Professing Rhetoric

Professing Rhetoric Selected Papers From the 2000

Rhetoric Society of America Conference

This page intentionally left blank

Professing Rhetoric Selected Papers From the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America Conference

Edited by

Frederick J. Antczak Cinda Coggins University of Iowa

Geoffrey D. Klinger University of Utah

2002

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

Copyright © 2002 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, NJ 07430 Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rhetoric Society of America. Conference (9th : 2000 : Washington, D.C.) Professing rhetoric : selected papers from the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America conference / edited by Frederick J. Antczak, Cinda Goggins, Geoffrey Klinger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-4136-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8058-4137-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—United States—Congresses. 2. Report writing—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—Congresses. I. Antczak, Frederick J., 1952— . II. Goggins, Cinda. III. Klinger, Geoffrey. IV. Title. PE1405.U6 R47 2002 808'.042'071073—dc21 2001040926 CIP Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

ix

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

1

James Arnt Aune

The Politics of Professing Rhetoric in the History of Composition and Communication

13

Nancy McKoski

Sleeping with the Enemy: Recoupling Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition

21

Janice Norton

Toward Finding Common Critical and Pedagogical Ground

29

Beth S. Bennett

Republican Rhetoric and Subversity: Speaking for White Women and American Indians in the 1820s

37

Deborah Gussman

Rhetorical Education for Political Action: The League of Women Voters and the Subversion of Political Parties in the 1920s

45

Wendy B. Sharer

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

53

Thomas Augst

When the 'Past Is Not Even the Past': The Rhetoric of a Southern Historical Marker

63

Derryn E. Moten

Kairos and the Rhetorical Place

69

Jerry Blitefield v

vi

Contents

Rhetoric and the Body: A Lesson from Ancient Elocutionists

77

Annalisa Zanola Macola

Live from the Operating Room: A Generic Visual Rhetoric

87

R. Michael Jackson

Policing the Architectural Canon: The Gendered Discourse of Architectural Studies

97

Elizabeth Birmingham

Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Collective Authorship: Rethinking Ethos and the Politics of Disclosure

107

Kathryn T. Flannery

Mediated Ethos: Instructor Credibility in a Televised Writing Course

115

Joyce Magnotto Neff

The Essay Matters because the Essayist Matters: Personal Disclosures and the Enactment of Ethos in Essays by Black Feminist Writers

123

Juanita Rodgers Comfort

Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More

131

Elizabeth Howells

Romantic Heroism and "Public Character": Ethical Criticism of Performative Traditions in Public Discourse

139

Stephen A. Klien

Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction 147

Lawrence K. Stanley

Preparing Ethical Citizens for the Twenty-First Century

155

Jami Carlacio and Alice Gillam

Rhetoric and Ethics: Is "How Should We Proceed?" the Wrong Question?

163

Richard Glejzer

Public Schools, Private Ethics: Rhetoric of Service in Composition Melody Bowdon

171

Contents

vii

The Rhetoric of Globalization, Graduate Student Labor, and Practices of Resistance

179

Catherine Chaput

Rereading the Literacy Crisis of American Colleges and Universities

187

Christopher Schroeder

Sophistic Masks and Rhetorical Nomads

193

Bradford Vivian

Paideia versus Techne: Isocrates's Performative Conception of Rhetorical Education

199

Ekaterina V. Haskins

Thoroughly Modern Vico: The New Science and Counter-Enlightenment Politics

207

Daniel L. Emery

Rhetoric of Science as Non-Modern Practice

215

Carl G. Herndl

Ending the War between Science and Religion: Can Rhetorology Do the Job?

223

Wayne C. Booth

The Open Question of the Conversation Between Science and Religion: A Response to Wayne Booth's Rhetorology

235

James L. Kastely

Author Index

241

Subject Index

247

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

What is it, at the turn of this century, to profess rhetoric? Scholars in our field are going in a variety of directions—theoretical, critical, historical, pedagogi­ cal. Without trying to impose a coherence greater than the diversity of our en­ terprises will bear, are there common premises, purposes, narratives of our pasts, ambitions for our futures that hold us together and move us forward as a field of intellectual inquiry? What are the areas within our subject in which re­ search is especially needed, and how may that research be stimulated? What are the conditions of our work as rhetorical teacher/scholars—situated in particular institutional and organizational structures—that shape our practice? In the spring of 2000, over two hundred rhetorical scholars from eight na­ tions convened in Washington D.C. to advance the discussion of these questions. Judging by the range of their interests, rhetoric is perhaps as vital a field of in­ quiry as it has ever been. Some scholars are recovering historically silenced or un­ recognized rhetorics, including Native American, African American, Latino, and women's rhetorics. Others are exploring rhetoric's relation to performance, and to the body, or revising the canons, stases, topoi and pisteis; others are re­ working the rhetorical lexicon to comprise contemporary theory. Topics in our most vital scholarship also include rhetoric as figurality, comparative and contrastive rhetorics, rhetoric and genre, rhetorics of science and technology; rhetoric and reconceptions of the public sphere, rhetoric and public memory, rhetorics of globalization and social change, including issues of race, ethnicity, and nationalism; rhetoric's institutionalized place in the academy, in relation to the other humanities and to the interpretive social sciences; and the place of rhetoric in the formation of departments and the development of pedagogy. All of these interests were articulated in the 2000 conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. This conference marked a kind of turning point. Among diverse interests, rhet­ oricians seemed to find common themes, shared intellectual and pedagogical en­ terprises that hold us together even as the institutional situations of rhetoricians still keep us apart. The quality of this scholarship promises much for the next century—so long as we remain audiences for each other, so long as we sustain a vision of rhetoric as a common calling, a shared profession in all its diversity. James Aune's keynote struck that chord explicitly. Aune uses a speech Max Weber delivered to University of Munich students in 1919, Wissenschaft ah Beruf, ix

x

Preface

as a background to examining the contemporary university as an economic and political locus for scholars. In the Weimar Republic, academic life grew ever more dictated by the "discourse of the market" and a demand for the provision of technical skills. In our own day, Aune claims these imperatives have been mixed with a push toward uncritical celebration of an amorphous "Western heritage," a push funded and ideologically fueled by foundations and corporations. Aune uses Weber to reflect on the need to rebuff such assaults on the academic mind, and suggests that Protagoras and Cicero might give rhetoricians special leverage to do this, by "promoting the methods and values of controversy." Teaching and encouraging students to explore multiple sides of a question fosters a rhetoric that makes it possible to preserve university life as a site of free inquiry and intel­ lectual process. Aune warns us that—especially given the current cultural onslaught—we must "sustain our sense of rhetoric as a calling." Three authors remind us of historical dimensions of our common calling. Nancy McKoski situates Rhetoric's location in the university curriculum as a re­ sponse to political conservatism. She provides a sociopolitical examination of the academic climate in the 1930s, 1950s, and 1980s, climates that shifted away from the more inclusive pedagogy of progressive democratic education toward a more classical republicanism with a strong, if not always explicit, strain of exclu­ sivity. McKoski provides an overview on the turf battles among Communica­ tions, Linguistics, and English for composition courses and a narrative of how Rhetoric emerged as an academic discipline. Janice Norton studies how the history and politics of disciplinary boundaries have influenced the efficacy of rhetoric in the contemporary academy. Norton advocates for what "Rhetoric might yet become" and suggests a list of ways that Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp programs could teach each other, and by so doing help identify and serve shared institutional interests. Beth Bennett advocates for another sort of collaboration, between rhetorical criticism and composition pedagogy. Traditional rhetoric (insofar as it has come to favor cultural criticism) and composition pedagogy (insofar as it favors pro­ cess over product) have both been eclipsed. Now electronic technology is re­ shaping the meaning and process of communication. Fundamentals like agency, authority, and audience remain important, but their parameters have become more fluid. Where style once emphasized correctness or clarity as the goal, Bennett argues for "a critical engagement of the virtue of propriety in rhetorical practice." Today's teachers of rhetoric must help students learn to recognize propositions of ethical responsibility in the rhetorical choices they make by in­ cluding not only the critical and ethical skills, but also those encompassing cre­ ative and expressive competencies; "that is, we need to reconsider the virtues of adornment, of clarity, and of correctness." Part of our work is historical, a recovery of various rhetorics in our shared past. Deborah Gussman examines the rhetorical strategy employed by Lydia Maria Child in her children's 1828 revisionist history, The First Settlers of New England. Child's text attempted to present the American Indian as representa­

Preface

xi

tive of the republican ideal of citizenship, portraying the Puritans in a strikingly realistic light. Gussman explores the use of the classic American jeremiad and contrasts advisory rhetoric with adaptory rhetoric, noting that "the task of the female Jeremiah was complicated by the rhetor's awareness of her social subject position and the absence of a legitimate female public space." Gussman demon­ strates how the vehicle of a conversation in the home between a mother and her two daughters might benignly teach them social and political activism, and also impart egalitarian ideals. Wendy Sharer focuses her study of the League of Women Voters on its contri­ butions to educating women. Influenced by the educational philosophy and dem­ ocratic ideals of John Dewey, the League created schools of citizenship across the country, providing classroom and course-based instruction mixed with experien­ tial learning. While primary instruction dealt with the elements and machinery of the individual political parties, secondary instruction taught rhetorical strategies aimed at developing political influence. Interviewing, public speaking, debate, and collaborative authoring were taught; fieldwork included visiting government buildings such as the Court House and State House, familiarizing women with fo­ rums for their future advocacy. Sharer extrapolates from the League's practices a similar pedagogical approach for the academy today. Thomas Augst studies Frederick Douglass's public lectures to suggest that the current media culture's commodification of "real" experience emerged in the rhetorical performers of the nineteenth-century reform movements. While new oral and print forms of mass media were appearing, "the public lecture acquired unprecedented popularity and legitimacy as a channel of civic discourse." Not only did Douglass speak with a neoclassical eloquence garnered from reading Caleb Bingham's rhetoric manual, The Columbian Orator, he spoke with moral ethos against slavery. His autobiography, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, which recounts his personal experience as a slave, informed his public perfor­ mances. Thereby Douglass drew credibility from "the moral witness of ordinary experience." Douglass saw the lecture hall as a more "efficient medium for moral suasion" than printed works. He promoted the human voice to an instrument of humanity, with powers of swaying an audience through sensory immediacy. Derryn Moten raises the question of just how the text on an historical marker can spawn a barrage of conflicting interpretations and reactions. In and around the city of Montgomery, Alabama—nexus point for both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement—there are no fewer than eighteen historical markers, each of which had its version of history and inflection of its meaning, each a site for the rhetorics of public memory. When, for example, a marker commemorat­ ing Union General James Harrison Wilson (who led the capture of Montgom­ ery) was stolen, public discussion was divided as to whether that was a loss or a vindication. Historical markers, Moten shows, serve as rhetorical vehicles for capturing "intracommunity and intercommunity difference." A stimulating counterpoint to these historical rhetorics emerges in Jerry Blitefield's exploration of the historical dimensions of kairos that "situate the

xii

Preface

rhetor in time and place at the point of social action." Using Frank Kermode's idea of the temporal dimension into which a reader of fiction falls, Blitefield makes an analogy to practical discourse: in either case, for kairos to exist as rhe­ torical agency, it must have aplace to come into fulfillment. Place provides the material room for kairos to be written and endure, and "kairos, as a range, pro­ vides the temporal room for rhetorical action." What makes kairos a useful con­ cept in this way is that it has a narrative continuum that involves both the rhetorical moment in time and the displacement of that time in place. Blitefield shows how the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the Memorial subsequently created there serve to illustrate how "a single place provides at once the reposi­ tory of kairoi past and the medium for kairoi present." Rhetorics of the body, visual rhetorics, and gendered rhetorics are also active sites of scholarship in rhetoric; some of these rhetorics are powerfully traditional, some breathtakingly new. Annalisa Zanola Macola examines how elocution in public speaking, and voice in particular, were promulgated in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century treatises. Recalling delivery as a canon of classical rhetoric, Macola advocates for a return of something like the American elocutionary movement and a refocusing on vocal training in public speaking courses. Mike Jackson presents a rhetorical commentary on the genres depicted in Max Aguilera-Hellweg's The Sacred Heart, a collection of medical photographs and nar­ ratives. Jackson equates a rhetorical situation with the form of a genre which "plays a dual role as social frame of a situation and rhetorical action taken within that situation." When genres co-exist within or on a single rhetorical artifact, quite novel hybridizing may occur. Jackson examines Aguilera-Hellweg's work as a form of rhetorical hybrid, crossing genres of documentary photography, science journalism, medical documentation, pornography, and horror. As a bridge be­ tween culture and artifact in a hierarchy of rhetorical action, the genre reveals the social exigency that precedes the rhetorical action and the action itself. Elizabeth Birmingham finds in her personal experience "a profound, gender-related crisis" within the disciplinary walls of architecture. Although they constitute over half the students declaring a first-year interest in majoring in ar­ chitecture, women are virtually nonexistent among representations of faculty, students, practicing architects, and historical representations. Rectifying the si­ lence about women in architecture texts, Birmingham attempts to establish a place in the architectural canon for Marion Lucy Mahoney. Birmingham shows how Mahoney's architectural achievements were relegated to a status subsidiary to the more celebrated accomplishments of her husband Walter Burley Griffin, and of her collaborator for fourteen years, Frank Lloyd Wright. Birmingham dis­ solves the gendered perspective that focused on Mahoney as a feminine entity, rather than on her architectural work. The relations of ethos, character, and ethics compel the attention of many rhetorical scholars. Kathryn Flannery challenges Nedra Reynolds's definition of ethos as one constructed and sanctioned by a group, and questions Adrienne Rich's idea that authority rests on acts of disclosure of a "particular body, place,

