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Weeks #1-2b, Continued: My Lecture NO.tes used for the Seminar, Wednesday, 2000, January 19th.
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continued>> Robert L. Scott, in his response to Ehninger, opens with a number of disclaimers and caveats:
 His work supplements Ehninger's (by returning to the initial article in which Ehninger locates four instead of three periods--the fourth was "asthetic"),
he has no dissatisfaction with Kennedy's or W.S. Howell's work on protosystems,
he agrees on the plurality of approaches, but emphasizes, "A pluralistic attitude does suggest that the reality of rhetoric will be shaped differently by the demands of different peoples in different circumstances and that any complex human activity will involve a skein of tacit assumptions not all of which can be made explicit simultaneously."
Scott then gives us a definition:
"Rhetoric is communication characterized by a high degree of intentionality and a high degree of structure, including distinctness of communicative roles; it eventuates in discourse in the public realm of experience rather than the private."
Thereafter, Scott's discussion is very interesting in that he surveys, initially, the concerns of the 1968, Speech Communications Association's (SCA's) 'Conference on Research and Instructional Development in Speech Communications.' The authors of the report on the conference emphasize "message" as part of the rhetorical-communicative act. ("How do 'messages get there' [in the world]?", "What brings messages to be?", "What force or forces account for them?") Scott's answer: "messages are a result of the interacting of speakers, listeners, and the world in which they live. That answer seems quiet commonplace" (emphasis mine). He continues: "Further the assertion that some persons might emphasize one of the three elements as primary or active, taking the others as less immediate or less active, also seems sensible. But following the implications of these easy answers leads to results that are a little strange, and the strangeness may be revealing." Indeed!
For Scott, the idea the the speaker is active and the listener is passive is strange. Indeed! He reminds us that in Xian rhetoric, speakers have been portrayed as passive, as receiving the word. Moreover, he reminds us of the arhetorical situation of the world as active and "rhetoric as superfluous." In other words, reality-world, from a scientific point of view, tells the scientists--forever mere, passive observers-recorders--What is what.
Scott then reports a new approach of listeners making meaning, "forming messages for themselves out of the bits and pieces of information available to them from the multitude of sources all around them.
It is from these ruminations that Scott forms the following figure of permutations and combinations:
But what is missing here? Scott writes:
"I find it impossible to cite an exemplar for a listener-oriented rhetoric, perhaps because this ideal is far from even highly imperfect realization in western culture. Certainly we have often heard communal ideals exposed, but ordinarily the advocates have been elitists or have viewed themselves passive spokespersons to a higher demand of what is manifest (to them) in the nature of things. In short the new heaven and earth is called forth in old voices. We may be living in an era in which the roots for a truly new rhetoric are being nourished; of that I am not sure."
Can Heidegger and Lyotard be far ahead-behind? I can hear them. Their future-anterior, will have been. Can you h/ear them?: Logos, Code, Language is more so the stranger (UncannyOneCumARadicalMany) here. The great EXcluded here! Indeed!
Enough said at this point, for a later opportunity will allow us to report on the "house of Being" and "of Becoming" (See Heidegger, Being and Time; "Letter of Humanism"; Lyotard, Just Gaming. See my extended discussion in "Three Countertheses," 152-59.
Scott--of course, given the conventions of scholarly discourse--lists numerous caveats, etc. And then moves on to a further refinement of Ehninger's work in terms of "periods" of history. He searches for exemplars of the various hyphenated perms and combs such as "listener-oriented rhetoric," which in this case, he says he cannot find! Every discipline has its blindspot; every blindspot has the conditions for the possibility of a discipline! Around the
Hierarchical Order of emphasis:
1. Italics
2. Underline
3. Plain (or bold).
Hence, "pragmatic-subordinate" has speaker as dominant and listener as subordinate. Here the speaker observes the world and communicates his knowledge to the listener (audience).
The "social" has the speaker as dominant and the world as subordinate. Intersubectively, it is the dialectical exchange between the speaker and the listener (audience) that makes the world. |
Communications TryAngle We a-Go!
Regrouping now as best as he can with Ehninger, Scott segments his way-of-seeing thusly:
Aesthetic (world-speaker-listener): "The rhetoric of the Great Sophists, especially that of Protagoras and Gorgias, insofar as we know it, might well belong with the aesthetic pattern." Moreover, Petrarch.
What is supposed to be happening in this explanation is that emphasis is being placed on the listener. (Given my audience in this seminar and its predispositions, I am going to have to drop in parenthetical comments so as to clarify differences. From a Kinneavean or Russian Formalist point of view in the "aesthetic period" or "aim" it is language--the code--that is placing emphasis on itself [language centered, reflexivity] or is the speaker placing emphasis on the language per se [human centered] so at to please or delight the listener. The role of the emphasis on langauge calling attention to itself is lost in Ehninger-Scott's explanation. In fact, the code or language is missing from the semiotic relationships. It's not three things but four, the latter being language holding together or tearing apart the other three elements.)
Social (world-speaker-listener): "One might easily interpret Aristotle's Rhetoric as providing the first glimpse of what may yet become a listener-oriented, that is a social, rhetoric.
