A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (6 page)

What distinguishes rhetoric from discourse analysis is its emphasis on the
arts
of discourse. That is to say, it is not interested in discourses
per se
in the way that a linguist might be. Rather, it is engaged by how such discourses are made and received, who are the composers and audience, what is the occasion, and crucially
how
the exchange is constructed. These issues are not just a matter of technique but of art (in that sense they align themselves with the notion of
technè
as craftsmanship). They are better classified as art, as opposed to science, as the concentration is on originality, quality, and performance rather than on classification and the discovery of new relations. That does not mean that rhetoric is a matter of people reproducing the same kinds of exchanges along tried and tested routes, fulfilling roles in relations to conventional social schemata and discoursal genres. These patterns will be available but can be reworked, combined, and transformed according to the purposes of the transaction. New forms of interaction can be generated (as they often
are, by new media). And, as with some of the arts,
ars est celare artem
—the art is to hide the art.

The arts of discourse, then, are particularly appropriate for global use in the twenty-first century because of the increased communicational possibilities, increased chance of misunderstanding, increasingly fast pace of interaction and increased democratization of societies. The latter point is the most pertinent in terms of the socio-political nature of rhetoric. As social and political structures change, so do rhetorical possibilities. What we might term the
rhetorical imperative
is the need to make sure that communicational possibilities are up to speed with social and demographic change. When they fall behind, and people call on outmoded types of communication to bring about transaction, the process of change is slowed or does not take place. As Gee, Hull, and Lankshear (1996) imply in the prescient
The New Work Order
, fast capitalism brings about fast rhetorical responses and a need for a critical take on these. Not that rhetoric is the servant of capitalism, but that it can and should respond to change in the balance of relations between people at work and in domestic and public spaces.

As mentioned briefly earlier, Barthes (1988) saw a key pivotal moment in rhetoric as the turning point between old rhetoric and the new semiotics of writing. The paper is in fact a transcription of a seminar given in 1964–65. First, it must be pointed out that Barthes has couched his argument in terms of old and new: old rhetoric, new semiotics. In terms of intellectual positioning, we must see this as an ideological move in favor of new semiotics and at the expense of old rhetoric. Indeed, the aide-mémoire is “the manual I should have liked to find ready-made when I began to inquire into the
death
of Rhetoric” (11, my italics). Such a “manual,” Barthes claims, did not exist in French at the time. But there is, almost in the same breath, an acknowledgement that a negative attitude to such a manual—in the sense of a list of terms, classifications, and prescriptions for action in discourse—“does not mean that in the course of this study I have not often been moved to admiration and excitement by the power and subtlety of that old rhetorical system, and the modernity of certain of its propositions” (12). What I will argue here is that Barthes, by couching rhetoric as “old” and indeed “dead,” and by defining it as a metalanguage—a “discourse on discourse” (13), has constructed a rhetorical argument in which the dice are loaded against rhetoric from the start.

Barthes's argument is nonetheless elegant. He posits a rhetoric that is monumental in scale: a meta-discipline and way of looking at the world that has seen the passage of history “without itself being moved or changed” (15). One that has seen off, as it were “Athenian democracy,
Egyptian kingdoms, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the great invasions, feudalism, the Renaissance, the monarchy, the French Revolution; it has digested regimes, religions, civilizations; moribund since the Renaissance, it has taken three centuries to die; and it is not dead for sure even now” (15). Such an edifice is bound to fall at some point, but what is fascinating about the way Barthes sets up the construction is that behind the metaphors is a notion that “Rhetoric grants access to what now be called a super-civilization; that of the historical and geographical West” (15). This ideological—almost invisible—network of assumptions and verities has provided, suggests Barthes, an immutable background against which successive civilizations—both West and East—have defined themselves. Post-
Orientalism
(Said 1978), we might, from a Barthes perspective, see
rhetoric
as underpinning the values and influences of the West (extrapolating to Europe and America what was originally Greek and European): monolithic, essentially European, invisible, powerful, and pervasive. In Barthes's terms, “a kind of subtly articulated machine, a tree of operations, a ‘program’ destined to produce discourse” (16).

In a particularly interesting section, the paradox at the heart of Barthes's (1988) analysis is revealed: “Rhetoric is triumphant: it rules over instruction. Rhetoric is moribund: limited to this sector, it falls gradually into great intellectual discredit. This discredit is occasioned by the promotion of a new value [we might say, Enlightenment-induced],
evidence
(of facts, of ideas, of sentiments), which is self-sufficient and does without language (or imagines it does so)” (43). The belief in the power of evidence belies the very fact that evidence is created in language, or in some form that can be constituted in language. If evidence is the touchstone of empiricism, it pushes language and communication to the edges and sees rhetoric as ornament, detail, and elaboration. The paradox is the one that has bedeviled rhetoric from the start: the dialectic between
truth
and the communication of truth. Only the slickest of rhetoricians would turn that dialectic to advantage and say “this is the nature of rhetoric: it both is and is not of itself. It is predicated on the generation of the ‘other’ and then debates with its
alter ego
.” Barthes has a tendency to be attracted by the ludic, game-like nature of the enterprise that is rhetoric, and he pursues the intellectual game of to-ing and fro-ing on both sides of the argument. Here, to drive home the point, is another rhapsody on the theme of ambiguity:

[T]hese contradictory evaluations show clearly the present ambiguity of the rhetorical phenomenon: glamorous object of intelligence and penetration, grandiose system which a whole civilization, in its extreme breadth, perfected in order to classify, i.e. in order to think its language, instrument of power, locus of historical conflicts whose reading is utterly absorbing precisely if we restore this object to the
diverse history in which it developed; but also an ideological object, falling into ideology at the advance of that ‘other thing’ which has replaced it, and today compelling us to take an indispensable critical distance. (47)

But much in the aide-mémoire is helpful: the quick journey through the history of rhetoric, the insightful and fragmented nature of the commentary. One challenge that the present book has to face is the accusation that rhetoric was “diluted by syncretism” (Barthes 1988, 26): in other words, that it has or had become so ubiquitous and powerful as to be weakened and thus ineffective as theory. Barthes points to the fusion with poetics, the breakdown of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction; we could add to that list the blurring of the distinction between action in the real world and the kind of language-as-action ideas of speech act theory. It is a necessity for the present book to draw the parameters around rhetoric so that it does not spread thinly and dilute; to continually police the borders so that distinctions can remain clear and precise; and to delimit the power of rhetoric to the arts of discourse—a large enough territory—rather than the whole of social and interactive experience.

