discourse under that regime, depending on who’s reading.

No answers. But I keep coming back to that Faigley quote as a moment of interesting rupture. Its juxtaposition of qualities and modes.

Why We Need Tacitus

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric, Rome

The recent Kairos Call for Webtexts has me interested. The CFW says, “we focus on the connections between classical Greek and Roman rhetoric and contemporary digital communication” — and yet the CFW’s three examples (Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates) are all Greek.

Composition doesn’t like the Romans, and especially not the Romans under Empire. (In our disciplinary literature, though not in Classics scholarship, Quintilian gets a pass for his collusion with brutality.) And I wonder whether seeing the rhetorical impulses of a massively powerful and deeply conservative agrarian world power makes teachers uncomfortable. The Greeks were about knowledge; the Romans, power. Questions of true and false versus questions of right and wrong. With such polarities, of course the Sophists might seem like more appealing allies with which to rhetorically align ourselves.

But if you look at Roman rhetoric under the stresses of imperium, you start to see a much more significant connection to the way words work in the world today. You start to see Leo Strauss as the contemporary theorist of the vicious and amoral Roman delatores, and the hopeful rhetoric of the Greek Sophists as an ultimate instantiation of contemporary critical relativism — and perhaps a reason why rhetoric as theorized in relation to power functions differently from rhetoric as theorized in relation to knowledge.

So what might we learn from imperial Rome contra democratic Greece? First: the Sophistic privileging of knowledge (and today as it functions in composition) is naïve under imperium. Like the later Romans — like Tacitus, like Juvenal, like Pliny, like Plutarch — we need a discourse that concerns itself with rhetoric’s relation to power. American rhetoric today carries an impulse towards stripped-down forthrightness characteristic of the early rhetoric under Augustus. Certainly, the style of Tacitus is glittering and pointed, breathtaking in its compression (ask any amateur who’s ever tried to translate him and for pages sought a verb), but unique for its time in its elisions. Most other imperial rhetoric carried a style that lectured and hectored and said what it meant, because it was able to, because it held no political importance. The rhetoric of empire was literary, and fraught with epideictic qualities, because — under imperium — it could not be deliberative.

I figure it’s clear where I’m going with this, and the parallel I’m drawing. The problem is just that imperium, now, is distributed and in fact enacted through distributed rhetorics. Could it be, though, that lecturing and hectoring in the American rhetorical mode that privileges so-called “plain speech” is forthright because it’s easy to oppose? What if we use Tacitus to turn Strauss on his head and argue for a difficult political discourse, an ambiguous political discourse, a problem-posing political discourse that asks questions rather than answers them?

NFL Visual Rhetorics

preterite Rhetoric

I don’t much like Fox, but I have to say: they get football right. ABC’s Monday Night graphics muddy up the bottom half of the screen, and CBS is even worse in its Sunday coverage that places silly 1998-style brushed-metal medallions and bars over all corners of the screen — but Fox, with its use of translucency and a single top-of-the-screen bar or icon gets it right.

Beyond that, though, the cinematography angle fascinates me. CBS is clearly the most naturalistic, doing the least image filtering of the three networks, and their CGI projection of the first-down line seems almost embarassed in its self-effacement. ABC’s Monday Night franchise this year is sort of in the middle, with some obvious on-the-fly video image enhancement in its balancing of black and white levels, and I can’t tell how much sharpening they’re doing. But Fox: man, Fox is shameless, and I can’t help but love them for the way in which they’re spinning the game into sheer spectacle, almost to the point where it might as well be a video game. Compare a Fox game to a CBS game: visually speaking, what you see from Fox is (1) an equalized image adjustment, heightening the strong blacks and strong whites in any image, reducing the range of lightness values and so increasing the contrast, (2) a posterization of color values, so that similar hues merge into one another, and (3) a sharpening of edges, so that differences in color and hue and value seem more sharply defined.

The net result? The NFL on Fox is far easier to follow in the way in which they dumb down all of the information that the game presents. And that’s a good thing. So what we’re seeing is something beyond the rhetoric of naturalism: we’re seeing a favorable public visual rhetoric that happily reduces the information available.

A filtered rhetoric.

My Dinner with Terry

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Last week, Terry Eagleton gave our English department’s annual Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life. It was a great talk, and I was one of the grad students who got invited to come along to the faculty dinner with Eagleton afterwards, which was excellent as well, though I’ll cop to being star-struck and tongue-tied. But Eagleton was charming and funny and brilliant and intensely charismatic, and I’m glad to have gone to both the talk and the dinner, especially since my dissertation work owes so much to the theoretical inheritance — via Eagleton and others — of his mentor, Raymond Williams.

His lecture focused on two terms: terror and tragedy. Terror, of course, in its modern rhetorical deployment as “terrorism,” and tragedy in its literary sense. The term “modern” is essential, according to Eagleton, because terror (as a political idea and a philosophical concept) and modernity are “twinned at birth”: the word “terrorist” was first used by Edmund Burke in reference to the French Revolution, the founding of the first modern bourgeois state. But — of course — in that case, terror was the Jacobin state. As Eagleton put it, “Terror has an impeccable bourgeois pedigree.” He pointed out, as well, that our contemporary rhetorical references to “9/11” have their own predecessor in the September 11 death of Salvador Allende in the coup d’etat that installed General Pinochet and Milton Friedman’s Los Chicago Boys 28 years earlier. (Yes, again with the economics — but with Eagleton, the first and second Paris Communes, Friedman, and Chile, how could it not be?)

