Rhetoric

Huckabee’s Paralipsis

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Congratulations are apparently in order to Mr. Huckabee, both for his win in Iowa and for his familiarity with the classical rhetorical figures. While I’m not in a position to say anything about Mr. Huckabee’s forthrightness or his politics, it was at least amusing to see him on December 31 taking advice more than 2,000 years old:

Occultatio est cum dicimus nos praeterire aut non scire aut nolle dicere id quod nun maxime dicimus, hoc modo: …”Non dico te ab sociis pecunias cepisse; non sum in eo occupatus quod civitates, regna, domos omnium depeculatus es; furta, rapinas omnes tuas omitto.” Haec utilis est exornatio si aut ad rem quam non pertineat aliis ostendere, quod occulte admonuisse prodest, aut longum est aut ignobile. Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.xxvi.37

In Harry Caplan’s 1954 translation:

Paralipsis occurs when we say that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say precisely what we are now saying, as follows: … “I do not mention that you have taken monies from our allies; I do not concern myself with your having despoiled the cities, kingdoms, and homes of them all. I pass by your thieveries and robberies, all of them.” This figure is useful if employed in a matter which it is not pertinent to call specifically to the attention of others, because there is advantage in making only an indirect reference to is, or because the direct reference would be tedious and undignified.

Mr. Huckabee, it would seem, knows his pseudo-Cicero, although I’m not quite as inclined as the New York Times is to call his recent performance in telling reporters that he would not air his negative ad about Mr. Romney (and then showing them the ad he wouldn’t air) “remarkable,” unless it’s in his savvy deployment of paralipsis / occultatio / praeteritio by proxy. However, it did get me into an interesting discussion with a colleague of what the device is actually called. You’ll notice that Harry Caplan takes the Greek term paralipsis as a translation for the Latin occultatio, which is what my colleague wanted to call what Huckabee did, with the emphasis on hiding or obscuring. I had always understood the figure to be referred to as praeteritio, though, with the emphasis (as in pseudo-Cicero’s infinitive praeterire) on ostensibly passing something by, which seems more appropriate to the quoted examples.

So I’m left with a distinction that maybe isn’t a difference. I think paralipsis works fine as a catch-all term for the general practice of saying something by saying we’re not going to say it, but I kinda like the fine-grained distinction we see in the Ad Herennium between saying something by obscuring it (occultatio) and saying something by passing it by (praeteritio). Are they two different things?

And if so, which is the more appropriate term for what Mr. Huckabee did?

Memorial Day

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Three moments from this weekend.

Moment 1: Tink and Zeugma were agitated Saturday morning, and there was a lot of noise from the open front windows as I read and typed. There was a demonstration on Main Street, an anti-Iraq-war parade up to the gate, and I live one block over. And I’ll admit: reader, I couldn’t look.

I knew I wasn’t going to go into work on Saturday, what with Cheney giving the address, but I hadn’t anticipated what it might mean to work from home on a Saturday morning. There was the racket that I usually associate with football games, and then, as I read and typed, there was something else.

Something like: “Morons for peace!”

Something like: “Join the American Communist Party!”

Something like: “Have some marijuana!”

Something like: “Go home, hippie!”

I was flabbergasted. I still am. I know this is an Army town. I served, and I know a lot of the folks in town served, and it means a lot to them. But counterdemonstrators — hecklers — bellowing at “Morons for peace”?

Who in the world, reader, is not for peace, especially among soldiers, who have the most to lose? And so I felt two things I couldn’t reconcile.

The first was anger at what I wanted to categorize as redneck foolishness: for taunts, the ones I heard through my window were as silly and superannuated as one could imagine.

The second was anger at the demonstrators I imagined as so self-righteous and self-absorbed that they’d be foolish enough to try and take away from what my students have done and what they’re going to be called to do. How dare you, I thought, when the first place these kids go is going to be Iraq or Afghanistan, and you have to mar their achievement, on their day, with invective. When they’re so good, so generous, so big-hearted.

When we bury so many.

Moment 2: I drove up to Amherst on Sunday. I saw my attorney, and we dined on beer and sausages, and I saw some other friends as well, who remarked upon Andy Card being booed off the stage at the UMass graduation.

When I saw the video, I howled. I cackled. I loved it. This man, who so publicly lied to so many people, who holds responsibility for the deaths of soldiers via his duplicity, who was refused by even John Ashcroft in a crude and vile attempt to do something illegal — yes, this man was booed off stage by everyone around him, faculty and students alike.

That’s the value of his honorary degree.

Moment 3: Seven years ago, Daniel and I had beers together at Silky’s, in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. He told me about how easy the Special Forces Q-course was, and how hard other things had been. He was as sweet and intense as he always was.