Perhaps because of its quasi-scientific nature and the predilection of those who have championed the meta-discipline through the centuries, rhetoric has shown an urge to classify. It is as if the practice has been defined as the “the science of discourse” rather than “the arts of discourse.” Science classifies because its starting point is hypotheses. From this general level of operation, evidence is sought to prove or disprove the hypothesis. But first, science must make sure that its terms and its methods—overall, its tools of operation—are clear, distinct, and fit for purpose. Otherwise the relationship between the hypothesis (claim, proposition) and the evidence (data, grounds) would be questionable. In Toulminian (2003) terms, the warrant for advancement in the field would not be strong enough.

Each of the classical rhetoricians spun a web of classification, based on their particular starting points—or what we would describe today as their ideologies. Aristotle from his conception of rhetoric as “the art of persuasion” and from
technè
(speculative production of what may or may not exist—the generation of propositions and their subsequent proof); Cicero from his focus on oratory in the public (Roman) forum; Quintilian from what Barthes (1988) calls a starting point that “is certainly
technè
, but [that] is a practical and pedagogical
technè
, not speculative; it aligns:
a
. the operations (
de arte
)—which are those of Aristotle and Cicero;
b
. the operator (
de artifice
);
c
. the work itself (
de opere
) (these last two themes
are discussed but not subdivided)” (48–49). Quintilian thus may be said to have an ideological position in common with the twentieth-century rhetorician Kinneavy (1971), who posited a three-point rhetorical model with
I, You
, and
It
as the three cardinal points of the triangle of communication, with the text or product in the center; the “product” is the result of the combination of dynamic forces between the rhetor, the audience, and the object of communication. Earlier in the present chapter, it was mentioned that Quintilian was the pragmatist who, eschewing the elaborate classification systems of previous rhetoricans, suggested that in the relationship between
inventio
and
dispositio
(invention and compositional arrangement), the art is to find the right number of elements, in the right order, that suit the purpose of the communication. Such high-level positioning on classification (suggesting that, ultimately, it is not classification that matters but the ordering or arrangement of the elements in any given situation) is exactly the level at which the current book operates, though we will generate a model that is different from Kinneavy's predigital, premultimodal conception. However, one could say that the progenitors of the current theory are not the classical rhetoricans Aristotle and Cicero, nor the twentieth-century social semioticians (Saussure, Barthes), but a line of rhetoricians (Quintilian, Kinneavy) who see the
arts
of discourse as more important than the classificatory obsessions of the more scientifically inclined tradition. The simple reasons for such an emphasis is the need to generate a theory that is both high level and applicable in the discourses of the real world; one that embraces the fictive as well as the ostensibly “real”; is fit for purpose in the digital, multimodal world of communication; and, crucially, has an aesthetic dimension. If the generation of theory at this level is relatively more pragmatic than that of the high rhetoricians, so be it: the book operates at a relatively high plateau of signification, but not high enough to see its peaks disappearing into the clouds.

In short, the temptation to proliferate technical terms and a catalogue of classifications will be resisted in the interests of putting up light scaffolding (to change the metaphor) that is fit for purpose, helps us to construct the building we are interested in constructing, and can be taken down quickly to enable us to get on with the business of the world.

Prior et al. (2013) identify the three key elements of classical rhetoric—invention, arrangement, and style—as “canons” in a rhetorical model that has been influential for two millennia. Because these canons reflect high level maps of rhetorical activity and yet at the same time are practical in their application, they have been associated with rhetorical practice and pedagogy. Prior et al. state clearly what the ideological and practice-based
position is for their deliberations: it is the work of writing researchers and practitioners in university level writing programs. The emphasis here is on resurrecting the two elements of rhetoric that had been sidelined by Barthes—delivery or presentation on the one hand, and
memoria
on the other—and seeing these elements as fundamentally associated with the
resources
for communication in the digital age: a range of modes, in combination, and fast network-based means of dissemination. Prior et al.'s argument is that the re-inclusion of
presentatio
changes the whole picture of the model of rhetoric, and requires a re-think of the classical bases for the meta-discipline. In other words, the core classical trio of invention, arrangement, and style is not sufficient to account for the complexities of communication in the contemporary world. What is needed, argue Prior et al., is a rethink of the category of “delivery” to take account of the range of choices or “mediations” and distributions that take place as a speaker/writer/composer chooses how to communicate his or her message to an audience. From another perspective (that of multimodality) we might call the mediations
modes
and the means of distribution
media
. One clear move forward and clarification offered by Prior et al. is that they eschew the notion that the five parts of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—are necessarily sequential, but that they can be simultaneously operational in the making of an act of communication. Such compression and hypertextual co-presence in the act of communication is accepted—some acts of communication are instant, seemingly spontaneous, and co-incident. Others are composed over years, for example some of the paintings of Howard Hodgkin, the composition of whose works are often dated over a three—or four-year period before exhibition, after which the original resonates in different exhibition spaces, in online and print catalogs, in prints on purchasers' walls, and elsewhere in the memory.