Preface

xiii

historical and cultural moment." Flannery invokes Lorraine Code's idea of the fluidity of location, that "rhetorical spaces are not simply literal texts, but the multiple discursive arenas in and through which we live, in and through which we write." Responsibility is not predicated on an act of writing in isolation: "Ethos isn't something simply in the text—but rather a name for the web of in­ terconnections between text and world, text and reader ... the dynamic of any literacy event." Joyce Magnotto Neff keeps the issue of ethos in the present day, with a look at the different relationships that develop between teacher and student in a com­ position course delivered on interactive television. Neff examines access, con­ tent, timing, text ownership, and the issue of who has the floor. Ethos becomes a collaborative affair that involves technicians and technological interfaces as well as teacher and students. The distinct possibilities and constraints of an interac­ tive television course require pedagogical decisions to be made on the run, inter­ rupting class plans. Both the extent and pace of content is continuously being renegotiated. Neff suggests that interactive television courses offer opportuni­ ties for teachers to work on pedagogical ethos, to "become open, unstable, ener­ getic, flexible, nonauthoritative, informed subjects." Juanita Rodgers Comfort invites us to rethink the ethical dimensions of a more familiar medium, the essay as a form of rhetorical discourse. Comfort examines ex­ cerpts from the writing of Audre Lord, Alice Walker, and June Jordan to illustrate how personal disclosures operate as persuasive elements, fulfilling a sense of ethos and of personal power in that they establish a sense of self that in turn can "warrant a given range of ideas and opinions." Comfort discerns that black feminist writers in particular have "invested heavily in the essay form ... to place items on the pub­ lic agenda in ways that meaningfully touch both mind and spirit." Such essayists function as rhetors in eliciting through their own ethos an openness to the new and unfamiliar. "Ultimately the essayist as rhetor asks us to understand how we can connect, and how we can be distinct, at the same time." . Elizabeth Howells pushes the inquiry into ethos further into its history, trac­ ing the genre of the preface and how the dynamics of prefaces differed in purpose for men and women. Classically, the exordium served to advance the ethos of the speaker as well as the discussion of the topic. By the nineteenth century, the writing of a preface became commonplace, situating the author before the audi­ ence in a frank confrontation, man to man. Women, of course, were not permit­ ted to speak "man to man"; a woman's ideas and public presence were overwhelmed by the qualities required of ideal womanhood, "sacrifice and self­ lessness, community, and lack of desire." Howells finds in the preface writing of essayist-novelist Hannah More, poet Eliza Cook, and travel writer Isabelle Bird that the use of a preface became both a form of apology and a reassurance that what the woman writer had to say was "less an individual and more a communal project." She shows how these women rhetors knew and used social codes for rhetorical advantage in order to secure a position in literary dimensions of the public sphere.

xiv

Preface

Stephen Klien examines the downside of ethos, showing how romanticizing political leaders can adversely affect the political agency of the average citizen and inhibit civil discourse. The creation of a presidential candidate as a cham­ pion of good over evil can work to discourage civilized discourse by contraposing "opponents as mortal enemies to the community." Klien shows how such a rhe­ torical strategy can elevate "a combative approach to politics over a discursive approach of tolerance, negotiation, and compromise." Lawrence Stanley moves us into the different rhetorical realm of creative non­ fiction, where syntax and word choice depend on the exigency of the writer's perception and experience. An organizational style that might appear arbitrary or disjunctive nevertheless represents "a definitive act of the mind that seek{s} morphological structure." Stanley suggests that the interaction of writer, reader, and text creates a performance of parataxis: the writer is not merely amassing material, but exploring the "potential of form formulating itself out of the way one perceives, reflects, reads." Jami Carlaccio and Alice Gilliam suggest that how preparing ethical citizens for the new century might involve advanced rhetorical studies. They provide a prospectus for creating a certificate program in rhetorical studies beyond the first-year general rhetoric course. Two of their major concerns are how to include previously "silenced or unacknowledged rhetorical traditions" and how to "teach virtue." The inclusion of "Diotima and Aspasia, Christine de Pizan, Maria Stewart, bell hooks, and Henry Louis Gates, for example, would allow students the chance to critique a democracy of discourses" allowing "for a plurality of multicultural voices that traverse class, gender, race, and ethnic boundaries." Carlaccio and Gilliam explore approaches for teaching virtue in terms of Celeste Michelle Condit's three-fold framework for ethical community action, Krista Ratcliffe's concept of rhetorical listening, and Anthony Weston's strategy for identifying, re-defining, and integrating conflicts and connections. "A rhetorical studies curriculum that dialectically engages multiple rhetorical traditions pro­ vides students with a broader and more inclusive concept of rhetoric, and a cur­ riculum that acknowledges cross-cultural difference in ethical ideals enables students to respect and negotiate such differences." Richard Glejzer questions how utterance, knowledge, and performance col­ lude in ethical acts, given encounters with memory where both the history and the present of sexual identity become differends. Glejzer uses the theories of cau­ sality, agency, and sexual identity in the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault to suggest that the construction of a "we" needs to be replaced with "the particularity of a speaker's position." Melody Bowdon frames a different ethical question. Using Hillcrest Elemen­ tary, a foreign language magnet school in Central Florida where her composition students engaged in service learning, Bowdon argues that composition and rhetoric scholars should "refigure their notion of service," noting a trend rising throughout the 1990s of greater emphasis on involving students in their com­ munities by curricula that require engagement in some "service" activities. The

Preface

xv

means and goals of the pedagogy of service learning have varied, with ethical di­ lemmas sometimes arising from the required nature of the assignments. In these dilemmas, Bowdon seeks an ethical revision of service so that its "stigma ... can be converted to a source of power and pride." Rhetorical concerns can provide powerful criticisms of the contemporary in­ stitution of the university. Cathy Chaput uses the effort of English graduate stu­ dents to unionize at the University of Arizona as an example of how economic and corporate globalization has influenced the employment practices of the uni­ versity. Insofar as it is a new institutional strategy, downsizing the tenure track faculty and replacing them with underpaid graduate students in an effort to in­ crease budgetary efficiency reflects a "shift in decision-making power from the state or university to the market or corporate world." Chaput advocates a Foucauldian analysis of power structure and resistance at the university level, and urges departments and professionals to examine whether their rhetorical practices foster complicity with economic abuse. Christopher Schroeder analyzes the literacy crisis in America from a historical and vocational perspective. He proposes that the crisis is really one of meaning and legitimation of a particular white middle-class cultural capital. Surveying composition textbooks, Schroeder shows that the focus on critical writing, read­ ing, and thinking sanctions "fictionalized and essentialized subject positions of rational minds communicating with other rational minds and objective, tran­ scendent versions of the world in which the complete accessibility to reality cor­ responds to its complete expressibility in texts." In a world moving toward collective discursive exchange, Schroeder advocates for context-specific literacies in the contact zone of the classroom that are "predicated on difference" and that are legitimated by the provisional authority and dialogue of the teacher and students together. But everything old is new again. Rhetoric continues to draw vigor, albeit in new forms, from its classical roots. Bradford Vivian reevaluates the Soph­ ists and the Sophistic tradition in light of the recent attraction in rhetorical studies to their style and philosophy. The perceived notion of the Sophists had been contrasted to the more idealized status of Platonic philosophers, with polarities of perceived differences existing between them. Vivian offers the rhetorical question whether "the true being of rhetoric resided not in any one pole of this antithesis but in the very movement between them." Masks adopted by the Sophists to accommodate regional needs were likely a natural and positive response to the pan-Hellenism that was emerging in fifth cen­ tury BCE Athens. "Like all transitional periods, the age of the Sophists was thus one of jointure, wherein competing and irreducibly different systems of thought were at once held together, though in tension—simultaneously joined and separated in a doubling movement; the very portrait of a double truth." Vivian encourages rhetoricians to try to uncover the mutable similar­ ities that could co-exist in both the Sophistic and Platonic traditions of knowledge, discourse, and truth.

xvi

Preface

Ekaterina Haskins explores the nature of techne, of rhetoric as an art, by con­ trasting Isocrates's version with that of Plato and of Aristotle. Offering a histori­ cal look at the choices of Greek terms used to define the nature of knowledge and the role of the rhetor, Haskins gives a glimpse into the rivalry that existed between their competing ideas and personality. In his notion of discursive educa­ tion, logonpaideia, Isocrates includes a "self-reflexive performance" that consid­ ers the audience, serves as "training in social action," and thereby fosters civil and ethical discourse. The rhetoric of science is another important locus for rhetorical studies. Daniel Emery looks at the idea of "modernity" in intellectual history by com­ paring Mark Lilla's and Isaiah Berlin's analyses of Giambattista Vico's The New Science. Lilla criticizes the Romantics, Berlin champions them; Berlin attrib­ utes pluralism to Vico and Lilla does not. These contrasts allow Emery to ex­ plore the tension of their ideas as well as distinguish some similarities. Emery advocates studying the complexity of historical arguments regarding rational­ ity and individuality, in order to better equip and "serve our political present and future." Carl Herndl examines the varying interpretations of the incommensurability thesis in the rhetorics of science. "This thesis holds that differences in theoretical paradigms or discursive fields make it impossible for scientists to persuade oppo­ nents or to resolve what Kuhn famously called paradigm debates." Herndl offers a different model that "integrates the social and material with the discursive, but which does not abandon the real." Herndl illustrates the model with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory with its creation of quasi-objects—hybrids, "mixtures of entirely new types of beings" that go through a second set of prac­ tices called purification. Donna Haraway has translated this with her work on cyborgs, particularly OncoMouse. Herndl's point is that scientific theories are in this respect discursive and social. Herndl offers an important emendation of cer­ tain rhetorics of science: by recognizing that differences evolve out of defining objects, identifying networks, and translating problems, impassable states of ar­ ticulation can be avoided and possibilities for new and extended networks can open further inquiry. Wayne C. Booth proposes to "end the war between science and religion" by making rhetorical observations about how both are communities, brought to­ gether by essential and evolving questions, existing on precepts of faith for what counts as accurate observation, narrative, and proof. Both, for Booth, are com­ munities of inquiry and discourse, and neither is likely to find its highest value in final answers, but in ever-increasing enrichment of its common stock of reasons and practices of rhetoric. Jay Kastely puts this argument into the broader context of Booth's decades of rhetorical scholarship. The issues of doubt, discourse, and persuasion in science comprise a rich site of inquiry for scholars generally, and a useful ground on which to work out answers to rhetorical questions that have fascinated Booth

Preface

xvii

throughout his work, and form an agenda for scholars who wish to extend—or resist—his tradition. These papers represent only a fraction of the work presented at Washington. The encompassing range and dazzling vitality of those conversations indicate that professing rhetoric is, at the turn of the century, an intellectual activity that engages with, and helps formulate, the most important public and scholarly questions of our day. It has been a personal privilege to help stage and support those conversations through the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA), and I thank its members for a remarkable conference. I wish to thank specifically the local hosts Jeanne Fahnestock and Robert Gaines for their tireless work; a firefighter's kid like me can especially appreciate all the fires you put out. RSA's Executive Board furnished great support as well, and I particularly thank S. Michael Halloran for his efforts. I also thank Jerry Hauser as he succeeds me in leading the RSA, an organization uniquely addressing itself to rhetoricians across de­ partmental and institutional affiliation. His deep scholarship and broad vision will help him bear this happy burden triumphantly, and move RSA toward be­ coming the indispensable affiliation for every rhetorician. Colleagues who have assisted me in continuing my rhetorical profession even while enduring the distractions of deaning include Jim Aune, Sharon Crowley, Rosa Eberly, Michael Hyde, Mike Leff, Ira Strauber, and my colleagues in the Rhetoric Department at the University of Iowa: Barbara Biesecker, Diane Davis, Melissa Deem, Daniel Gross, Dennis Moore, Takis Poulakos, Carol Severino, Mary Trachsel, and Doug Trank. Colleagues in other Iowa departments also have my thanks, particularly JoAnn Castagna, John Erickson, Richard Fumerton, Jan Gratama, Miriam Gilbert, and David McGinnis. I thank all my students, who teach me more than they know. I thank my boss, Dean Linda Maxson, who has taught me heartening lessons about principles and courage in administration, and about how to bear the inevitable reactions with good humor. Thanks to the research assistants who helped me at every stage, Robert Bionaz and Patricia Coy, and to my ever-optimistic secretary Lisa Pfeiler. Thanks for production help to Linda Bathgate. My wife Deborah is the sine qua non of my continued profession of rhetoric, and I thank her for her grace, humor, and phronesis. Whenever I think of the privilege of being in this profession, I think of my grandfather Joseph Ryszko, whose nearly 60 years in the gypsum mines near Grand Rapids, Michigan never extinguished his joy in learning. The pride I feel in my profession began with him.

