Rhetoric

Rhetoric’s Changing Place

preterite Rhetoric

So I’m sitting here on the noisy patio outside the hotel bar and above the pool, working on a Shiner Bock and wondering if writing up my notes is really what I want to be doing in this gloriously warm and breezy weather, watching the birds — deep, shiny purple-black with yellow eyes and slim, curved beaks; definitely not crows (too small, for one thing, and the wrong cry), sort of like oversize grackles? — dive and turn among the cast-iron tables and hop and scold along the low-hanging branches.

Janet Atwill (chair), John Brereton, Randall Popken, and Thomas Miller filled a too-small conference room this afternoon. There were more than a few people sitting on the floor, and still more crammed in and standing against the back walls. On top of that, I think the room had the single largest proportion of full professors, department heads, and executive and editorial board members that I’ve seen at any conference presentation. The panel’s full title was “Rhetoric’s Changing Place in Composition and Communications”, and it examined rhetoric’s historically varying fortunes in the disciplines of higher education, focusing specifically on communication, English, and composition. The size and pedigree of the audience was entirely merited: good, good stuff. Here’s my go at trying to do it justice.
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Moral Vernaculars

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

The featured speaker at RSA’s opening session tonight was Gerard Hauser, who gave a fantastic talk on “Moral Vernaculars and Rhetorics of Conscience” that examined how rhetoric functions in the discourse of human rights. Hauser suggested that the moral universals of general declarations of human rights stand opposed by local moral vernaculars, and those moral vernaculars flow from the orientation of the vice to which they respond. In other words (if my hasty notes have got this right), local moral vernaculars focus on a single vice, amplified and extended to permeate society, whether that vice is cruelty become genocide, avarice become exploitation, or snobbbery become racism. But the uses of local moral vernaculars presuppose the existence of universal human rights, so that “The globalization of human rights is a function of the localizatioon of the moral vernacular”.

In fact, our inaction in the cases of Rwanda and Bosnia came because we had no moral vernacular with which to understand those circumstances. There was pity and outrage, but pity is a spectator sport that may in its attention to the difference of circumstances work against empathy rather than towards it. The spectacle of the body in pain may create pity, but empathy and a sense of obligation to act are harder to come by unless our understanding moves from the spectacle itself to the reasons, causes, and circumstances that brought such a spectacle into being. As long as we remain fixated on the images of Abu Ghraib, rather than the causes that lay behind them, we may find ourselves able to morally empathize, but lacking the moral vernacular with which to formulate a response: instead, we remain in a moral panic, demanding courts-martial for all, demanding immediate withdrawal of forces, demanding national unity, demanding the demolition of Abu Ghraib — but none of these are remedies that will prevent such horrors from occurring again. We have yet to develop the moral vernacular that will help us understand their causes.

It was an excellent talk, far more sophisticated, considered, insightful, and engaging than my scant and inadequate notes here might indicate.

Public Rhetoric

preterite Rhetoric

Didn’t post last night because Verizon’s web access was down. It’s become practically a daily event for them, which is really frustrating when you’re trying to do Web work. Which is why I’m working on my RSA paper now, instead of getting most of it out of the way last night like I wanted.

And I’m studiously not listening to Bush’s address to the War College in Carlisle (which I always thought was at Fort McNair, in DC, but it turns out Fort McNair — while site of the original Army War College — is actually home to the National Defense University), because I had it on for the first five minutes and simply couldn’t take it. The rhetoric was absolutely predictable, without a single surprise, and the frat-boy smugness of the tone just drove me up the wall. I’ll read it online tomorrow.

But I’ve come up with what I think is a pretty nice, symmetrical setup for my paper: after the introduction, I’ll work through the connections of public rhetoric to the public lives of the Romans, and from there move on to the private lives of the Romans and how self was constructed by contest, and from there move to our private lives today and how students have an interest in rhetorically constructing selves, and from there to our public lives today in the political discourse of weblogs, and the need for an effective public rhetoric that goes beyond the production of subjectivities and into political action. Public Rome, private Rome, private Empire, public Empire: not a bad structure, right? The conclusion will suggest how recent events with Trent Lott and Howard Dean display the power and limitations of the public rhetoric of private citizens, and I’ll probably use that quote from Tacitus about the failures of rhetoric as a final caution.

So with the thunderstorms, I’m just hoping the power stays on.

Guilt Versus Shame

preterite Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Good signs so far from Carlin Barton’s Roman Honor. I’ve read several chapters of this previously, as background for a seminar paper on ethos, audience, and rhetorical coercion in Cicero’s Pro Ligario, and it’s as fine as I remember it. Before looking at the implications of a few early quotations, let me try to propose what I’m after here: I want to use the concerns of Tacitus about power, subjectivities, and truth-production to metaphorically address the potentialities and pitfalls of democratic discourse on the Web, especially in relation — again — to power, subjectivity, and truth-production, but with today’s added economic component, and Barton can help me in understanding how the Romans publically and rhetorically constructed individual and social subjectivities. The missing part of the equation — the donut-hole of a hypothesis I’ll be working towards, with the help of Hardt & Negri — is how we, today, on the Web, publically and rhetorically and economically construct individual and social subjectivities, and whether such constructions have political consequences that were absent under the Roman empire.
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End of Combat Operations

