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Weeks #1-2: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, January 19th. Introduction to the Seminar: ReBeginning/s with Systems or Maps or Topologies or Cartographic Representations of Rhetoric/s and Composition/s. Or what we call in English and Linguistics (growing out of speech-act theory) "Pragmatics."
The first group/ing of readings for the evening (there are five groupings for the evening [see contining link below]) are
Wk 1: a.-b.  Ehninger, "On
Systems of Rhetoric,"
Scott, "A Synoptic View of Systems of Western
Rhetoric," and
Ehninger, "II. A Synoptic View of..."
Wk 2: c. Kinneavy, "Discourse and the Field of English" (communication triangle)
Kinneavy, "A Pluralistic Synthesis of Four Contemporary
Models of Teaching Composition" (Moffett, Britton, D'Angelo, Kinneavy)
*Darnton, "What is the History of Books?" (Recommended)
Fulkerson, "Four Philosophies of Composition."
Berlin, "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories."
d. Kott, "The Sexual Triangle."
*Kristeva, "The Ethics of Linguistics." (Recommended)
Serres, "Platonic Dialogue" on the excluded third in Hermes.
e. Hayles, "Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the
Foundations of Cybernetics."
For full references please see Readings for Seminar.
The initial Question that I will have (re)asked is ... Why did I assign these readings? What are these Readings about If Not about the authors' testimony concerning their Relationship/s with the Logos (language, discourse, etc.)?
And therefore, my d/ear 'colligs,' I ask you: Prey Tell, What is--How(l) are--y/our Relayshunship/s with the Logos? It is the "last man [and woman]" who asks, What is...? (Nietzsche, Zarathustra (prologue, 5). Given the potential of being the Last, vve must become makers of interruptions and doers of noise.
I ask the question/s in the light (or darkness [or perhaps grayness, if it comes to that!]) of the following Quick Summary of what we will, in part, have done in examining the field's Public (as well as Private, Pubic) relationship/s with the Logos:
1. We will begin with an olio (anthology) of definitions of "rhetoric." The word "definition" comes from the Latin word definire, to limit. VVe will have much to say about the dialectical-formulaic (aristotelian) strategy of defining by way of species (to be) genus (that) differentiae. In other words, by way of the dialectical question, or species-genus analytics, What is Rhetoric? The results of any definition is usually, if not always, an impoverishment of thinking. Whatever 'thinking' might be/come. (Cf. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking.) What is the difference between 'What is called rhetoric? and what do I/we/you/they call rhetoric? How does the word 'call' function in both? Even many 'conservative' thinkers find fault with the approach of definitions; this finding of fault, e.g., can and will take us to the Douglas Ehninger and Robert L. Scott exchange concerning the suggestion of less given to definition and more to "systems" as an approach to understanding rhetoric/s. Singular or Plural? Still, today, in terms of history, we hear or read people saying "The History" and seldom "Histories." If plural Rhetorics and Histories of them are to be plural, we then still get our/their Rhetorics in a grammatical (paradigmatic) and formalistic (limited) logic of permutations and combinations, exhausted.
2A. So nes, after a look at definitions of rhetoric (at the level of the sentence), we will continue to read about relationships with the Logos rendered as by now standard sets of topologies concerning discourse/s (at the level of a calculus or geometry or just basic olde formalism): We will examine what is called the
"Systems" view of Western Rhetoric and its respective emphases in discourses and will continue with the
"Communication Triangle" (CT) view of encoder, decoder, reference, and code, and aims of discourse.
(There is a definite overlap between the Systemic [Synoptic] and CT [Pragmatics] views.) These two topologies--maps--are important, for if you understand them, you will be able to locate yourself and others in relation to what is being discussed in the field or discipline. It is apparent that a geometry of triangulation is important to locate ourselves in dis/respect to the Logos. (Think of the topologies as maps of the territory of 'rhetoric and communications' or of 'rhetoric and composition.' But in finding your way into, through, and across theoretical discussions of the field, you must be careful of not confusing the map [topology] for the territory. The two topologies are to be taken as heuristic fictions or provisional conceptual starting places not as "real/ity," whatever that might be, though the formalist or transcendental pull toward forgetting the fictions is far too great for many 'users' of systems.) VVe will have to discover a way of finding ourselves 'lost' in conceptual spaces without the threat of the pull. The trick will be to lose others and then for some of us to refind each other on different terms. But all this is so terribly difficult, for "I see you" or "I don't see you" is perhaps identical with the fort-da game. After all is said and undone, there will have been the game of aleatory procedures.