This page intentionally left blank

JAMESARNTAUNE Penn State University

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

When Fred Antczak and I were teaching at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s, I became convinced that being an academic was a lot like growing up in a dysfunctional family: you always have to GUESS what constitutes "normal" behavior. As part of my guessing, I started a collection of that odd little genre of litera­ ture known as the "campus novel." I started with the Amanda Cross mystery Death in a Tenured Position, moved on to Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe and Randall Jarrell's Picturesfrom an Institution, and then discovered perhaps the best of them all, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, which captured my own sense of failed vocation at the time. I even adopted Jim's little tune about his department head: "You ignorant clod, you stupid old sod, you havering slavering get...." As the 1980s wore on, the campus novel and other representations of aca­ demic life moved more from the comedy of manners to a full-fledged rhetoric of crisis. Sometimes it was hard to tell the fiction from the journalism. James Carey speculated that William Bennett had a set up a 1-900 phone service with record­ ings of the latest political correctness outrages to titillate horny right-wingers. Robert Paul Wolff contended in his review of The Closing of the American Mind that Saul Bellow's preface to that work was a tip-off that "Allan Bloom" was in fact Bellow's most audacious fictional creation.1 The crisis rhetoric was a symptom—or, in a more paranoid moment, part of a coordinated justification—of the massive restructuring of university life we are now living through. The labor aristocracy of Research I university faculty de­ pends on the new white-collar proletariat of adjuncts. Our deans and depart­ ment heads have adopted the corporate discourse of Total Quality Management. How many of us in this room ever expected to draft a "strategic plan"? Adminis­ trators now demand that we professors, the most risk-averse occupational group outside the Roman Catholic curia, adopt habits of flexibility and entrepreneur­ ship that our educations systematically bred out of us. In less than a generation, the academy has moved from a feudal mode of pro­ duction to what radical economists call a "post-Fordist regime of flexible accu­ mulation." Universities face, in the language of The Communist Manifesto,

1

2

Professing Rhetoric

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones be­ come antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and we are at least compelled to face with sober senses, our real conditions of life, and our relations with our kind.2 The purpose of my address today is not to propose some sort of socialist rev­ olution within the profession and outside it, although I would certainly love to be presented with one at my retirement, in lieu of a plaque or a gold watch. My theme is "Rhetoric as a Vocation," in keeping with the conference theme of "Professing Rhetoric." Those of you who are sociologically inclined may recog­ nize the allusion in my title to Max Weber's remarkable speech, Wissenschaft als Beruf, delivered in 1919 to a group of students at the University of Munich contemplating academic careers.3 It is always valuable to see how issues that perplex us arise in a different historical and cultural context, if only to help us clear our heads. So, what I propose to do here is examine what James Boyd White has taught us to call the "constitutive rhetoric" of Weber's speech: how the notion of the ac­ ademic community is constituted and reconstituted in this particular perfor­ mance of language, what kind of person does Weber ask his audience to become?4 Weber begins with the question, "What are the conditions of science as a vo­ cation in the material sense of the term?" More specifically, "What are the pros­ pects of a graduate student who is resolved to dedicate himself professionally to science in university life?" (129).5 Weber's first move is to identify the blurring of traditional boundaries sepa­ rating the university from the external social world. Universities have become "state capitalist" enterprises directed by captains of industry. Teachers and re­ searchers are separated from their means of production in libraries and laborato­ ries and forced to produce knowledge useful to the state for economic and technical reasons, or for legitimating state authority. Professors live under a re­ gime of "relentless selection" that encourages careerism and gamesmanship. They are, as Weber puts it, "Americanized" (131). New faculty must recognize the spiritual cost of the profession. Academic ca­ reers are sorely beset by chance. "Das akademische Leben ist also einer wilder Haz­ ard" (530). It is a heavy responsibility we have in advising a young scientist or scholar. "If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza." But the others, too, must be asked with the utmost seriousness: "Do you in all conscience be­ lieve that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Natu­ rally, one always receives the answer: 'Of course, I live only for my "calling." Yet,

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

3

I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief "(134). Having thus located his audience within social and psychological space, he moves on to temporal matters, that is, the great Weberian theme of Entzauberung, usually translated as "disenchantment," but better read as "de-magification."6 The nature of science commits the scholar both to special­ ization and to obsolescence, social factors that may work against the Platonic "divine madness" required for devotion to one's vocation. The scholar needs to convince himself that the fate of his soul depends on whether his particular inter­ pretation of a passage in a manuscript is correct. Central to understanding the "ideal type" of the scholar is to recognize his or her difference from the artist. The artist works within a different sense of time. Scientific work postulates the progress of knowledge. In art, there is no progress. Every scientist knows her work will be outdated in ten, twenty, or fifty years. "Every scientific 'fulfillment' raises new 'questions'; it asks to be 'surpassed' and outdated We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum" (138). Having located the character of the scholar in social space and historical time, Weber then moves to dissociate sharply the scholar from the artist, the priest, and the politician. He condemns the cult of "experience" and "personality" among the young. He asks students to give up their desire that professors be spiritual mentors and "football coaches" in the art of living. (This passage is par­ ticularly chilling when we recall the important role played by the German uni­ versity student unions in the rise to power of the Nazi Party.) Besides Entzaubemng, here we have the other great Weberian theme of "Wertfreiheit," or "value freedom," so often misused by American social scien­ tists. Wertfreiheit entails two kinds of demystification. The first is the recognition that academic life cannot provide "the way to true being," "the way to true art," "the way to true nature," "the way to true God," or the "way to true happiness." The academic can do only four things: 1) produce technical tools for the execu­ tion of projects, 2) supply methods of analysis for people to investigate things for themselves, 3) to get students to recognize "inconvenient facts" that may under­ mine their fiercely held party opinions, and 4) to help them assess the internal consistency of their objectives (150-152). The academic is neither prophet nor priest. Kathederprophetie,'prophecy from the lectern,' will not restore the old communal faiths; at most, it creates ephemeral and fanatical sects. The second implication of the principle of Wertfreiheit is that the academic is also not a politician. Academics lack the sort of traits required for charismatic po­ litical leadership. They also unfairly exploit their power relationships with their students if they try to persuade them to hold particular political beliefs. Weber was speaking against the perception that university professors had been too lukewarm in promoting patriotism among German youth. Weber's speeches inspired a con­ siderable volume of academic pamphlet literature in the 1920s, usefully analyzed by Fritz Ringer in his book, The Decline of the German Mandarins.7 The most shrill of

4

Professing Rhetoric

Weber's opponents was the extreme nationalist Ernst Krieck, who insisted that Weber was responsible for Germany's loss of greatness: "The great traditions had been forgotten; society was dissolving into its atoms; the nation had lost its soul; a cultural crisis was at hand.... Only a common national religion could bring about a sense of moral unity and renewed purpose."8 Instead of religious prophecy or right-wing nationalism, Weber proposed for his audience a distinctive sense of scholarly vocation. The word Weber used for vocation was Beruf, which retained his association with Luther's sense of the "calling" of the Christian. Weber's solution to the cultural and political crisis of his time was to adopt the vocational sense of the early Protestant reformers with­ out a belief in God. Fredric Jameson, for example, has criticized Weber's concept of Wertfreiheit from a Marxist standpoint: Weber's attitude toward values preeminently constitutes a value in its own right, and that it is the difficulty of maintaining such an in­ ner contradiction that imposes on him that attitude of paralysis, of suspended action and judgment, which is so frequently mistaken for objectivity in the usual academic sense of the term.9 Yet Jameson, it seems to me, misses both Weber's own important political inter­ ventions after World War I in attempting to create a liberal constitutional order for Germany, and also Weber's mastery of a distinctive rhetorical tone of passion­ ate moral commitment with an ironic sense of self-limitation. This rhetorical tone is best captured in the audacious trope that concludes Weber's speech. Weber contended that if we wish for an ethic of ultimate ends rather than an ethic of responsibility, we can always make it easy on ourselves by joining one of the old churches, whose doors are opened "widely and compassionately." But if we are intellectually honest, we will compare our fate to that of the Jew­ ish people. Weber concludes: Integrity ... compels us to state that for the many who today tarry for new prophets and saviors, the situation is the same as resounds in the beautiful Edomite watchman's song of the period of exile that has been included among Isaiah's oracles: "He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come. The people to whom this was said has enquired and tarried for more than two millennia, and we are shaken when we realize its fate. From this we want to draw the lesson that nothing is gained by yearn­ ing and tarrying alone, and we shall act differently. We shall set to work and meet the 'demands of the day,' in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and obeys the demon {daimon} who holds the fibers of his very life." (156)

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

5

Weber's uncanny identification of the Jewish people with the vocation of the scholar points ahead as a kind of warning. After Weber, the German students' search for a charismatic Prophet and the demand that professors take on a na­ tionalistic politic role culminated in the lowest academic act of the millennium, Martin Heidegger's Rektoratsrede of 1933, in which he proclaimed the allegiance of the university to Der Fuehrer. That, it seems, is what happens when Wissenschaft abandons its vocation—when it abandons the search for clarity, its political neutrality, its relentless telling of inconvenient facts, and it attempts to re-enchant the world. My goal in discussing Weber's constitution of the Scholar as ideal type and the academic community as a form of life is not necessarily to recommend his particular solutions to the cultural crisis of his time. It is rather to use his themes as a starting point for some very important conversations at this conference about "professing rhetoric." As in the Weimar Republic, academic workers face unbearable pressure from economic and political forces outside the university, particularly: 1) An unprecedented invasion of academic life by the discourse of the Market. 2) An accompanying demand that universities limit their social role to the provision of technical skills and an uncritical celebration of something called the "Western heritage." The universal triumph of the market comes down to money, public relations skills, and the mobilization of the energies of a lunatic fringe of libertarians. Just when the Left began to abandon class-interest-based forms of political and cul­ tural explanation, the Right consolidated its efforts to buy an intellectual elite. It is hard to escape the ironic conclusion that in the past twenty years, the Right have been the only people who actually took the work of Antonio Gramsci seri­ ously on the need to create "organic" intellectuals. Thanks to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, we are now getting a clearer picture of these matters. In July 1997, the Center published a report by Sally Covington entitled Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations.10 As a result of an unusually skilled pub­ licity effort, the report was widely covered in the mainstream press and eventu­ ally became the source for the argument about the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against President Clinton that emerged after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998. The broad outlines of the report had been familiar to activists for some time, but the sheer enormity of the right-wing ideological assault on the universities, the mainline churches, and the government became clear for the first time. Among its many findings was the report's disclosure that twelve foundations, in­ cluding the Olin and Scaife foundations, contributed $210 million between 1995 and 1997 to create conservative academic programs at such esteemed institutions as the University of Chicago, Harvard, George Mason, Yale, and Claremont McKenna. The foundations contributed a billion dollars in the 1990s as a whole.

6

Professing Rhetoric

They also paid to support regional and Washington-based think tanks who coordinate their policy agendas. The webpage of the regional "Heartland Insti­ tute" lists nearly 150 of these organizations, all devoted to coordinating an as­ sault on public education and public support for the poor, homeless, and handicapped (see http://www.heartland.org). The foundations also paid "public intellectuals": Dinesh D'Souza received a fellowship of $483,023 through the American Enterprise Institute; Robert Bork $459,777 through the Heritage Foundation. Many influential books, from Christina Hoff Summers's Who Stole Feminism? (1994) to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994), have been funded by right-wing foundations. Journals such as First Things (devoted to promoting po­ litical and theological conservatism) and The New Criterion (devoted to a defense of high modernism in the arts and an assault on new approaches to arts and hu­ manities education) have received hundreds of thousands of dollars of start-up money and continuing support from the same foundations. Particularly threatening to academic freedom is the foundations' willingness to pay students to take classes in law and economics, courses which inevitably promote a party line on the role of markets in solving all social problems. UCLA actually canceled such a program because they believed it unfairly exploited the financial need of students for ideological ends—a cancellation that received vir­ tually no press coverage. Here are a few examples from my own institution, examples that are by no means unique to Aggieland. An example of the sort of research such centers pro­ mote can be found in the website for the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A & M University. The Center was founded as part of a mandate from the Texas Senate in 1978 requiring education in the free enterprise system in the public schools of Texas. The Center issues working papers and press releases on such questions as executive compensation, the privatization of public lands, unionization, and the minimum wage, all from a radical libertarian economic perspective; it has close ties to the Olin-funded American Enterprise Institute. ll The draft description of the economic component of the curriculum for the Masters Degree in Public Administration at the new George Bush School of Gov­ ernment and Public Service displayed a similar bias. The course in economic anal­ ysis is to be taught as two-thirds microeconomic analysis (itself an ideological choice) and "it is argued" (the passive voice is such an easy target that I will pass over it in silence) "that the government has a potential role [in the economy] when (i) property rights are ill-defined, and (ii) markets are not competitive." As some of you know, I had my fifteen minutes of fame from my own run-in with the Bush School. In October 1998, I received a telephone call from apoliti­ cal reporter at the Dallas Morning News, who asked me if I would be willing to comment on the gubernatorial debate between the Democrat Gerry Mauro and the Republican incumbent George W. Bush. Since I teach courses in argumenta­ tion and debate, I believed I was competent to make some observations. I told the reporter that neither candidate made any glaring mistakes, that Governor

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

1

Bush looked presidential, and that he was an excellent public speaker, unlike his father, whose rhetorical skills I characterized as "inept." I found out a month later that my comments had angered someone in the Bush family. The full story emerged only in July 1999 when an intrepid local re­ porter named John Kirsch uncovered a series of Bush School memos through a Freedom of Information Act request. Dale Laine, a top aide to Governor Bush, complained directly to the head of the Bush School about my comments. (At this point in the story, I always have to remind my confused listeners that I was in trouble for complimenting the Governor.) The director of the school drafted guide­ lines prohibiting professors from claiming an affiliation with the Bush School when offering opinions or "undocumented material" about the Bush family. In a later interview, Mr. Laine denied he was trying to stifle my academic freedom, but was merely accusing me of offering only a personal opinion not grounded in a "scientific" study. The only reason I even made the comment about former President Bush's rhetorical difficulties was that he had made the point himself in a public presentation at Texas A & M in Fall 1997. It turned out that I was not the only faculty member with a Bush School con­ nection who had been the victim of attempted intimidation by the Governor's aides. George Edwards, who holds an endowed chair in political science, also was criticized for having projected a Republican loss in the 1996 elections. Neither Edwards nor I really suffered any direct injury, but I experienced a few sleepless nights wondering if I had injured the reputation of my department. Thus far, ar­ ticles about political influence on the Bush School have appeared in local Texas papers, the AP Wire, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Editor and Publisher, the Nation, and Lingua Franca.12 Sources at the Bush School who wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that Governor Bush himself was involved in the ef­ forts to regulate professorial speech. The irony is that if I were a conservative ac­ ademic who had received similar treatment from a Democratic governor, I would have become the poster child for "political correctness." Another disturbing trend is the pervasiveness of direct corporate influence on universities. Changes in patent law and tax law in the early 1980s permitted greater corporate contributions to universities in exchange for the ability to buy the results of university research. Corporations were thus able to shift part of their research and development costs to universities at a time when the college work-study program was cut by 26.5% (after adjusting for inflation), tuition rates at public universities increased 170%, and the funding of meritorious proposals before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dropped from 50% to 20%. l3 Professors who largely turned a blind eye to the gutting of U.S. labor law un­ der the Reagan-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the un­ willingness of President Clinton to address the issue of labor law reform while he had Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress now find themselves in the same position that industrial workers found themselves in the early 1980s. The assault on tenure as well as the pressure to quantify educational outcomes and increase contact hours are part of the same triumph of the market that, as