He was earnest, and I miss him.

Edit: I always get kinda caught up when I think about Daniel. But my bigger point, I guess, was about my different reactions to political demonstrations. My politics make me sympathetic toward the demonstrators in both cases — but in the case of the demonstration here, that sympathy was mixed with frustration at the demonstrators who I saw as in some way diminishing my students’ big day. Toward the students and faculty members who booed Andy Card off the stage, I felt no such frustration. A difference in rhetorical kairos, maybe? The demonstrators on Main Street certainly weren’t winning anyone over to their side, and in fact were probably increasing the antagonism to their position among some observers.

Is it sometimes easier to win support by being quiet?

Reading Adam Smith, Part 1

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Economics, Rhetoric

Here is the first sentence of The Wealth of Nations:

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. (Smith lix)

Edwin Cannan footnotes the second word, “annual,” in the following way:

This word, with “annually” just below, at once marks the transition from the older British economist’s ordinary practice of regarding the wealth of a nation as an accumulated fund. Following the physiocrats, Smith sees that the important thing is how much can be produced in a given time. (Smith lix)

From Smith and Cannan, it’s quite clear: we must understand value as existing in and delimited by time. (This is why economic productivity, as a sort of value judgment about the quality and intensity of a nation’s workers, is measured over time.) So how do writing teachers talk about time? One obvious way, of course, is in our talk about process. Some of us even incorporate something like a Labor Theory of Value into the way we evaluate student writing, proposing to students that the work they put into composing stands in some relation of value to their performance in the course and the ultimate gradebook worth of their compositions. For writing teachers who base their pedagogies upon the process model, the Labor Theory of Value — for all its problems — is an economic reality in institutions that require grade-based valuation.

We’re familiar with the problems presented by the Labor Theory of Value. We know that Adam Smith tried to get away from it, David Ricardo promulgated it, and Karl Marx tried to re-think it. We know that contemporary mainstream economics has discarded it as thoroughly flawed and problematic, choosing to focus instead on the notion of marginality and how producers and consumers react to fluctuations in supply and demand at the marginal frontier. But I’d contend that the categories of “producer” and “consumer” are themselves too-easy oversimplifications in today’s information economy, and contend further that the notions of supply and demand are wholly inadequate in addressing the things that we can best characterize in economic terms as non-rivalrous experience goods: which is to say, essays.

I understand and largely agree with the critiques that have been made of the Labor Theory of Value, and I have strong reservations about how to enact the difference Marx draws between necessary and surplus labor. At the same time, though, understanding Time as the space in which Labor takes place seems to me an essential component of thinking about how the Value of that Labor gets used or appropriated. So here’s a question: if you’re a writing teacher, does part of your grading involve the Labor Theory of Value? Do you give students credit for the Time they take to do drafts, to do revision? And — if so — why? (I’ve got a tentative answer, but I’m curious to hear yours.)

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. New York: Random House, 1994.

Top Rhet/Comp Schools?

preterite Academia, Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Rhetoric

A military colleague asked me today for advice about doctoral programs in composition and rhetoric. This colleague has a M.A. in English and several years of experience teaching and administrating writing courses, and is thinking about taking early retirement from the military and wondering where to go and what factors to consider. Of course it depends what areas you’re interested in, I said, and noted that it’s generally not a good idea to pursue a PhD without full funding from the institution (ideally with a 1/1 load for the TAship and the opportunity to teach and design a variety of courses) and health insurance, and it’s awfully nice (from my experience) to have a TA union, and so on. But programs themselves? Well, there are published and online guides, I know, but my colleague got me thinking, and so I’m curious as to what the proverbial word on the street might be:

What, in your opinion, are the ten best PhD programs in rhetoric and composition?

Of course, the criteria themselves for ‘best’ are open to debate, and again, it depends on what one’s scholarly interests are. I’d certainly expect to see Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, UT Austin, Michigan State, Carnegie Mellon, and Syracuse at or near the top of a lot of lists, and I’ve got strong feelings about the excellence of other programs as well — Pitt for its unique and compelling cultural studies approach, and UMass and UNH for their deep (and evolving) historical investment in the process approach — so I’ll ask: what do you think? What would your top 10 be, and what would you say their particular areas of excellence are?

Where do you admire?