These two views (i.e., systems and CT) are constitutions (cf. K.Burke) of What exists, What is potentially good, but most importantly What is possible. These views allow you/us to think--bring thinking into being--but to think what is already acceptable as 'thought' in the field of rhetoric. We will, therefore, have to reconsider and refocus--perpetually--our interests toward the conditions of What is possible?
| Historical Note: Jim Berlin in "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class" (478-79) [in CE 50.5 (1988): 477-94] with the help of Therborn, takes up the questions, "What exists?," "What is good?," and "What is possible?" See my concerns in Notes for Week 7 of the Berlin Seminar. |
and What is not possible? in these two views. I always find it desirous to re/consider the ethics and politics of these dominant views. Yes, as we learn, we will have discovered perpetually that we will have had to unlearn. We will have to take up with the 'compossible' and the 'incompossible' (Leibniz, Deleuze&Guattari) as vve have done in the past, and without any remembrance of things lost.
In examining What is not possible in these views, we will have to look at the body, bodies (in a pub[l]ic way not yet looked at in our field!), and at noise and interruptions (in a way that they are not looked at except as a nuisance in our field). In other words, we will start with the conditions of what is included and then relook at what is excluded though of value. We will, therefore, be focusing on what orients a community of scholarly folks and will be refocusing on what would be necessary to dis(re)orient this community to see what it excludes of value in the name of making (itself) a discipline. (A way of seeing is a way of always already being Oedipal.)
When we read, say, Plato's Gorgias we will see how the conditions for the possibilities of discourse make impossible what wants to be said by a Gorgiastic sophist who would not be necessarily or even provisionally Oedipal. (The Gorgias will teach us even more later in terms of Existence, Good, and Possibility and how they are determined [limited] by 'dividing practices.') But what we will have been taught may not be that helpful.
| Historical Note: If you have read my "Three Countertheses," then you, Dear Reader and Seminarian, will know where I am going with this line of mis/reasoning, and yet perhaps not. See Contending With Words. Ed. Harkin and Schilb. NY: MLA, 1991.139-72.) |
And yet, we are making our ways to the Compossible. And making our vocation (to be called) a dangerous one. Standing on the Edge of words overlooking the abyss, dancing can lead to falling into the abyss. Sorry. I parody the olde f/arts who would respond with such a warning. There may yet be some value in the or "a fellow in motley clothes ... looking like a jester" (Zarathustra, prologue 6). We must not fear the spirit of gravity, but learn to set aside gravitas (gravidity) and just-drift. To over-coming.
2B. One such approach and purpose (i.e., 2A as I have described it) may not work. We will need multiple assaults on learning and un(re)learning what 'rhetoric and composition' (writing) are all about. As a discipline. We began with a sentence approach, then continued with a systems approach, now we will continue with a spectacle of change approach. We are on our ways to overcoming.
In orienting and dis(re)orienting our ways of seeing, we will refocus, by way of another turn, on N. Katherine Hayles's mapping of three waves of change. Let us not forget that 'rhetoric and composition' is/are about making changes, bringing about changes! About varying predispositions! About turning ourselves on our heads! Or becoming-headless (as in 'acephalous,' Acèphale [Bataille])! While folks in 'rhetoric and composition' (as practiced in English departments) tend to look to T. Kuhn and his notion of paradigm shifts (The Structure of Scientific Revolution) for a theory of change and a principle of legitimation for what they do, we will relook to Hayles for her wayes: specifically, those of
"homeostasis" (the ability of an organism to maintain itself in a steady-state, an equilibrium), of
"autopoiesis" (i.e., self-organization of the body, reflexivity), and of
"virtuality" (in which emergence, or evolution, becomes unpredictable; in which human becomes post-human).
In examining these three waves and incipient triangle--read semiotically across each other--we will be concerned, e.g., with what will have happened to the three basic proofs (ethos, logos, pathos), as put forth by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. We will be concerned with what will have happened to subjectivity, agency, ethics; with reason, rationality, discourse itself (as exemplified in the systemic and CT views); with emotions, audiences, politics; etc.