8

Professing Rhetoric

Jürgen Habermas writes, blinds itself to every value that cannot be expressed in the form of a price.14 A key difference from Weber's rhetorical situation is the way that a distinc­ tive, scientistic free market rhetoric, clothed in a faulty sense of Wertfreiheit has taken over our institutions. Time and again free-marketeers assert as truth methodological statements and effects of policy that are either plainly wrong or are more controversial than they claim. Foremost among these assertions are: Rational choice (i.e., the application of cost-benefit, economic "reasoning") is the bestpossible mechanism in the human sciencesfor explaining and predicting human behavior. In fact, rational choice theory lacks empirical verifica­ tion; rhetorical and communication theory explains the emergence of social norms far better than rational choice theory does.15 Government intervention in the marketplace is always bad. The fall of Com­ munism has settled once and for all the question of the superiority of the free market to anyform of government intervention. Market ideology relies on a radical dissociation between "government" and "people." Market­ ization places political decisions about education, welfare, and even foreign policy beyond the reach of democratic publics. Labor is a commodity like everything else; pro-union and minimum wage legislation are unwarranted interferences with the labor market. When did professions and vocations become "the labor market"? The Internet will ensure the triumph of thefree market worldwide by reduc­ ing the costs of information and transaction costs, thus ensuring "friction-free capitalism."16 (Which I guess must mean you get screwed withoutfeeling it.) It also shows how individual initiative and free markets develop unexpected solutions to old problems. The Internet is the product of perhaps the greatest single government expenditure outside of Cold War mili­ tary spending in general. It is the product of planning, just as much as any democratic future for communication technology or educa­ tion must be. The good news, however, about free market rhetoric is that although it has captured the minds of the technical intelligentsia and increasingly larger sectors of the universities, it is inherently incapable of reaching a wider public, which may explain the hostility of free-marketeers to majoritarian democracy. It is only recently (since the triumph of the Market between 1975 and 1989) that the mass democratic public has tended to vote against its own economic in­ terest. The reduction of everything to the "cash nexus" in the wake of globaliza­ tion provides a significant opportunity for the left, center-left, and even traditionalist conservatives. However successful the disciples of Hayek, von Mises, Friedman, and Posner may have been in the academic fields of economics,

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

9

law, and political science, they possess an inherent inability to persuade a demo­ cratic public. Only the external threat of Communism or the merging of free market arguments with nationalist appeals have made radical marketization at­ tractive to voters. A new political program for a global, democratic left must emphasize the importance of the welfare state, strong unions, and regulation of the financial markets for the preservation of traditional communities. The classical theorists of rhetoric and their twentieth-century successors knew that human beings are a composite of appetite, spiritedness (thymos), and reason. Free market economists cannot explain the development of social norms through epideictic discourse or the kind of craft knowledge—practical wisdom—that transcends the calculation of costs and benefits. The triumph of Homo economicus occurs at the expense of family, work, neighborhood, freedom, and faith—the topoi of conservatism at its best. Professors Bloom, Bork, Hoff Summers, and Fox-Genovese may eventually come to recognize that the major threat to their Western heritage is not a handful of cultural studies types with purple hair and multiple body-piercings who have captured the Commanding Heights of the English department, but rather the trumping of academic values by market values. I certainly have no magic answer to the assault on the academic vocation; like Weber, I can only recommend that we continue to do the tasks for which our calling suits us best: the marshaling of what Weber calls inconvenient facts, pro­ viding the tools needed by what Rosa Eberly calls "citizen critics."17 The particular role played by the rhetorician in the current crisis is that of promoting the methods and values of controversy. I was thrilled in the early 1990s when Gerald Graff proposed that a solution to the culture wars was for us to "teach the conflicts," but I was dismayed that he had so little to say about the methods that would help students engage in controversy.18 Ideologues of both the right and the left do not like the central rhetorical method handed down to us from Protagoras and Cicero. I agree with Thomas Sloane's argument in his important book, On the Contrary, that neither English nor Communication de­ partments have given the Sophistic and Ciceronian traditions their due. We need instead to make "debate the conceptual model of rhetoric" and actually re­ quire students to argue on both sides of a question. This practice, contrary to some recent critiques, is not inevitably based on such allegedly male-oriented traits as antagonism or competitiveness. In fact, when skillfully applied, rhetoric enables us to transcend those qualities by creating communities of controversy. A rhetoric of debate enables us to eventually abandon antagonism and enter into an intellectual process of maieutic or midwifery.19 The relationship between gender and academic practice, however, does lead me to identify what seems to me to be a primary limitation of Weber's otherwise compelling account of the academic vocation. The restrained passion and moral seriousness of his ethic of responsibility do resemble the disillusionment of the male academic at midlife. In Weber's account of academic and social life, there is no acknowledgment of sexual difference or the place of the family (although

10

Professing Rhetoric

Weber's own feminist credentials were remarkably high for his time). The char­ acter of Weberian scholar seems terribly, frighteningly alone. There is neither the sense of personal commitment to a partner or to children, nor is there a sense that the academic enterprise can transmit a set of craft values best learned in community rather than intense isolation. I want to conclude by reading a passage from another of those campus novels that I read in the early 1980s. In May Sarton's novel The Small Room, Lucy Win­ ter, a new instructor at a small New England college, observes her older and ex­ perienced colleague Hallie Summerson teach an English class about John Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne. Sarton describes Lucy's feelings as she listens: Something streamed out of her that was absolutely open, passion­ ate, of an intensity that made shivers go up and down Lucy's spine. It was the freeing of a daimon, as surely as the writing of a poem springs from the freeing of the poet's daimon. It surrounded Hallie Summerson with the aura of a person set apart, lonely and—Lucy half-smiled at the word, but uttered it to herself nevertheless—sacred.... This power, Lucy suspected, had to be as carefully guarded as the creative power of the artist. What nourished it? Would she herself ever do more than stand at the threshold of the mystery, stand there with awe, but outside? Would she ever herself be a keeper of the sacred fire?20 I do not know if Sarton had Weber's allusion to the daimon in mind when she wrote this passage, but I believe she captures, more clearly and vividly than Weber, the kind of spiritual passion unique to the academic vocation. I am no more certain than I was in 1984 that I am doing more than standing with awe at the threshold of the mystery. Some days, though, I can feel the presence of the daimon: when a student develops a sense of self-confidence at the platform, when a class realizes it has just had a civilized discussion about abortion or race, or when reading a student paper I learn a new interpretation of a text I have read dozens of times. May our conversations at this conference help us all continue to feel the presence of the daimon, the particular daimon who sustains our sense of rheto­ ric as a calling. Notes 1. Robert Paul Wolff, rev. of The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, Academe, 73, 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1987): 64-65. 2. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: Norton, 1988) 58. 3. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Es­ says in Sociology (New York: Oxford UP, 1946), 129–56; the German original is in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen: J. Mohr, 1922), 524–55. Subsequent references are to the English text, in parentheses, except for a few instances in which I have cited the German text.

Rhetoric as a Vocation: A Weberian Meditation

11

Some of the difficulties in translating Weber are discussed in Gerth and Mills, v–vii. For a useful selection of Weber's other writings on the universities, see Edward Shils, ed., Max Weber on Univer­ sities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974). 4. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meanings: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984). 5. In some ways, science is an unsatisfactory equivalent for the German Wissenschaft, because it con­ notes almost exclusively the "hard" sciences in English. In German, for example, the study of clas­ sical languages and literatures is referred to as Altertumswissenschaft. Scholarship might be a workable alternative. 6. See Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989) 224. 7. Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969) 352-66. 8. Ringer 357. 9. Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller," in The Ideologies of The­ ory, Vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 12. 10. See also the 1999 follow-up report: $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s; see the website, www.ncrp.org, for information on ordering the two reports. 11. See www.tamu.edu/perc/ 12. See Benjamin Soskis, "Bush Family Values," Lingua Franca, Mar. 2000: 6-8. 13. Lawrence Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower (Boston: South End, 1995), 9-10. 14. Jürgen Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Revolutions of Recuperation and the Need for New Thinking," After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, ed. Robin Blackburn (London: Verso, 1991) 25. 15. For further development of these arguments, see James Arnt Aune, Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (New York: Guilford, 2000). 16. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1996) 180-207. 17. Edward P. J. Corbett and Rosa A. Eberly, The Elements of Reasoning, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn, 2000) 121-38. 18. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992). 19. Thomas O. Sloane, On the Contrary (Washington, D.C.: Catholic UP, 1997) 3–4. 20. May Sarton, The Small Room (New York: Norton, 1961) 117.

This page intentionally left blank

NANCY McKOSKI

The Politics of Professing Rhetoric in the History of Composition and Communication

Since the mid-1980s, the politics of our field changed abruptly from consid­ eration of actual students and their behaviors and attitudes in the classroom to consideration of the theoretical and historical discourses that might make up the content of composition as an academic discipline in the liberal arts; from stu­ dents and discussion of actual differences and identities to discourse and discus­ sion of difference and identity as theoretical concepts; from the students in our classrooms and the here and now problems of race, class, and sex to the resurrec­ tion of exceptional minority figures in the history of rhetoric. The study of rhetoric was first introduced as the proper discipline of composi­ tion in the mid-1950s, a dramatic turn in the field that is particularly evident in talks presented at the 1954 Conference on College Composition and Communi­ cation (CCCC). This was the first CCCC conference to be planned and held in the new Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, whose inauguration in 1953 ended the twenty-year New Deal Democratic reign of the Roosevelt-Truman years. That it was re-introduced in the mid-1980s, another politically con­ servative era, is no coincidence. Both the introduction of rhetoric in the mid-1950s and its re-introduction in the mid-1980s signaled deep reactions against the forces of progressive educa­ tion in composition, with its participatory democratic ideals, its reliance on the social sciences, and its attention to students as an obvious but neglected resource for pedagogical research. John Dewey's philosophy of progressive education and its backing by progressive governmental policies masterminded the establish­ ment of public education in the first half of the century. Progressive education's democratic ideals of educating all American youth and its reliance on the politi­ cally progressive social sciences were crucial to the opening of secondary and post-secondary education to working class and immigrant student populations. Land grant universities were mandated by law to accept without limitation all high school graduates, and many of those universities had remedial writing courses and/or other remedial support services by the 1930s. Part of the back­ lash against progressive education in the 1950s involved the reconsideration of 13

14

Professing Rhetoric

open enrollment policies and the phasing out of remedial writing courses. In 1955 the University of Illinois was the first institution to publicly announce the dropping of its remedial writing course. Charles W. Roberts, Chairman of Fresh­ man Rhetoric, reports that the Illinois plan "which we have decided to pursue will, by devious and subtle means, make the unprepared student an extremely rare, if not wholly extinct species on our campus" (95). Roberts writes in his 1955 proposal for the plan that "in my twenty-six years of work with Freshman Rhetoric at the University of Illinois, I have not seen a more opportune time than the present in which to straighten out the lines of responsibility in English instruction in the entire public school system. The good sense of public school administrators is beginning to assert itself" (97). In referring to these lines, Rob­ erts explains that "we have been suffering through a period dominated by edu­ cational nonsense [which] is largely responsible for the hordes of unprepared students dumped on our doorstep annually" (97). The neo-progressive forces active in the field of composition from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, which resulted in student-focused research and pedagogies, also accompanied a period of unprecedented inclusion of minority student populations, notably Black and Hispanic, under open enrollment poli­ cies fueled by progressive political pressure to open up higher education. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux say that the "racial and ethnic composition of public colleges and universities was rapidly transformed in the 1970s and re­ mains in the 1980s the target of the educational counterrevolution. Financial aid, fellowships, and other scholarship programs have been drastically cut back by federal and state governments" (6). The social or rhetorical turn in composi­ tion of the mid-1980s, strongly influenced by the poststructuralist Marxist/feminist theories of literary studies, has worked hard to deconstruct the student identity and the student-inclusive pedagogies of the last fifteen years; so that while we read in our journals about radical politics and the obligatory refer­ ences to Audre Lord or Gloria Anzaldua, not to mention what seems like the endless repetition of the thesis that reality is the social construction of language, our composition classrooms have been thoroughly traditionalized. Current composition pedagogy basically consists of teaching formulas for the classical or modern argument and the techniques or formal requirements of the research pa­ per. The only alternative to this focus on form is the Ways of Reading approach that emphasizes the interpretation of difficult texts. If we focus on writing, we teach discourse formulas and the rules of research; if we emphasize reading, we teach the interpretation of the kinds of difficult texts that literary studies has al­ ways prized. The return to rhetoric in composition in the 1950s and the 1980s represents a return to teaching the universalized forms and principles of discourse and the valued texts of the liberal arts tradition after periods of political and educational expansion that are marked in composition pedagogy by the influences of the so­ cial sciences. The most liberal periods in the history of composition studies and pedagogy—the decade after World War II and the years from the late 1960s to

The Politics of Professing Rhetoric

15

the early 1980s—were highly interdisciplinary, influenced particularly by the research conducted in linguistics, anthropology, cognitive and social psychol­ ogy, sociology and the proliferating interconnections among these fields that contribute to studies in literacy and education. In the introduction to his 1950 A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke explains that part of his project is to reclaim the rhetorical elements "that had become obscured when rhetoric as a term fell into disuse, and other specialized disciplines such as esthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and sociology came to the fore" (xiii). I think we have to wonder about the politics of the reclamation of a subject that had fallen into disuse be­ cause its concerns had been taken up by specialties that dispersed its universal principles by studying psychological, sociological, or anthropological differ­ ences in actual language use. We have to ask what such a reclamation might mean in the wake of periods of academic expansion, particularly the unprece­ dented inclusion of working class, Black, and Hispanic student populations. The social constructivist or rhetorical arguments against scientism and the objective sciences have obscured for those of us in the liberal arts the fact that the social sciences have been behind all of the social reforms of this century and that the humanities as a whole have not only not been behind them but have often openly resisted them. A recent biographer of Dewey writes that "Dewey's lifework was provoked by the scandal of the fact that science manifestly makes progress while philosophy, ethics, and art do so dubiously, if at all" (Ryan 280). The early history of the social sciences in this century adopted the principles of scientific naturalism for their new academic disciplines as the only way to get out from under the prevailing dominance of traditional scholarship, which they viewed as "metaphorical, value-laden, deductive, and too often based on written documents rather than on the actual observation of social events" (Purcell 17). The three principles of scientific naturalism—objectivism, particularism, and functionalism—entailed a "directly observational methodology" that posited "the only real knowledge available about both [people] and society [as] empiri­ cal and experimental" (19, 21). Scientific or morally neutral objectivism, the first principle, was declared to specifically counter the moral and rational con­ ceptualizing that made up much of traditional humanistic scholarship. The em­ phasis on individual, measurable, concrete facts, or particularism, the second principle of scientific naturalism, reinforced the new social scientists' arguments that things and reality were what should be studied in their disciplines, not words and logic. As a critic of traditional legal scholarship remarked in a 1930 article defining the new legal realism, a study of the law based on the observed behavior of actual legal practices in the courtroom, "the traditional approach is in terms of words; it centers on words ... it has the utmost difficulty in getting beyond words" (83). Functionalism, the third principle of scientific naturalism, defined the meaning or importance of any phenomenon in terms of its practical consequences: "[p]eople, customs, institutions, laws, and beliefs were what they did in practice, not what they were shown to be logically or what they ought to be morally" (23).