preterite Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

I leave for the conference in Austin on the 27th. I was hoping to have time to draft my paper and run it past the head of the Classics department here, who’s a Tacitus specialist and who was kind enough to do a directed study with me a couple years as a lead-up to being one of my examiners on Roman rhetoric, but it’s end-of-the-semester grade-crunch time, and I don’t think it’d be fair to ask her to look over the paper in the space of three days. (Despite the fact that she’s a wonderfully kind and witty person who makes me wish I still had coursework to do, so I could take another couple of Latin seminars with her and get back into the groove of translating.) Maybe I’ll use the comments at the conference to revise it, and show her a better version afterwards, with some questions about where I might submit it. I was thinking PRE/TEXT might be the best option, but their broken links suggest that the journal may now be defunct — anybody know? JAC might work, I suppose, if I tried to frame it as a call for adding Tacitus to the rhet/comp canon: while I wholly believe in rhet/comp’s feminist “reclaiming” project associated with the classical tradition, it bugs the hell out of me that Aspasia, from whom we have no original writings whatsoever and whose entire history is questionable, gets ten pages in Bizzell and Herzberg, while Tacitus gets zip.

Let me offer one long quotation as further evidence of his relevance. I leave making the concrete and specific connections to our contemporary situation as a perhaps overly facile exercise for the interested reader.

“Tacitus is less concerned with the specific secrets of long-dead emperors and their officials than with the way in which language is used to disguise the truth and deceive the unwary. Calgacus comments that the phrase Pax Romana disguises much violence, and Cerialis warns the Gauls that the Germans use the rallying cry of ‘Freedom’ and other ‘deceptive terms’ (speciosa nomina) merely in order to become their new masters. Tacitus relishes the exposure of official lies and the misuse of language. [. . .] Galba calls his stinginess ‘economy,’ and his cruelty ‘severity.’ Elsewhere defeats were celebrated as triumphs; ‘facts were scorned in favor of appearances.'” (Mellor 94)

Rhetorical Self-Production

preterite Computers, Politics, Rhetoric, Rome

Hardt and Negri write that “the manifestos of Machiavelli and Marx-Engels define the political as the movement of the multitude and they define the goal as the self-production of the subject” (63). While they use Spinoza to refine and extend this perspective into an ultimately hopeful “materialist teleology” (66), they do not argue with the perspective itself. Today, the politicized production of self — in the writing classroom and on the web — is an increasingly public practice.
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After Empire

preterite Computers, Economics, Rhetoric, Writing

Finished Hardt & Negri’s Empire today. Good stuff, mostly, with a fairly consistent point of view; certainly succeeds in the philosophy department as much as it fails (which it does, abjectly and completely, despite its clearly huge ambitions) in the materialist department. Their erudition is, of course, impressive, and I wished I’d had a dictionary of philosophy on hand while reading: while I’ve read bits of the Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Adorno that they cite, and plenty of the Aristotle, Plato, Foucault, Derrida, Tocqueville, and Benjamin, I’ve only made it through introductions to Kant and Rousseau and Heidegger, and know Spinoza and Hegel by nothing other than reputation and reference. So I struggled a bit when the references flew, as they often did.
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Where Truth Gets Produced

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Short post tonight. Hardt and Negri write, “Difference, hybridity, and mobility are not liberatory in themselves, but neither are truth, purity, and stasis. The real revolutionary practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will.” (To which I ask: why, and how?) They continue: “Mobility and hybridity are not liberatory, but taking control of the production of mobility and stasis, purities and mixtures is. The real truth commissions of Empire will be constituent assemblies of the multitude, social factories for the production of truth” (156). Let’s assume for the time being that we can grant this. Particularize the theory into specifics: the emperor Tiberius took control of the production of truth. Weblogs are sites of production of a staggering multiplicity of truths. How do the diffuse truths of the many compare to the false and imperious truth of the one? Some will see in the truths of the many a hope for counterhegemonic and democratic freedom. Others will see in the truths of the many only solipsism, isolation, and ultimate political failure because of a reliance upon individualism rather than upon the insurrective rhetorical power of a collective univocity.
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Absent Rhetors?

preterite Rhetoric

Yesterday’s entry wasn’t the most coherent I’ve written, but maybe that’ll give a good idea of the extent of my struggles with Hardt & Negri. It’s tough stuff.

Anyway: in addition to the paper on Tactitus, rhetoric, and empire, and in addition to the dissertation, I’m also working on something for publication, and need some help with it. It’s a morbid question, though, for which I apologize in advance: I mean no insensitivity.

What I’m seeking is a list of contemporary rhetors and rhetoricians, from varying fields and with varying perspectives, who were all alive and working at the same time but are unfortunately now no longer with us. The figures I think of first are Michel Foucault, James Berlin, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Who else comes to mind?

A Confession

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

A confession: I didn’t post last night because I fell asleep reading Hardt and Negri. Yes. About 38 pages in, from the last Post-It note and the book’s position on the floor this morning. (I was on the couch, even. I mean, reclined, but on the couch.) And it’s doubly embarassing because I’ve always been a defender of difficult theoretical prose. Difficult? I like big words, and these guys manage a combination of the ethereal and the turgid that would give Fred Jameson theoretical nocturnal emissions.

Now: all that is not to say that the book ain’t useful. It warmed my cranky little heart to see that, while I think they mistranslated “solitudinem”, they chose as their epigraph for Chapter 1 a portion of the same quotation from Tacitus I recently found so compelling: “They make slaughter and call it peace” (3).
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