Rhetorics Easy and Hard

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

A while ago, I had lunch with a colleague and we talked about the recent department meeting. Like me, my colleague is a civilian, and like me, my colleague’s politics are progressive, with a strong explicit commitment to social justice that might work against conventional perceptions of the types of academics who teach at military academies. I was feeling embarrassed, having (once again) publicly put my foot in my mouth at the meeting by declaring some strongly felt opinions about the necessary and primary place of revision in writing instruction and the importance of rhetorical sophistication in creating writing assignments that ask students to go beyond reductive and simplistic yes/no up/down good/bad binaries. Not necessarily embarrassed that I’d made the assertions — for those in composition, I think such preferences are mostly self-evident — but embarrassed that I’d managed to seem so “impassioned” and “adamant,” as another colleague described me, and later my boss. Politically speaking, it likely wasn’t the best way for a new professor to position himself in relation to a department that still has some considerable historical misgivings about bringing all this process stuff into the teaching of writing. On the other hand, though, it’s been made clear to me that part of the reason I was hired here was to help contribute to re-orienting the perspective on writing instruction, and so I’m protesting a bit too much: I knew in coming here that I’d be saying things about pedagogy many of my more senior colleagues might not agree with, and I knew as well that my politics would be radically different from the politics of many of my colleagues, and radically different as well from the politics of a majority of my students. No surprise there, right?

I’m not so sure. After the ideological certainties that go along with being a graduate student and teaching assistant at Research 1 schools, and even after my four years as an enlisted soldier, I’m having to learn a radically different teacherly rhetoric with which to engage the cadets in my classes; a rhetoric that’s in many ways far more ideologically attuned to political nuance than what I’ve been used to. After lunch, I met with a cadet in my office, and we talked about the mid-process draft of his most recent essay, where he argued about the relationship between a soldier’s private service ethic and the public perception of why soldiers serve. He invoked David Rozelle, the Captain who had his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq and later requested and received a return to a command in Iraq. I asked the cadet if it was possible for people to support such soldiers without supporting the war in Iraq. The cadet was impassioned and adamant: absolutely not. One cannot adequately respect Captain Rozelle without understanding and respecting his beliefs and values.

At the institutions where I taught as a graduate student, I’d have found it easy to dismiss such rhetoric from students as something spoken rather than wholly inhabited; as an idly mouthed rhetorical commonplace rather than a deeply felt credo. Here, though, every single one of my students knows that they incur a five-year service obligation, and that upon graduation their first stop is likely either Iraq or Afghanistan. And as I’ve noted before, they bear that prospect — as they do all things — with complete equanimity. With students whose attitudes and demeanor seem so different from those I’ve encountered elsewhere, then, I’ve had cause to question my own ideology, my own pedagogical practice, my own rhetorical commonplaces and political positions, all in ways that I might not have elsewhere. And yet some of the commonplaces seem so much the same, as well, even as they come from different ideological positions. My lunchtime colleague mentioned his longtime association with certain left-radical coalitions within academia, and the way that they’d closed off communication with him when he came to teach here. As if he were, in a way, a Benedict Arnold to their cause.

I teach at a military academy, and my personal politics are far left, and I see no necessary contradiction there. Certainly, I share the ideals of the peace movement: people should not wage war upon one another. But those are easy ideals to hold. I wonder whether folks in organizations like Rhetoricians for Peace would see someone who works as an educator for the military as a puppet, a stooge, an ignoramus. I wonder, in fact, what they might see as the relationship between peace and the military. Because I think they and my cadets might stand to learn something about commitment and idealism from one another; about rhetorics easy and hard.

Walking Hours

preterite Computers, Rhetoric

In my first semester as a new professor, much of my attention is going either to managing the load of papers, committees, and other work or else to syllabus development and lesson planning (and my enjoyment of the time spent in the classroom), but I’m also aware of some of the unique aspects of the extracurriculum here. Consider, as one such aspect, the way certain discipline concerns are managed:

I’m not sure what else to say other than the practice of videorecording, editing, and distributing this film stands in an extremely interesting relationship to the exercise of discipline depicted in the film. There’s something of the repurposing there that Jim Ridolfo has talked about in his investigations of “rhetorical velocity,” and that repurposing does interesting things with the relation between representation and power. Note to self: this bears further investigation, especially at an institution like mine.

What Prominent Republican

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

The elections are weeks away, and tonight I’m grading papers and continuing to refine a writing assignment that asks students to engage with difficult texts on vexed topics in ways that require some attention to one’s own politics. In coming up with lead-in exercises, I’ve again encountered a Web site I’ve used as part of past class exercises, and I’m delighted to see they’ve fleshed out their materials considerably.

One of the things they now include is a quiz, from which I’ll shamelessly steal the following question:

What prominent American Republican said these two things?

1. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are. . . a few. . . Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

2. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed.”

I hope you might venture a guess in the comments. If you know, or if you Googled, please play nice and don’t spoil the fun.

Bonus discussion question: What sorts of politically correct feminist tree-hugging left-wing hippie peacenik terrorist-loving Democrats and academics can you imagine mouthing such sentiments?

Examples welcomed.

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.