16

Professing Rhetoric

Rhetoric, as the central discipline of the liberal arts tradition, was at the core of the classical education that characterized American colleges well into the nineteenth century. As Gerald Graff describes, the classical colleges' "concep­ tion of democracy assumed the natural right of liberally educated men to na­ tional leadership ... locating 'virtue and wisdom not in the people but in an educated few fit to be their leaders' " (21). Moreover, he describes the "typical American college [as] a quasimonastic institution where 'the preparation of in­ dividuals for Christian leadership and the ministry' ... was considered a more important goal than the advancement of knowledge" (20). The new universities that developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to better suit the needs of a rapidly expanding, industrializing nation adopted scientific models of knowledge in good part to free themselves from the ecclesiastical influences of the classical colleges. A rapidly expanding curriculum, an elective rather than prescriptive system of study, the departmentalizing of subjects, and the almost doubling of student enrollments every decade from 1890 to 1930 were other notable characteristics of the new modern universities. The introduction of rhetoric as the proper discipline of the required first-year English course by the mid-1950s was part of a revival of classical studies in gen­ eral in the humanities that dated back to the 1930s. Classical philosophical and political systems were re-invoked for study, as in the Neo-AristotelianThomistic movement at the University of Chicago, to counter what many hu­ manists viewed as the destructive influences of the new social sciences in Ameri­ can education, culture, and politics. The naturalistic world view that prevailed among many social scientists after 1910 accepted "change as given, order as ac­ cidental, process as nonteleological, behavior as adaptive, values as experiential, and absolutes of any kind as superstitious" (Purcell 9). In the main, the objective methods of scientific naturalism were deployed by social scientists in the 1930s and 1940s in the name of humanitarian and progressive ideals. Many social sci­ entists were avowed and ardent proponents of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. The purported philosophical and moral relativism of the new social sciences, however, provoked a huge reaction by rationalist philosophers and religious spokesmen, who blamed those ideas for eroding traditional systems of belief and leading directly to the mass movements of the 1930s, the logical outcome of which, they argued, was the totalitarianism of the 1940s. Neo-Humanism, the New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelianism and Neo-Thomism were all academic movements reacting against "the spiritual degeneracy of the modern world, ... the undue prestige and power of science, ... the lax sur­ render to 'romantic' impulses or to naturalistic 'drives,' ... the spread of materi­ alistic or pragmatic philosophies" (Thorpe and Nelson 402). In fact as one critic pointed out, classical and clerical reactions to the liberal-democratic ethos of the Roosevelt and Truman years were prominent in the United States only in its lit­ erary journals. Only in "the journals of the New Criticism" were "authority, hier­ archy, Catholicism, aristocracy, tradition, absolutes, dogma, truth, ... related terms of honor, and liberalism, naturalism, scientism, individualism, equalitarianism,progress,

The Politics of Professing Rhetoric

17

protestantism, pragmatism, and personality ... related terms of rejection and con­ tempt" (Davis 10). The revival of classical studies in the humanities out of which the New Criticism developed was also the source of proposals to meet general education requirements with study of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the great books as well as the later introduction of rhetoric in com­ position. The academic revival of classical studies in the 1930s was a profoundly antimodern reaction to the forces of mass or participatory education and democ­ racy of those decades. Richard Weaver's 1948 article "To Write the Truth" and the 1953 articles by Weaver and his students at the University of Chicago, which introduced classical rhetoric and argument for the composition course, argued that rhetoric is needed to define the true names of concepts like democracy: "[d]oes it stand for something existing in the nature of things, something in accordance with 'right reason,' or can it be changed overnight to mean dictatorship of the proletariat?" (28). The teacher or rhetorician, Weaver continues, is also a philosopher, who "works through logic, which is itself an assurance that the world has order. True enough [he declares], there will not be much student-centered education here, and knowledge will take on an authority which some mistake for arrogance" (30). In his history of the intellectual conservative movement, which he argues began in 1945, George Nash uses Weaver as a representative figure of the "new conservative" or traditionalist wing of that movement, citing Weaver's 1948 Ideas Have Consequences as the book that "was to become, in the opinion of many, 'the [source and origin] of the contemporary American conservative move­ ment' " (39). The democratic goals of progressive education and the social scientific knowledges used to promote those goals continued to influence composition teaching, however, through the growing popularity of the communications course after World War II. In the decade after the war, the communications course was a popular alternative to the composition course as the English re­ quirement in many universities. Its focus on the combined skills of speaking, writing, reading, and listening was a more practical, functional, and topical study of language than the more traditional composition course. Having origi­ nated during the war years as an accelerated and intensive course in English for inductees in the military, its continuance after the war was influenced by the large number of war veterans that flooded college campuses under the G.I. Bill. When it became clear, however, how the new studies in linguistics and the Gen­ eral Semantics movement—both strong influences in progressive education and the communications course—werebeing used to challenge the very foundations of traditional language instruction, the English department stepped in and re­ claimed composition for the humanities. The traditional concepts of logic and grammar underlying conventional lan­ guage instruction came under direct attack by the new scientific language stud­ ies. The new studies in linguistics established that English consisted of a number of dialects currently in use and that the prestige of certain dialects over others

18

Professing Rhetoric

was a consequence of conditioned attitudes of value, not of inherent qualities in the languages themselves. Language was defined as a culturally learned set of behavioral habits deeply embedded in a person's many senses of identity. Learning new habits of language would depend on the learner's committed en­ gagement and involvement in the environment of the new language. As Donald Lloyd argued, knowledge of linguistic science called "for drastic correction of the methods used in the [English composition] course" as well as an entirely differ­ ent approach or attitude toward students and their language habits (41–42). The General Semantics movement was critical of abstract language and logic for obscuring the real differences at stake in many recurring social arguments. Pro­ ponents of this movement argued that differences in meaning kept people from understanding one another and that differences in meaning should provide the focus of language study. The new social scientific studies of language, which in­ fluenced the communications course and challenged the basic assumptions of traditional language instruction during the late 1940s and early 1950s, invoked a huge reaction by liberal arts proponents in composition that were strikingly evident in a number of papers presented at the 1954 CCCC convention. A series of papers at this conference introduced the discipline of rhetoric to counter the implications of the new linguistics studies for composition. Six of the eight papers presented in a series of three panel discussion sessions entitled "Modern Linguistics and the Teaching of English" reestablished the humanistic discipline of rhetoric as the proper provenance of composition. These papers es­ tablished clear boundaries between the disciplines of rhetoric and linguistics and argued that rhetoric, as the evaluative discipline, simply took precedence over linguistics, a descriptive discipline. One presenter wrote that rhetoric, as the more comprehensive discipline, may borrow from linguistics, but linguists "can­ not on linguistic grounds make rhetorical statements or judgements" (McMillan 146). Other papers at this convention argued that the communications course was inferior to the composition course, the most notable of which was a Marxist condemnation of the course as the watering down of higher education to meet the middle-management needs of corporate industry. That the 1954 CCCC con­ vention was the first to be planned and held in the new Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, whose inauguration in 1953 ended the twenty-year New Deal Democratic reign of the Roosevelt-Truman years, is pretty telling. Some facts do speak for themselves. The studies and practices of composition are highly political, and we have to recognize that when rhetoric intervenes in com­ position, the more conservative forces in our field are in power. Works Cited Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry Giroux. Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism. Chi­ cago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Ashin, Mark, "The Argument of Madison's 'Federalist,' No. 10." College English 15 (1953): 37–45. Bilsky, Manuel, McCrea Hazlitt, Robert E. Streeter, and Richard Weaver. "Looking for an Argu­ ment." College English 14 (1953): 210-16.

The Politics of Professing Rhetoric

19

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Congleton, J. E. "Historical Development of the Concept of Rhetorical Proprieties." College Composi­ tion and Communication 5 (1954): 140–45. Davis, Robert Gorham. "The New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition." The American Scholar 19 (1945-50): 9-19. Dykema, Karl W. "Historical Development of the Concept of Grammatical Proprieties." College Com­ position and Communication 5 (1954): 135-40. Francis, W. Nelson. "Modern Rhetorical Doctrine and Recent Developments in Linguistics." College Composition and Communication 5 (1954): 155-61. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutionalized History. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Ives, Sumner. "Grammatical Assumptions." College Composition and Communication 5 (1954): 149–55. Kelly, George. "Prolegomenon to Future Communication Metaphysics." College English 6 (1955): 210-15. Lloyd, Donald. "An English Composition Course Built Around Linguistics." College Composition and Communication 4 (1953): 40–43. McMillan, James B. "Summary of Nineteenth Century Historical and Comparative Linguistics." Col­ lege Composition and Communication 5 (1954): 145–49. Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic, 1976. Purcell, Edward A., Jr. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1973. Roberts, Chas. W. "The Unprepared Student at the University of Illinois." College Composition and Com­ munication 8 (1957): 95-100. Ryan, Alan. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: Norton, 1995. Thorpe, Clarence D. and Norman E. Nelson. "Criticism in the Twentieth Century: A Bird's Eye View." College English 8 (1947): 395–405. Weaver, Richard. "To Write the Truth." College English 10 (1948): 25-30.

This page intentionally left blank

JANICE NORTON Arizona State University

Sleeping with the Enemy: Recoupling Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition

The Seventh Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference invited pre­ senters to respond to the insights of the Wingspread "Prospects for Rhetoric" conference on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary. In the final entry of the conference proceedings, Carolyn Miller wrestles with an issue absent from Wingspread, the fact that Rhetoric remains a house divided as it moves into the twenty-first century. Having begun the last century as two armed camps, Rhe­ torical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition end the century perhaps less an­ tagonistic towards one another, but perhaps even worse, as completely indifferent to one another. As Miller puts it: Perhaps the most salient fact of rhetoric's academic existence in the United States is its division by institutional and educational history into two departmental homes, communication and English. There are lively and active communities of inquiry and criticism in both departmental locations, and too few scholars who are familiar with both. (207) Indeed, she goes on to wonder whether rhetoric can be a discipline—and whether it can play an effective role in the academy or in intellectual life—if it is divided into two primary contingents that barely speak to each other (208–09). In this paper, I want to take up Miller's question by way of a highly truncated, broad stroke interrogation of the status of Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition and some of the conditions under which each currently labors in the academy. Given the entanglements I hope to partially unknot here, it is probably a good idea to define some terms I will use. First, it may be helpful to remember that rhetoric is both a practice and a theory (rhetoric) and an institu­ tional discipline (Rhetoric). Rhetorical Studies here refers to the disciplinary entity housed in departments of Speech Communication while Rhetoric and Composition refers to that disciplinary entity housed in departments of English, and rhetoric and composition refer to discrete practices and theories. What I want to do here is 21

22

Professing Rhetoric

move through some of the issues facing each of the disciplines and the terms structuring their relations to each other in order to eventually propose a shift in those relations. Miller's concern for disciplinary survival is punctuated by the material condi­ tions affecting academic departments everywhere. Under assault by increas­ ingly conservative legislatures, universities everywhere face retrenchment and increasing reliance on nontenurable faculty. Since Rhet/Comp has labored under adverse conditions for decades, current circumstances merely reiterate for it a particular past. For example, the recent Rhetoric Review survey of doctoral pro­ grams in rhetoric discloses that there are fewer programs and faculty and more graduate students than its last survey about ten years ago (237). Despite the de­ cline, however, in 1997 there were 65 doctoral programs in Rhet/Comp (235) and more than 65 percent of the 1997 graduates found tenure-track positions (238). As the Modern Language Association reports substantially worse results for English majors in general (about 50% placed in tenure-track positions), Rhet/Comp's placement record is comparatively quite good (239). Hence, the authors of this year's survey suggest that the decline in doctoral programs might be "optimistically" linked to a likely consolidation and maturation of programs. I, however, am inclined to suspect that it reflects a reduced commitment to rhet­ oric as a disciplinary field of inquiry and an increased commitment to composi­ tion. Currently, virtually every major university in the United States requires the first-year composition course for all its graduates and enrollments are up (Crowley), and these courses require an increasing number of bodies to staff them. Therefore, it is not hard to see why Rhetoric and Composition's place­ ment record looks so good at a time when other English majors are having diffi­ culty getting placed. There is no indication, however, that this has positive consequences for Rhetoric majors. Rhetorical Studies finds itself in a somewhat different situation, if no less troubling. Traditionally housed in Departments of Speech Communication, Rhetorical Studies has only thirty-two doctoral programs, about half as many as Rhet/Comp (NCA). Data concerning the number of graduates and placement rates are unavailable, and that in and of itself may be significant. William Eadie, former Associate Director of NCA (National Communication Association), however, has pointed out to me that during his seven-year tenure at NCA: [T]here are few positions advertised directly in rhetorical studies. It is likely that individuals who are specializing in this area are taking gen­ eralist positions, often at smaller institutions. The few positions in re­ search institutions that come up each year attract heavy competition. The greatest unmet demand of the past couple of years has been for people who can teach public relations, and I imagine that some of the rhetorical studies graduates have managed to land some of those jobs, especially in smaller programs or in programs with heavy teaching loads, where flexibility of courses that can be taught is valued.

