Rhetorical Perspective

[John Bernard Bate]

Peter's excellent questions:

>I don't think there's any doubt that rhetoric is a key part of the
>Western Tradition, but I have the following questions:  1) Is rhetoric
>only concerned with language?  2) Is rhetoric only concerned with public
>discourse?  3) For a perspective to be considered rhetorical, must it be
>realized in the classical Western model (handbooks, political and legal
>applications)?

1) I would argue that, indeed, the term 'rhetoric' primarily involves some
take on language, oral or scriptural language, 'the arts of persuasion';
from language the term is extended tropically/historically to other forms of
semeiotic practice (say, political posters, advertising layout in magazines,
even the organization of space in a building, etc.).  But the primary sense
is linguistic, clearly.

2) 'Public discourse': doesn't the concept of 'rhetoric' emerge at precisely
the moment when there is some kind of 'audience,' however concretely or
abstractly that is realized?  It is not necessarily a 'public' (which of
course is another very specific cultural and historical sociological
imagining).  But the notion of 'a public' -- indeed, the emergence of what
we problematically call a 'public sphere' -- is probably intimately tied to
a notion of some kind of lanugage use that addresses such an entity.  Again,
a highly specific (and for most of the world quite recent) historical
situation.

3) The emergence of very particular kinds of textual artifacts (say
Aristotle's _Rhetoric_ or speaking manuals in general), in association with
very particular kinds of linguistic practice (say a rhetor/multitude model
of discursive interaction), are key diacritics of some new ideology of what
language is, how it functions, and the kinds of things specific kinds of
persons can do with it. It is not entirely necessary that we have these
things, but they are pretty clear signs that people have what we can call a
'rhetorical perspective' on language, or to put it differently, an ideology
of language in which the notion of 'rhetoric' is a key element.

But all this still begs a basic question in my mind: what does 'rhetoric'
mean? (I've been dying to ask this question on this list for some time.)  In
a phrase such as:

'a rhetorical position' or
'the rhetorical crafting of the argument'

what added information does the term 'rhetoric' give?  I think that the term
adds no more information than to index a particular take on language itself,
a particular ideology of language in which word is split from deed,
semeiosis from materiality.  Again, a peculiar and specific phenomenology
that does not exist everywhere and every-time.

Cheers, (to Seth and James, too, for their comments),

Barney
_____________________________
Bernard Bate
5311 S. Woodlawn, #1
Chicago, IL 60615

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