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The Preterite Proletariat

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

I hadn’t realized how busy I’ve been, but looking back and seeing that I haven’t posted in a week — well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve kept meaning to respond to the excellent things Clancy and Jenn have had to say about Kelly Ritter’s CCC plagiarism article, but revisions to dissertation chapters, getting the class weblogs going, gearing up for the job search, and prepping two pieces for publication have kinda gotten in the way.

So a quick thought tonight while I’m working on one of those pieces for publication: in his response to my three posts on the Wayne Booth rhetoric carnival Collin Brooke hosted (could that really have been only seven months ago, with John’s comments there and him now gone?), the Happy Tutor scolded me (in his generous and inimitable manner) for suggesting that a rhetoric that said different things to different people could be useful or ethical. My comment was in response to Booth’s caution “that one form of careful listening can produce one of the worst forms of deception. Really skillful rhetors can invent language that is intended to mean one thing to ‘insiders’ while appeasing ‘outsiders’” (121), and I offered in response Shadi Bartsch’s suggestion that “the discourse used before powerful figures, especially on occasions when it had an audience ready and willing to find unstated meanings, could undermine its own contents and the authority of the addressee. The meaning granted a given act, in interactions with emperors or their agents, was not always and not necessarily the sole province of the powerholder” (Actors in the Audience 65). The Happy Tutor wondered whether that wasn’t rather Straussian of me, to suggest that texts could or should be simultaneously (to use Strauss’s terms) esoteric and exoteric; that texts could communicate radically different or even opposite things to different audiences. (My favorite example is Cicero’s Pro Ligario, but Bartsch invokes the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus as another excellent example, as well as Quintilian’s borrowing from Cato the Elder of the ideal rhetor figured as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.)

And that made me think: Bartsch, Booth, and Strauss. All University of Chicago professors. Is there some institutional habit of thought that turns people at the U of Chicago towards problems of hermeneusis? But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it”? Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?

I wish Booth would have had more to say on the topic.

Come Together (Bourdieu)

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Rhetoric

Economists rely on metaphors. Graphs, diagrams, the visual logic of geometry: these are especially favored among neoclassical economists for their explanatory power, even as neoclassical economics has been increasingly critiqued (see, for example, the post-autistic economics movement) for the ways in which these metaphors seem to be better at explaining themselves in a sort of idealized hermetic circle than they are at actually explaining the real workings of the world. Bourdieu, in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, follows the lead of the economists with his graphs, diagrams, and curves (see, especially, pages 17 and 81 for figures that seem to explain more than they truly do): geometry, after all, has a rigor and a logic, and what sociologist would not want to borrow some of that power?

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Class and Visual Rhetoric

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

The new College English came in the mail today, and over lunch at campus, I took a quick turn through Dean Rader’s review article, “Composition, Visual Culture, and the Problems of Class.” My first reaction — which likely indicates that I need to go back and do a more careful reading — was that it made me a little grumpy. While I entirely agree that it’s “essential to see all manner of texts as valid objects of inquiry” (650), I’d assert — on a first, quick read — that “the connections” Rader perceives “among rhetoric, visual culture, and social and economic class” (650) are problematic. The two authors that Rader cites who write about “the Problem of Class” are Lynn Bloom and Fredric Jameson — and in the field of composition, that’s distressingly scant, particularly given the poorly researched and self-indulgent class bigotry of the Bloom essay that Rader describes as “thoroughly enjoyable” (640). Such lack of depth leads to the review essay’s more grave difficulty: its not-very-implicit equation (640) of the middle class with textual rhetoric and the working class with visual rhetoric, and subsequent contention (641) that arguments which “privilege the visual over the rhetorical” (do we assume that he here meant “textual” for “rhetorical”?) (641) have a particular class orientation.

There’s also the often-repeated ceci tuera cela argument I’ve griped about before: “visual culture is beginning to supplant print culture” (640). Is there too much culture in the world’s (apparently limited) cultural space? If we see an increase in the traffic of images, do we need to spin open the valves and bleed off some textuality in order to keep the culture pressure from going to condition red? Because most statistics seem to indicate a fairly consistent increase in global literacy.

Finally, there’s the piece’s pedagogical notion — well critiqued by John Walter — that we should teach students this stuff because they’re already skilled at it, because it’s easier for them to do, and because they like it better (638). This is a poor rationale upon which to structure one’s teaching. I’ll reiterate: yes, I wholeheartedly agree on the importance of bringing the composition and analysis of texts in various media and genres into the classroom. But the argument for that importance is one I’m not sure Dean Rader’s review article manages — on the basis of class — to make.

Still, as I said, this is a reaction based upon a first reading, and I hope I might yet be corrected. Clearly, I haven’t here done any close work with the body of Rader’s analysis; it’s simply, rather, that his assumptions about class give me pause, particularly when taken in conjunction with the (already, as he notes, strong) literature in composition on visual rhetoric. Right now, it’s back to Bourdieu, but I know I’ll likely need a break from Pierre at some point soon, so I hope to return to this article.