Recoupling Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition

23

If Eadie is correct, and even a casual perusal of Spectra (the official news dis­ semination organ of NCA where jobs are announced) over the last few years sug­ gests that he is, the picture for Rhetorical Studies graduates is considerably bleaker than it is for Rhet/Comp graduates. There are fewer jobs, stiff competi­ tion, and every likelihood that one will become a generalist and not the specialist one trained to be. Hence, unlike English Studies, which continues to advertise for specialists, even if in much reduced numbers, Rhetorical Studies majors are likely to find it necessary to respond to ads that never mention the word rhetoric. Eadie argues, however, that doctoral programs in Rhetorical Studies are not, in his view, under attack. I am less sanguine about this than he. It is significant that in the same moment that Rhetorical Studies graduates are forced to become generalists that finally, after a series of ballot challenges over the last decade or so, the Speech Communication Association, which was founded almost a hun­ dred years ago by rhetoricians, has changed its name to the National Communi­ cation Association. This marks the fact that the Association, as a professional body, now believes that representing itself as "Communication" is more descrip­ tive of its members' concerns than "Speech," a turn that elides the debt that the NCA owes to the elocutionists and oral speech proponents who originally formed the Association. The very thing that those scholars wanted to fore­ ground, a specific set of differences from the literate practices of English depart­ ments, has now once again been erased. That is not, in my view, necessarily a bad thing, but it does speak to a formal displacement of a history of disciplinary identity formation that has a great deal to do with the current status of relations between Departments of Speech Communication and English Studies. The history of the relationship between Rhetorical Studies and English de­ partments has been at times quite bitter, and despite its own marginalization in Communication Studies, Rhetorical Studies does not deign to acknowledge the rhetoric taught in Rhet/Comp. Speech theorists angrily broke with English de­ partments in 1914 to form their own professional association largely because they felt that National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) marginalized oral practices. When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s, Michael McGee, one of the most prominent theorists of rhetoric in Rhe­ torical Studies, was fond of telling his students that the reason that he had switched from English to Speech Communication was that he had "gotten his aesthetes shot off in the war." He had little use for those who spent their days plumbing James Joyce when real social injustice continued unabated in the streets. McGee's remarks point to a presumption that the rhetoric done in Eng­ lish departments is inevitably tainted by its close association with English stud­ ies, and hence, must suffer from an effeteness that saps its political strength. This presumption is made clear in the studied indifference Rhetorical Studies exhibits toward scholarship on the other side of the aisle. As Janice Lauer points out in a review of the scholarship between and among communication, classics, and composition (where she collapses rhetoric with composition), while many "composition historians and theorists ... have cited some relevant scholarship in

24

Professing Rhetoric

communication and classics ... the work of most of the rhetorical theorists and historians in communication and classics ... reveal no references to scholarship in composition" (forthcoming). Keith Miller's review of John Lucaites', Celeste Condit's, and Sally Caudill's Contemporary Rhetorical Theory supports Lauer's ar­ gument: "Of two thousand citations in this volume (a rough estimate), only one essay in RSQ [Rhetoric Society Quarterly], one in RR [Rhetoric Review], and one in P/T [Pre-Text] are cited—and only once apiece" (203-04). While I be­ lieve that there is good cause for Rhetorical Studies to be critical of Composition's apolitical leanings, its failure to engage the rhetoric theorized by Rhet/Comp at all is highly problematic. Indeed, while this ignorance implies a more-political-than-thou attitude when it comes to the rhetoric done in English departments, the fact is that Rhet/Comp has repeatedly attempted to grapple with the politics and history of its own theory production while Rhetorical Studies has resolutely refused to examine those very issues. So while Sharon Crowley, James Berlin, Janet Atwill, Maureen Goggin, Victor Vitanza and oth­ ers have labored to produce a history of theory production in Rhet/Comp, such an enterprise has yet to be undertaken in Rhetorical Studies by even its least prominent theorists. On the other hand, to be fair, this ignorance is returned by Rhet/Comp. Rhet­ oricians in Rhet/Comp are, by and large, not contemptuous of Rhetorical Studies because they know very well the ancient to early modern tradition that Rhetorical Studies also teaches, and, in fact, they are indebted to Rhetorical Studies for some of the best scholarship of that tradition. For instance, if you lis­ ten to Sharon Crowley, she believes that she owes an enormous debt to Rhetori­ cal Studies scholarship. Nevertheless, Rhet/Comp rhetoricians are almost uniformly unaware of the great tradition of rhetorical criticism kept alive by Rhetorical Studies. Given Rhet/Comp's location in departments of English Studies, this failure to also take up the intellectual strand of critical work is a most peculiar state of affairs, given that literary criticism flourishes there. In this sense, the Rhetoric of Rhet/Comp has permitted literary studies to completely co-opt one of the most viable political tools at its disposal, that of criticism. To be sure, Rhet/Comp, at first glance, finds itself in a somewhat more secure institutional position than Rhetorical Studies. Having made itself into some­ thing of a "sure thing" by embracing its status as the single largest service pro­ gram in virtually every university and college in the United States, and consequently becoming the proverbial "goose that laid the golden egg" for the coffers of colleges of Liberal Arts, it is difficult to imagine a moment when uni­ versities will retreat from the bonanza of the first-year requirement. (And one wonders, then, if perhaps there is a bit of covetousness in Rhetorical Studies' esti­ mation of Rhetoric in Rhet/Comp.) This is not to say, however, that Rhet/Comp is secure from institutional pressure. No WPA is ever immune from the peren­ nial pressure to find salary savings, to increase the cap on class size, and to reduce the number of complaints emanating from young men and women press-ganged into service in required, largely unpopular, courses. Moreover,

Recoupling Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition

25

English Studies, whose very institutional life almost universally depends on Rhet/Comp to generate the financial support necessary to maintain large PhD programs, continues, nevertheless, to regard Rhet/Comp as an inferior calling. If Rhetorical Studies has little use for Rhet/Comp, ironically, neither does the very discipline that supposedly has tainted Rhet/Comp. To make matters more perverse, I want to further complicate Carolyn Miller's observations about the breach between Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp by ref­ erence to Sharon Crowley's and Susan Miller's critiques of the relation between Rhet/Comp. Not only are Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp not on speaking terms, but as Crowley puts it, "composition instruction and rhetorical education are very different things" (269). Susan Miller, for different reasons, makes a simi­ lar, if more acerbic, argument in Rescuing the Subject. Hence, while Rhet/Comp fac­ ulty do not have the same disdain for each other that English studies does for both of them, they could not have more differing agendas. In a nutshell, while the rhet­ oric in Rhet/Comp is explicitly political, composition scholarship is anything but. Whereas Rhetoric takes culture as its object, as David Kaufer has observed (Goggin 195), Composition Studies takes the student mind as its object. This is not to say that the distinction I am claiming between Rhetoric and Composition is clean. There have certainly been Neo-Aristotelian rhetoricians, for instance, who do not take their pedagogy and course content to be political, and there are some compositionists who take seriously the question of ideology. When considering the scholarship broadly, however, there is little question that Rhetoric and Com­ position, while occupying the same house, do not share the same bed and daily march to very different drummers. Consequently, while we often find Rhetoric and Composition faculty making programmatic decisions together, this alliance is uneasy and riven with contra­ diction. Indeed, the implications of the split between Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp cannot be fully understood without reference to the way Rhetoric in Rhet/Comp is hamstrung by its relation to Composition. I would argue that when Rhetorical Studies takes Rhet/Comp's institutional relation to English Studies to be determining, it misses the more serious difficulty in the current moment, which is Rhetoric's association with Composition. Because Rhetoric in English departments has been, through its alliance to Composition, so thor­ oughly implicated in the first-year composition requirement, Rhetoric's politi­ cal power has indeed been compromised. One need only recall what happened to Linda Brodkey at the University of Texas to understand the difficulty when Rhetoric tries to enact its political commitments in the first-year course in de­ partments of English. (The firestorm created by her attempt to foreground the political nature of writing was so hostile that Brodkey eventually left the Uni­ versity of Texas.) As Maureen Goggin would argue, the complexity of the relation of Rhetoric to Composition is part of a much more entangled history, that of how, at the be­ ginning of the last century, Speech Communication, Rhetoric and Composition, Literature, Linguistics, and Creative Writing were split off from each other in

26

Professing Rhetoric

the process of disciplinary identity formation, an eventuality which now should provoke us, she argues, to "[ponder] whether carving up the space in modern higher education along language lines was not an untenable act" (Tangled 67). What I am trying to suggest is that while Sharon Crowley gets it right when she argues against the first-year requirement, only rhetoricians,1 not compo­ sitionists, are likely to agree with her. Crowley contends that the first-year re­ quirement is thoroughly imbricated with a tradition of pedagogy that privileges rules, clarity, and process to the exclusion of issues of ideology and power. This is not to say that the first-year requirement is apolitical. Indeed, the focus on rules, clarity, and process is totally bound up with institutional politics, but compo­ sitionists, on the whole, are not inclined to confront the material conditions of their situation (218–21). There are many more compositionists than rhetori­ cians, if Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) at­ tendees are any indication. Consequently, unless Rhetoric disentangles itself from Composition, the first-year requirement will continue to be fraught with institutional political danger for it. That is to say, now might be a good time to reconsider relations between and among ourselves, outside the box the last century placed us in. As Eadie points out, Rhetorical Studies has already begun to shift "in the direction of cultural studies" as "the focus of rhetorical studies has shifted away from the history of British and American public address." While this may reflect an openness to dis­ ciplinary change, and I may be wrong about this, it is also a turn that bears watching to be sure, for one of the crucial places that cultural studies in the United States has been most noticeably nurtured, and depoliticized, as Cary Nelson has so scathingly argued, is in the house of English Studies. Hence, one might argue that having struggled so hard to resist its historical relation to Eng­ lish Studies, Rhetorical Studies now, quite without irony, invites the return of the repressed. As I understand the problem, nothing less than rhetoric itself is at risk from threats on all sides, surrounded as it is by apolitical enterprises with institutional entitlements from a depoliticized cultural studies and composition studies, to a contemptuous English Studies, to the unreflective thrust of much of the scholar­ ship in Rhetorical Studies, to the balkanization of rhetoric in Rhet/Comp pro­ grams. Although Victor Vitanza has somewhere suggested that Rhetoric ought to "just float," that is, go without a disciplinary home, I am not convinced that rhetoric can survive being so thoroughly unmoored, given contemporary insti­ tutional politics. For sure, the practice of rhetoric itself is alive in any number of disciplinary locations, as Steven Mailloux has recently pointed out (19, 21), but with a few exceptions, rhetorical theory, by and large, has been done in Rhetori­ cal Studies and Rhet/Comp. There is no good reason for Rhetorical Studies and the Rhetoric in Rhet/Comp to continue in their ignorance of each other. We are not enemies, and if we persist in our disciplinary fragmentation, I fear that in the long run, we risk the diminution of rhetoric as a viable theoretical presence within the academy. Unless we aim to give up on the entire project of Rhetoric

Recoupling Rhetorical Studies and Rhetoric and Composition

21

being housed in the academy, it is time that we give our attention to what Rheto­ ric might yet become. In my view, Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp still have important things to teach each other. • The politics of creating full professors. The anecdotal evidence suggests that with far fewer doctoral programs, Rhetorical Studies has been signifi­ cantly more successful than Rhet/Comp in promoting its professoriat. Theresa Enos's analysis suggests that this is a direct result of Rhet/Comp being so thoroughly feminized, and no doubt, Rhetorical Studies benefits from precisely the opposite condition. Gendered or not, however, it is time to take notice of who gets made full professor in Rhetorical Studies and how that takes place. • The politics of feminist theory. Deeply indebted to a notion of perspective to guide its critical project, Rhetorical Studies has refused to treat feminist theory as anything other than another perspective, that is, it does not get that feminist theory is, among other things, a critique of perspective itself and, as such, requires an interrogation of the entire framework structur­ ing Rhetorical Studies' critical project. As a profoundly feminized institu­ tional entity (Enos), Rhet/Comp has long welcomed feminist theory and its implications for its theoretical work, albeit I confess, as a largely liberal politics project. • The politics of doing criticism. Rhetoric in Rhet/Comp needs to familiar­ ize, critique, and extend Rhetorical Studies' deep tradition of critical in­ quiry. A feminized Rhet/Comp can bring fresh insights to texts that have previously been largely the province of masculinized readings. Rhet/Comp can extend its intellectual reach considerably through a polit­ icized critical project. • The politics of civic space. Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp have differ­ ent things to teach each other about civic space. Rhetorical Studies be­ longs to that long tradition of rhetoric as politics and has fairly consistently engaged the question of what it means to take the civic seri­ ously. Rhet/Comp has, by and large, limited its discussion of civic space to the academy and the role of the classroom in civic participation. As Janet At will's Rhetoric Reclaimed makes clear, however, both Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp have been compromised by their location within the lib­ eral, humanist academy and the turn to representation. As both Atwill and Barbara Biesecker have argued, it is time to rethink rhetoric as techne and disengage from the politics of representation in order to reclaim the civic for a heuristic rhetoric. My list is admittedly idiosyncratic and incomplete, but I hope it is suggestive. By no means do I intend to imply here that Rhetorical Studies and Rhet/Comp should aim for a unified discipline. There is something to be said for the diversity that their disciplinary bifurcation creates. However, I do think we

28

Professing Rhetoric

are well past the time when we should be thinking about what we share and how nurturing that shared tradition might serve both our political interests. Perhaps the disciplinary demise of rhetoric would not be a bad thing—rhetoric does always rise again—but I believe it would be a very great waste. Note 1. Perhaps not all of them; rhetoricians are usually quite sensitive to institutional politics and under­ stand the privilege that comes with being indispensable, that is, it takes bodies to service all those first-year courses. Works Cited Atwill, Janet M. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Biesecker, Barbara. "Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric." Philosophy and Rhetoric 25:4 (1992): 351-64. Crowley, Sharon. "Adams Sherman Hill Gets His Wish." (forthcoming CCC.) —. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Eadie, William. Rhetorical Studies Programs. E-mail to the author. 07 May 2000. Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Goggin, Maureen Daly. "The Tangled Roots of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, and Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography on the History of English Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29:4 (1999): 63-87. —. Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composi­ tion. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2000. Lauer, Janice M. "Cross-Disciplinarity in Rhetorical Scholarship?" Inventing a Discipline: Rhetoric Schol­ arship in Honor of Richard E. Young. Ed. Maureen Daly Goggin. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, forthcoming: 67–79. Mailloux, Steven. "Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths Between English and Communi­ cation Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30: Summer (2000): 5-30. Miller, Carolyn. "Epilogue: On Divisions and Diversity in Rhetoric." Making and Unmaking the Pros­ pects for Rhetoric. Ed. Theresa Enos and Richard McNabb, Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1997: 207-09. Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. Nelson, Gary. "Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto." English Studies/Cultural Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent. Ed. Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. NCA Graduate Program Directory. National Communication Association, Annandale, VA. 04 May 2000 .