In final (rebeginning) words--and in a most radical departure from what usually goes for What is rhetoric?--we will be concerned with the status(lessness) of discourse by/e (post-)human beings in rhetoric, composition, and the Humanities. We will have recognized (attempted to realize) our self-overcoming. Discipline's or Disciplinarity's overcoming.
Let's now turn to the first grouping of articles&chapters:
 Systems of Rhetoric. Ehninger and Scott. |
Preliminaries: What we might find exceptionally interesting (ethically and then politically) in Douglas Ehninger's and then Robert L. Scott's purposes for writing is the incipient or manifest announcement of being ... becoming called to make something different from 'defining rhetoric,' though making different is not different. (This will all have become more clear as we proceed.)
Let us remember that, of course,
| The issues raised by appropriation are impossible to escape since given the Symbolic we cannot not appropriate. All is always already appropriated. The proper name 'Aristotle' and 'Aristotelian' is any number of disections and appropriations. There is nothing that is 'Aristotle' or 'Aristotelian' in itself. There is potentially everything that is both. But we are getting ahead/less of ourselves with this digression. And will have returned to the conditions for the possibilities of the headless event/uality. |
Ehninger and Scott did not start the divisio approach, for they are both using for the most part an Aristotelian approach of classification, but with a difference. While Aristotle may have been the great class(genus)ifier, he was at best only a protosystems man, if even proto. Ehninger makes this distinction clear in his own three divisions of the Classical period and the later 18th century and the by now modern period in the U.S. beginning in the 30s. It is the case, however, that we can appropriate Aristotle's classifications in terms of systems approaches. Terms such as "systems" are inter-, intra-, and extra-changeable.
Ehninger opens with a sentence definition of Rhetoric (notice the syntax):
A rhetoric I define as an organized, consistent, coherent way of talking about practical discourse in any of its forms or modes.
Ehninger is separating 'practical' rhetoric from otherwise, aesthetic rhetoric or that which is perhaps limited to a literary rhetoric. (Let's not forget the separation-divorce of speech-communications rhetorics from English department rhetorics. Let's not forget history.) He continues:
By practical discourse I mean discourse, written or oral, that seeks to inform, evaluate, or persuade, and therefore is to be distinguished from discourse that seeks to please, elevate, or depict.
Ehninger moves from a rhetoric of one treatise (say, Aristotle's) to "the rhetoric embodied collectively in the treatises of a given place or period [which] constitutes a system."
In summary, Ehninger's strategy is to move from a definition of
Rhetoric to his definition of a
(Practical [nonaesthetic] Rhetoric) to his view of
System/s (grouped as three periods).
He announces, "I shall attempt to describe the rhetorics of three historical periods in terms broad enough to exhibit their essential characteristics as systems, and then to suggest certain practical uses of an analysis conducted at this level" (emphasis mine). Then he give us his disclaimer, after which he begins to elaborate on each of the three periods:
The Classical period "arose out of" the (1.) "new development of democratic institutions in the city states in Sicily and Greece." In this new political environment, speech making becomes important in making laws (i.e., by way of deliberative discourse), administering justice (judiciary or forensic discourse), honoring heroes (epideictic discourse); and out of the (2.) new challenge of how to teach these three speech acts to a society where every free "man must act as his own laywer and his own legislator."
These two issues and needs shaped classical rhetoric. Ehninger limits his brief discussion to the "basically grammatical nature" of the rhetoric: the syntax of speech acts (the three forms of discourse). Classical rhetoricians distinguished rhetoric from grammar-logic-poetics, and explored the relationship between rhetoric and politics-ethics. They were concerned with speaker, speech (discourse), and audience. (Or with ethos, logos, pathos.) And they focused on what would bring success. They furthermore described and codified the canons or offices of invention, disposition, style, memory and delivery. The grammatical nature made rhetoric all that much easier to teach and to assess. With these solutions to and for the two issues and needs (democratization and education), however, came problems: overly false, artificial descriptions of successful use of language on the occasion of speaking publicly; overly formulaic and prepackaged; and overly naive view "of the relation between the speech act and the mind of the listener."