Later Scott states: "It seems to me that what Ehninger and I both call 'social' rhetoric has not yet appeared as a pattern characteristic of our culture." Scott gives Kenneth Burke as an example of a rhetorical theorists of the social (communal, intersubjective).
At greater length:
Pragmatic-dominant (world-speaker-listener): "In the classical period it was finally the rhetorical propensities of Isocrates that flourished.... Ehninger calls this period 'the grammatical' for the very good reason that the great teachers of the time were busy working out the fundamental nomenclature of the art. But as important as these pedagogical necessities were, they were subordinate to the assumption of the Ciceronian ideal of the orator-statesman as dominant in a well-ordered society."
There are two primary concerns or questions in the pragmatic-dominant: "First, what may be said on behalf of a cause [in the world]? and, second, how may it best be said?" For Ehninger, according to Scott, "The very asking of questions of that sort seems ... to show an attitude that can be called pragmatic. Further, answering both were taken to be the concern of rhetoric."
According to Scott, this emphasis on the world of rhetoric for the speaker (dominant, active) upon the listener, audience (passive) is the work of the Neo-Aristotelian or Neo-Ciceronian rhetors.
Caveat: What is difficult here is the placing of primary emphasis on "world," for when Scott begins to talk about Descartes and Bacon, it is the "speaker" who is dominant in describing the world for a passive audience. (Note: Some how or other, I can still find it easier to follow Kinneavy's explanation by way of the triangle and aims instead of by way of the italics, etc., and historical periods. But don't let my prejudice in seeing be yours.)
Pragmatic-subordinate (world-speaker-listener):
A Pragmatic-subordinate is basically, according to Scott, a "Managerial rhetoric." In respect to asking and answering the two above questions, Scott writes: "In the third period, the pattern of emphasis had shifted and only the second [question] ... was seen as germane to rhetoric." Scott's major example of this shift of emphasis occurs in the 15th and 16th centuries in "the art of Ingratiation," exemplified by Castiglione and Peacham. (In our contemporary world it is Dale Carnegie and his How to Win Friends and Influence People.)
Somewhat complicating matters--it is difficult to throw together courtly rhetoric and scientistic rhtoric--is the empiricist movement with Descartes and Bacon, who employ a "pragmatic but subordinate role [for] rhetoric as the handmaiden of the new science." Perhaps the courtly rhetoric and the image of handmaiden fit!
It is difficult to talk about the four unfolding as "periods" when they can at best be shown to be a vareity of threads among other threads.
Scott concludes his discussion by pointing to the reigning, contemporary emphasis on the pragmatic-subordinate (e.g., the rhetoric spun out from the Watergate scandal), and pointing to a social rhetoric that "is not even freshly formed but merely germinating in the compost heaps of our old thought."
Ehninger:
... points out that Scott's approach, which he agrees with and has learned from, is concerned with "the epistemic ground on which the rhetorics of various periods rested." Scott is interested in the "source" of the "message" (world, speaker, listener).
Ehninger paraphrasing Scott gives this account:
"in the ancient world messages were thought to have their source in the speaker as the embodiment of the cultural tradition";
"in the medieval world they were thought to originate in some metaphorically 'higher power' for which the speaker served as transmitter";
"in the early modern they were looked upon as residing in 'the book of nature' ";
"while today [the modern period] the burden has shifted to the listener," who must piece together the "bits or scraps."
Ehninger says that Scott backed off from discussing the "social rhetoric" of today and that he would discuss it further. (1) He points to such predecessors as Charles Beard, John Dewey, Mary Follett, and Graham Wallas. Then in the 50s and 60s there is Burke. And finally, there are in his day Chaim Perelman, Henry Johnstone, Michael Polanyi, and Harold Zyskind. (2) He argues that rhetoric does more than science can or has done in promoting "harmonious human relations." He supports his position again by naming Richard Weaver, Wayne Booth (Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent), and Stephen Toulmin (The Uses of Argument). The list continues.
(3) Ehninger finally suggests "that contemporary conceptions of rhetoric are marked by a new and thoroughly revolutionary view of the relation between rhetoric as instrument and man as agent" (emphasis mine). Man is the symbolizer, not just the perceiver of the world but also the inventor of the world (by way of attitudes toward the world). There is no escape from rhetoric and a symbolic making of the world. There is no mere motion except that which is determined by the symbolic systems developed by and for physicists. Motion, emotion, commotion, etc., are all highly symbolic and attitudinal (Burke). Ehninger writes: "In short, the human being not only is surounded by rhetoric; he also, whether he wills it or not, is imprisoned within its walls. He is inevitably and inescapably a rhetorical animal" among animals. Imprisoned!
We are going to turn now to a similar discussion but as 'carried on' among rhetors in English Departments. Ehninger and Scott are representatives from Speech-Communications. Though their discussion took place in the mid-70s, the discussion was one very important starting place for re/understanding "rhetoric" beyond the notion of a single "definition." So though dated, it's influence lives on in S-C and for many of us in English Composition.
The third group/ing of readings for next week...>>
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