BETH S. BENNETT University of Alabama

Toward Finding Common Critical and Pedagogical Ground

In "The Habitation of Rhetoric," Michael Leff argues that American rhetori­ cal scholars began the twentieth century as neo-Aristotelian speech critics and have ended it as neo-sophistic, socio-political critics. More specifically, Leff char­ acterizes this development as a shift, or split, in rhetorical scholarship from 1) criticism that studied speeches to understand their contexts or to locate pro­ cesses assessed by their extrinsic effect, thereby aligning speech or rhetorical criticism with history, to 2) criticism that viewed rhetoric as "a power that ranges across the entire domain of human discourse," reducing rhetorical criticism to social critique. What both views share, Leff posits, is a preoccupation with action as opposed to substance (53). As Leff argues, it is this emphasis on studying the process of rhetorical action that has dissociated rhetorical criticism from composition pedagogy. His­ torically, the pedagogical tradition linked rhetoric and composition in their common concern for practical discourse and its implications. Both perspectives embrace what Leff calls "a humane philosophy" that measures the integrity of discursive practice by its "effort to balance the aesthetics of production and the requirements of ethical action" against practical expedience (54). At the start of the twentieth century, though, while composition remained fo­ cused on the product, rhetorical criticism followed the action, as it were.1 A critical focus on the action effected by rhetoric enabled rhetorical critics to move quickly from studying rhetoric as public address, political action "constructing or enacting citizenship," to rhetoric as historical events, "important human activity" using the art of public address, to rhetoric as cultural studies, socio-political action influenc­ ing individuals within particular societies.2 Postmodernism has resulted in rhetori­ cal criticism itself becoming a type of action. In defining the role of a critic, Barbara Warnick admits that the rhetorical critic may still be any of four actors: artist, analyst, audience, or advocate (232). However, she argues that as an advo­ cate engaging in critical rhetoric, one seeks to unravel dominant discourse and is therefore incompatible with traditional rhetorical criticism (236). Interestingly, while rhetorical criticism has moved toward cultural criticism and away from traditional rhetoric, recent scholarship in the area of written 29

30

Professing Rhetoric

composition has displayed a shift away from the traditional emphasis on product and toward a pedagogical emphasis on the composition process. This develop­ ment has revived interest in rhetorical theory and has created the opportunity for exploring common ground, practical and critical, between rhetorical criti­ cism and composition pedagogy.3 The purpose of my remarks is to advocate fur­ ther exploration of this opportunity and to offer specific grounds for critical and pedagogical collaboration. My advocacy comes from the standpoint of one who teaches the history of rhet­ oric to students in Communication Studies.4 Often, communication students are drawn to the study of rhetoric for the power history has shown it to have wielded or for the social critique it now affords rhetorical scholars. But, nevertheless, such students wonder—what will studying rhetoric help me understand practically about the contemporary world of communication in which we live? In the world viewed by our students, electronic technology is not only chang­ ing the process of communication, it is shaping it in such a way that neither rhe­ torical paradigm alone, traditional speech nor print, functions adequately to explain what is happening. For example, as Kathleen Welch has discussed, broadcast media have changed the public's reception of messages into a blend­ ing of visual and auditory cues and developed what Walter Ong labeled "second­ ary orality" (Welch 24–26). Electronic technology has enabled the construction of interactive texts, what Jay David Bolter calls "hypertext" and James Porter calls "internetworked writing," that has caused the concept of author or even de­ fined sources to disappear, ownership of the text to be questioned, the text itself to become fluid and expansive, and audience to be widely diverse and undefined. Within these contexts, meaning is negotiated, not permanently constructed, by the participants involved, and process is continuous and nonlinear. At the same time, the very complexity of emerging communication processes is what makes such traditional rhetorical concepts of appropriateness, authority, agency, and audience more, not less important, in the "real world".3 As Porter re­ minds us: We are in an ethically sensitive and important time right now be­ cause what we as users (and as teachers of users) do on the networks will help constitute the norms for such discourse as they become sta­ bilized and legally sanctioned (or not) in the future. (8) As rhetorical scholars, we cannot address these issues satisfactorily by returning to the traditional focus on product, nor do I see the solution in focusing critically on discursive effects in action alone. Rather, as critics and teachers of rhetoric, we need to shift our focus to studying how to develop the creative producers of communication.6 Regardless of how one defines rhetoric, most of us who study it acknowledge that being rhetorical means making deliberate choices, among various commu­ nication options, that establish a relationship with others. In Aristotle's view,

Finding Common Critical and Pedagogical Ground

31

that relationship should be an ethical one, displaying good sense, good charac­ ter, and good will, not just because such was the moral responsibility of the rhetor, but also because it was the most effective relationship to establish with one's hearers.7 In other words, effectiveness and ethical responsibility should not be in opposition but should actually enhance one another. Today's sophisticated world of communication requires much more of prac­ ticing rhetors. In academia, we often refer to the goal not as developing rhetori­ cal sensitivity or skill, but rather as developing "critical thinking" skills in our students. But what exactly does that mean? Are we cultivating the ability to think analytically or merely to perceive choices? If we mean cultivating the abil­ ity to make judgments, what grounds are we proposing for making those judg­ ments? Are we establishing a better understanding of how to make good, both ethical and effective, decisions in producing discourse? In his work on rhetorical ethics, Porter claims we are not. He posits: I see most academic discussions of network ethics embracing one of two positions: either (a) a liberal-individualist position ... based on an Enlightenment trust in the sanctity of the individual ... or (b) an ex­ tremely ironic postmodern position that leaves the ethical issues un­ addressed ... I do not believe that either position is adequate. (19) What Porter advocates instead is "a situated and kairotic rhetorical ethics," a position that "grants ethical authority to local practice and the conventions of particular communities," one that "is essentially pluralistic in its constitution and heuristic and rhetorical in its methodology" (19). Of course, by kairotic, Porter means appropriate, the ability to accommodate what Leff labels decorum within a given situation (Leff 61–62). Such choices be­ come one of two types: those of style, making judgments in the aesthetic and the ethical production of messages, and those of presentation, choosing among the modes available for the production of messages. Necessarily, making effective choices involve judging production competencies, including literacy, speech performance skills, technological skills, as well as entertainment value for audi­ ences increasingly conditioned by a culture of secondary orality (Ong 11). I suggest that we need to generate a new, collaborative understanding of the classical "virtues" of style–replacing the old, pedagogical notion of style as ei­ ther imposing "correctness" or aiming for "clarity" with one that will enable us and those we teach to make better judgments among the choices available. Without critical direction, as our students demonstrate repeatedly, it is much easier either to learn the rules and when to follow them, or to drop out of the pro­ cess altogether, than it is to learn how to judge independently what choices are good ones. What I have been advocating implicitly thus far, it would seem, is the need for a critical engagement of the virtue of "propriety" in rhetorical practice. Burkean scholars rightly note that his discussion of language "reinforces the use

32

Professing Rhetoric

of decorum as a way for a critic to analyze the relationship between the speaker, the audience and community" as well as for examining the selection of stylistic devices used to link ideas with communal values and expectations (Smith 78). However, recognition of the importance of propriety in making rhetorical choices by no means implies an uncritical acceptance of social oppression or the dominance of a particular set of values. Respect for both diversity and for unity, for the individual and for the community, can coexist (Porter 164), but it means accepting Burke's position that rhetoric involves both identification and divi­ sion. As Porter expresses it, "As we strive for likeness and similarity (consubstantiality) we also affirm our differences" (163). Thus, cultivating the vir­ tue of propriety in rhetorical practice is not the same as promoting a set of val­ ues; it is the cultivation of valuing a sense of judgment for accommodating propriety. Again, in Aristotle's terms, such virtue demonstrates good will by showing re­ spect for the expectations of others and a willingness to work for a greater, not individual, good (see I.7.1–41). The demonstration of such judgment is important for ethical concerns. As the history of rhetoric clearly reveals, regardless of the particular views that have emerged about rhetoric, all have recognized the power of rhetoric, whether to inform, to persuade, or to entertain. As Robert Hariman has commented: "[In the contemporary era] thinkers often see the art of rhetoric as either a dangerous formalizing of discourse that displaces truth and morality, or as a muddled ac­ count of public life that fails to discriminate among matters of expertise, ethics, and entertainment" (149). Typically, rhetorical scholars have tried to avoid the responsibility associated with such by ignoring the cultivation of it and by con­ demning those who use it. Such a critical posture, while important for the in­ sights it provides about social conditions, seems to suggest that if we restrict ourselves to criticizing rhetoric, we can avoid misusing it. To those with such sentiments, Porter remarks, "Rather than wring our hands in dismay over the arrogance of wielding this power ... we should see the exercise of discursive power as common, frequent, unavoidable" (156). If we choose not to accept re­ sponsibility for cultivating the ethical and effective use of rhetoric, we relinquish that power to the hands of those who can exercise it effectively. In particular, both commerce and politics have demonstrated a readiness to exploit rhetoric if we leave it to them. My view, then, is that we need to develop the rhetorical expertise of our stu­ dents, helping them become effective voices for ethical rhetoric. To do so, we must include creative, expressive skills, not just critical and ethical ones, as well as com­ munication competencies; that is, we need to reconsider the virtues of adornment, of clarity, and of correctness. Let me suggest a few ways we might do so. From the moment Gorgias first demonstrated the potency of combining poetic form with rhetoric, there have been critics of the use of adornment. In part, this criticism has stemmed from the belief that rhetoric with poetic forms created an irrational, and therefore unethical, response from its hearers. But Craig Smith argues that the distinction between rhetoric and poetic is over­

Finding Common Critical and Pedagogical Ground

33

stated. Smith asserts, "Gorgias was right: poetic gives rhetoric much of its power to build new realities, and rhetoric can adapt poetic to better meet and transform expectations in audiences" (83). On the issue of adornment, rhetoric has too often settled for the practical, but plain, while poetic has indulged in what is artistically creative without concern for practical matters such as acces­ sibility. Both views miss the importance of appealing to the aesthetic tastes of the hearers. Eric Havelock attributes this mistake to the fact that we have forgotten the inherent appeal of the spoken word, an appeal which both rhetoric and poetic exploit. He says oral language is appealing because it is realistic, not abstract. So, he says, "poetic language, if it is to be poetic, has to operate with images geared to what is actually happening. It is a language of action and reaction, of sharp poignant emotion, not an exercise in logic" (415). We need to remem­ ber, he advises, that language we use when we speak orally, "without benefit of an abstract rearrangement of our thoughts," is popular, immediate, sensory, dynamic (419). If we are to empower ourselves and those we teach to our full­ est communicative voice, we should not restrict ourselves to the language of abstraction. Certainly, in comparison with the approach employed by adver­ tising and consulting professionals, the kind of discursive efforts we often see in public speaking classes or in freshman composition classes seem tame, con­ strained, even tedious. Ultimately, though, successful (effective and ethically responsible) rhetorical efforts will result from both artistic, or creative, and competent use of particular media, whether that be speech, print, electronic, or multi-media forms. Basic skills in competency have to be taught to make full use of the practical and artis­ tic choices available to express oneself. Teaching competency entails some atten­ tion to correctness, minimally, to enable appropriate adherence to conventions and norms, along with technical proficiency. Such "virtues" of style and presen­ tation not only function to meet the expectations of the laws or customs, thereby giving coherence, to a community (Havelock 413–14), but also to improve clar­ ity and to aid memoria. In his discussion of memory in composition studies, John Frederick Reynolds points out that memory should be viewed as an inventional strategy; often, its function is to serve as "a repository for information guiding intervention, arrangement, and style" (11), as well as in connection with cognitive/neuropsychology (12). In sum, developing a sense of judgment, based on propriety, adornment (or what is pleasing), correctness, and clarity, should en­ able the rhetor to make choices that engage others, encouraging them to partici­ pate, and at the same time avoid dominating or oppressing them. As critics and teachers of rhetoric, we can no longer afford to restrict ourselves to the old communicative paradigms; Ong's culture of secondary orality (com­ bining oral and visual forms) is a reality. As occurred in the transformation from orality to print, we are not going to lose the old paradigms, so we do have to maintain them, but we have to adapt and to synthesize them, too. Reynolds re­ minds us of our responsibilities as we face this new "language revolution":