 If rhetors in the Classical period focused on a grammatical approach to mastering rhetoric, the late 18th century rhetors (Lord Kames, John Ogilvie, George Campbell, Joseph Priestley), according to Ehninger, focused on "the relation between the communicative act and the mind of the listener-reader"; focused on developing "more sophisticated systems of psychology and epistemology." Theirs were faculty and associational psychology and common sense epistemology. Ehninger continues:
In short, whereas the ancients had built a subject- or substance-centered rhetoric, the eighteenth-century theorists [who Ehninger calls "new rhetoricians"] built an audience-centered one. They classified speeches in terms of the effect the speaker sought to produce upon his listener--'to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will' [Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, p. li]. They categorized proofs according to the ways in which listeners come to believe--by experience, analogy, testimony, and the calculation of chances. They fused the traditional areas of invention and arrangement into the broader concept of the conduct of 'management' of disocurse and included in this rubric all of the grosser resources, both substantive and methodological, byw hich the listener could be persuaded. The rejected the view that rhetoric is a 'counterpart' of dialectic or logic, and declared it to be an 'off-shoot' of logical studies.
These "new" rhetors, according to Ehninger, over emphasized one aspect of communications at the expense of overall processes. They did not keep an interest and further revise the grammatical aspects previously developed by the classical rhetors. They did not take interest in "the role that practical discourse plays in society." And finally, their rhetoric was "almost entirely an armchair construct."
 Rhetors from the early 30s in the U.S. have responded to the Classical and the "New Rhetoricians" of the later 18th Century by turning to a more social or sociological approach to human communications; they, as Ehninger states it, "view rhetoric as an instrument for understanding and improving human relations."
Ehninger, focusing on the "felt need" of his contemporaries, argues that the rhetoric of the third period "is [also] shaped by the intellectual and social milieu in which rhetoric today finds itself." He points to the challenges of the 1930s and beyond:
From the personal to the national and international levels tensions and breakdowns in human relations now, as never before, may result not only in maladjusted personalities or in misunderstanding among individuals, but in depressions, wars, and the suicide of the race itself.
Under such circumstances it is natural that rhetoric as a form of verbal interaction among persons and groups should be concerned with the part it can play in promoting human understanding and in improving the prcesses by which man [sic.] communicates with man.
Representative Rhetors are Kenneth Burke and I. A. Richards: The former "argues that because language is symbolic action rhetorical analysis can throw light upon human relations and moties generally, while rhetoric as a social force arising out of an atmospehre of divisiveness can promote consubstantiality and peace through the process of identification." The latter, similarly yet differently, sees "rhetoric as a study of the causes and remedies of misunderstanding, and accounts for his interest in metaphor and in 'comprehending'." The representative thinker behind the rhetors of the group is John Dewey, who "seek[s] to implement the ideal of improved human relations by developing a specialized rhetoric of reflective proglem solving." Another group of thinkers is "electronic engineers, [who] believe that an understanding of transmission systems will help to eliminate many of the blockages that occur when man [sic.] speaks to man." Yet anohter group is the General Semanticists and the writers on argumentation.
But I think most interesting, as Ehninger represents the next point, is that the newest rhetors of the period had a
common belief that at the root of many of the misunderstandings which impair or block communications are man's language and his habits of using and abusing it--a condition bolstered by the growing realization that language is not a pliable medium which through struggle may be molded to one's will, but rather is itself a shaping force which goes far toward determining how man will conceive of himself and of his world.
In summary and in Ehninger's own words:
"the ancients centered principally upon methods for analyzing the substance or subject matter of a 'cause' "
"the eighteenth-century framers of the 'new' rhetoric emphasized the message-mind relationship" and
contemporary rhetors "find a locus of interest in language as the vehicle by which the message is transmitted."
Ehninger makes clear that the contemporary rhetors believed "other symbol systems," unconscious ones, "also may carry messages which influeces thought or behavior." He sees, however, that this extension of rhetoric beyond language to other symbol systems is leading some scholars to speak of the rhetoric of "everything"! (Just substitute for "everything" a particular word.) He sees this extension of rhetoric as a threat to its "integrity ... as a bounded discipline."
The second/third group/ing/s of readings for the evening continue at 1b & 1c...>>
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