34

Professing Rhetoric

There have been many turning points in the history of rhetoric. Each has been influenced by changes in communication media and inevita­ bly accompanied by dire warnings. With the advent of writing, Plato foretold the loss of memory. People were equally uneasy with the in­ troduction of print. Both fears linger in our reluctance "to put it in writing." Computers and television raise essentially the same fears ... These fears may be well founded, but our response to the new media, as scholars and teachers, is really what is important. (xii) Our common ground is in recognizing what we as rhetorical scholars have to of­ fer in confronting these fears and meeting the challenge together. Notes 1. Beginning with Herbert Wichelns's distinction (in "The Literary Criticism of Oratory") that, un­ like literary criticism, rhetorical criticism "is concerned with effect" (in Methods of Rhetorical Criti­ cism 54), such emphasis upon action developed into rhetorical critiques of social movements, contemporary rhetorical practice, and ultimately, socially constructed knowledge as rationale for action. For a thorough survey of the development of rhetorical criticism prior to the early 1970s, see Charles J. Stewart, "Historical Survey: Rhetorical Criticism in Twentieth Century America." As a source of various forms of criticism currently practiced by rhetorical critics, see Roderick P. Hart, Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 2nd ed. 2. To gain an understanding of these changing conceptualizations of the role of rhetorical study, be­ tween the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, compare Gregory Clark and Mi­ chael Halloran (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America 247) and Herbert Wichelns (Methods of Rhetorical Criticism 28). 3. Leff's account of rhetoric in the twentieth century is primarily concerned with the shift in critical scholarship in Communication Studies, formerly Speech Communication. For an account of the division between Communication Studies and Rhetoric and Composition, see Steven Mailloux's account in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 4. My educational background in Speech Communication and English, pedagogical experience in the Iowa Rhetoric Program, and nearly twenty years of teaching courses in the history of rhetoric made me eager to address this issue, when Dale Sullivan first proposed it to the Steering Commit­ tee of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. Consequently, I have been somewhat dis­ mayed to read comments in a discussion stream on H-Rhetor that seemed to validate fragmentation, rather than collaboration, among rhetorical scholars. Quite surprising to me were comments by James Aune (H-Rhetor 28 June 2000) suggesting that, in his view, people now studying in Rhetoric and Composition are better trained in the history of rhetoric than people in Communication Studies. If true, this provides evidence of how the field of Communication Studies has shifted away from traditional rhetoric in the past twenty years. 5. See Porter's discussion of these concepts, 7. 6. In advocating this focus, I am not presuming to address the problems of disciplinary boundaries or institutional constraints. Rather, I am calling for the development of a shared commitment among those who regard themselves as rhetorical scholars, to focus less on the matters where scholarly criticism has led us and more on the critical matters the practical world is creating for us. 7. That Aristotle argues for an ethical and effective rhetoric is clear throughout his rhetorical treatise; see especially 1.2.4–8. Works Cited Aristotle. The "Art" of Rhetoric. New York: Putnam, 1926. Trans John Henry Freese. Cambridge: Har­ vard UP, 1967.

Finding Common Critical and Pedagogical Ground

35

Bolter, Jay David. "Hypertext and the Rhetorical Canon." Rhetorical Memory and Delivery. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1993. 97–111. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Clark, Gregory and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Trans­ formations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Hariman, Robert. "Decorum, Power, and the Courtly Style." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 149-72. Hart, Roderick P. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. 2nd ed. Needham Heights: Allyn, 1997. Havelock, Eric A. "Orality, Literacy, and Star Wars." Written Communication 3 (1986): 411–20. Leff, Michael. " The Habitation of Rhetoric." Argument and Critical Practice: Proceedings of the Fifth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation. Ed. Joseph Wenzel. Annandale: SCA, 1987, 1–9. Rpt. in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. Ed. John Louis Lucaites, et al. New York: Guilford, 1999. 52-64. Mailloux, Steven. "Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths Between English and Communi­ cation Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (Spring 2000): 5–29. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Porter, James E. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich: Aldex, 1998. Reynolds, John Frederick. "Memory Issues in Composition Studies." Rhetorical Memory and Delivery. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1993. 1-15. Smith, Craig R. "Roman Decorum as a New Praxis for Existential Communication." WesternJournal of Communication 56 (1992): 68-89. Stewart, Charles J. "Historical Survey: Rhetorical Criticism in Twentieth Century America." Explora­ tions in Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. G. P. Mohrmann, et al. University Park: Penn State UP, 1973. 1-31. Warnick, Barbara. "Leff in Context: What is the Critic's Role?" Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 232-37. Welch, Kathleen. "Reconfiguring Writing and Delivery in Secondary Orality." Rhetorical Memory and Delivery. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1993. 17-30. Wichelns, Herbert A. "The Literary Criticism of Oratory." 1925. In Methods of Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth Century Perspective. Ed. Robert L. Scott and Bernard L. Brock. New York: Harper, 1972. 27-60.

This page intentionally left blank

DEBORAH GUSSMAN Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Republican Rhetoric and Subversity: Speaking for White Women and American Indians in the 1820s

In this chapter, I consider the ways in which reformist rhetorics can be, unwit­ tingly, complicit with hegemonic cultural values by examining a nineteenth-century children's history text, The First Settlers of New England, written in 1828 by Lydia Maria Child, a white activist for American Indian rights and abolition. I de­ scribe two related rhetorical strategies Child uses in her revisionist history to es­ tablish a claim for white women and American Indians as public citizens: (1) the appropriation and subversion of republican discourse, and (2) the creation of a fe­ male jeremiad to condemn American society and call for social change. I argue that efforts, like Child's, to use rhetoric to intervene in a dominant nationalist dis­ course were partially successful in redefining the public sphere to include white women, but that those efforts failed to recognize or to resolve the specific material, cultural, and national concerns of American Indians. Child's use of revolutionary topics and her adaptation of the jeremiad can be understood in the context of what Jacqueline Bacon, in her analysis of African American abolitionist rhetoric, identifies as advisory and adaptory rhetoric.1 Advisory rhetoric is one that resists "traditional conciliatory gestures," "emphasize[s] conflict and dissent between rhetor and audience," evokes shock in order to reveal the audience's hypocrisy, and appeals to "moral absolutism" rather than logic (Woodward, qtd. in Bacon 56). Bacon also sees "appropria­ tion" or the "invoking and recreating [of a] society's dominant texts and topoi" as an advisory strategy—one which "allows marginalized rhetors to turn the language of those in power into a critique of their society" (57). The classic American jeremiad, as a "a mode of public exhortation" (Bercovitch xi), can be understood as a form of advisory rhetoric as well. The American jeremiad is "a rhetoric of indignation, expressing deep dissatisfaction and urgently challeng­ ing the nation to reform" (Howard-Pitney 6). The term jeremiad refers to a lamentation or doleful complaint, and makes reference to the prophet Jere­ miah of the Hebrew bible who warned the people of Israel of their imminent destruction for failing to keep their covenant with God. In formal terms, the American jeremiad usually has three parts: (1) a reference to a biblical prece­ 37

38

Professing Rhetoric

dent, promise, or hallowed national past that "sets out the communal norms"; (2) a description and condemnation of the present, or the "actual state of the community"; and (3) a prophetic vision of the future in which problems are re­ solved as the people fulfill their promise (Bercovitch 16). Child's text is pri­ marily concerned with the first two parts, the past and the present, and is less hopeful about the future than the traditional jeremiad. In contrast to advisory rhetoric, adaptory rhetoric, by appealing to com­ mon ground with the audience, "attempts to adapt the message to avoid a clash with [their] beliefs and values" (Woodward, qtd. in Bacon 56). Bacon notes that nineteenth-century female rhetors were more likely to marshal adaptory rhetoric explicitly, and to incorporate advisory rhetoric in subtle or coded forms (56). She argues for understanding adaptory and advisory rhetorics as two ends of a continuum, rather than as oppositions (71). This makes sense in relation to Child's text where the appropriation of republican rhetoric can be seen as an advisory strategy, while the construction of a female form of the jeremiad is more consistent with the adaptory. In other words, in examining Child's rhetorical strategies, we need to attend to the implicit ways in which her text encodes and comments on her role as a female American, as well as noting the explicit message calling for a change in social attitudes and practices toward American Indians. The rhetorical aims of The First Settlers of New England are articulated directly in its introduction: Child tells us that she abhors the U.S. government's present "crooked and narrow-minded [Indian] policy," specifically the plan for removal of the Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma, and seeks, through an examina­ tion and indictment of historical precedents in the relations between Europeans and Native Americans, a "Christian" solution to the "Indian problem" (iv). Child wants to revise popular notions of the "conduct of the Indians" toward the Puritans, and to "exhibit some of the most striking traits of Indian manners" (iii). Her use of history is reformist. She believes that the natives of America were mistreated by the Puritans, and continue to be mistreated by American policies and actions. Showing the "true" version of history by telling it from a perspective that is sympathetic to American Indians rather than to the colonists, Child hopes to return American politics to its noblest civil and religious origins—located in the Revolutionary revisioning of Puritan government. For Child, the Puritan treatment of the Indians "grossly violated the princi­ ples which form the basis of our government" (iv). This position, seemingly anachronistic, is consistent with that of popular nineteenth-century historians, like George Bancroft, who interpreted the past as an extension of the present by showing the Puritans to be the intellectual forerunners of the Revolution and of republican government. At the same time, Child's text goes against the tide of the prevailing nationalist writers who used American history as an occasion to offer explanations, precedents, and just causes for the "inevitable" demise of the "vanishing Americans." For Child, history provided a means for revising "mis­ conceptions" about the character of both Native Americans and Puritans by

Republican Rhetoric and Subversity

39

contrasting the good intentions, higher morality, and even civic virtue of the for­ mer with the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of the Puritans' (and their descen­ dants') morality and actions. Child wants simultaneously to prove that Native Americans and women do have the qualities required for republican citizenship, and to revise readers' understanding of what those qualities are or should be. In the fashion of an ad­ visory rhetor, Child is critical of the Puritans and the increasingly common­ place view of them as models of piety, religious tolerance, or republican values.2 She dismisses the claims that they were acting in self-defense and ar­ gues not only that their treatment of Americans Indians left little to admire, but that their representations of them as bloodthirsty savages were highly in­ accurate. She describes the colonists as "deluded" zealots, who were "infected" with "puerile conceits and inexplicable dogmas" (33). In contrast, Child intro­ duces the Pequot tribe of southern New England as "a powerful and intelligent people," whose acts of violence were always matters of self-defense and who were consistently charitable in their dealings with the colonizers (7). She turns the tables on the burgeoning nationalist myth by casting American Indians, rather than Puritans, in the roles of patriots and freedom fighters. For in­ stance, she uses heroic language to describe the Narraganset leader Miantonimo's self-defense in a Puritan court: the manly and dignified defence of Miantonimo ... was doubtless expressed in the powerful and energetic language, and manner, for which the natives of this land have been so justly celebrated, and un­ questioningly produced in the minds of his adversaries a conviction of their own unworthiness ... which increased their desire of freeing themselves from one who so fearlessly defended the course of truth and justice. (48–49) Throughout Child's narrative, Miantonimo is always seen as measured, ratio­ nal, generous, and compassionate, while the Puritans are almost always incon­ sistent, superstitious, greedy, and heartless. Child invests his character with the individual qualities essential and particular to the ideological formation of the American republic, such as vision, liberty, tolerance, and self-sacrifice. Miantonimo thus becomes a representative American, more equipped for the responsibilities of citizenship than those who would deny it to him. Child's defense of American Indian character was coupled with an idealiza­ tion of the merits of assimilation, however, which failed to account for American Indian perspectives. Countering the opinion that America could not have been settled without destroying the native people, she suggests that "intermixing" would have benefitted both parties: the "stern and morose" Puritans would be "improved and softened" by the "primitive simplicity, hospitality, and generos­ ity of the Indians," while the American Indians would receive the fruits of "our arts and sciences," and "the pure religion of Jesus" (65).3 Child argues that inter­

40

Professing Rhetoric

marriage was part of God's plan and "might thus testify our obedience to the will of our heavenly Father, who has made of one blood all the nations of men, that they may dwell together" (66).4 She warns that a nation built on "the spoils of natives whom we have destroyed" was destined to receive the "fearful retribu­ tion [of God] which has fallen on the guilty nations who have established them­ selves on the ruins of their fellow men"(66). Here, we can see Child using the jeremiad convention to subvert the Puritan rationale for American Indian de­ struction and to warn the present generation of the danger of seeing dominant historical explanations as satisfactory for current relations. At the same time, it is clear that she is unaware of, or unconcerned about, the possibility of American Indians speaking on their own behalf. Child used American history as a way of exploring the interconnections and in­ teractions between these various "cultures," and to discover, invent, and assert his­ torical precedents that would be consistent with her political beliefs. In many nineteenth-century historical texts, as well as the court decisions that justified In­ dian Removal policy, American Indians were represented as savage, uncivilizable, unassimilable and therefore destined to extinction.5 In opposition to this view, Child argued: "That the races of mankind are different, spiritually as well as physi­ cally, there is, of course, no doubt; but it is as the difference between trees of the same forest, not as between trees and minerals" (Child 1986, 185). Neither posi­ tion acknowledged that American Indians did not necessarily choose to be assimi­ lated, and that they did not see European culture as innately superior. Child's metaphor fails to account for differences in European and American Indian con­ cepts of the "forest," or the land, itself, such as attitudes toward land ownership, and notions of the secular and spiritual meanings of the land (see Nash). Child's strategy is to minimize cultural differences in order to assert the possibility of the inclusion of "Indians" as American national members. Further, while Child's appropriation of republican language and ideals and use of themes related to the jeremiad is occasionally powerful, the force of her appeal is mitigated somewhat by the adoption of an adaptory rhetoric alongside the advisory. Child's rhetorical choices, particularly related to the form in which she presents her critique (i.e., a children's history text), might be better under­ stood by considering her text as a version of what Lauren Berlant calls the "fe­ male complaint." Though Berlant doesn't use the term jeremiad, the form she describes is similar in its efforts to critique and reform American society. Berlant writes, "the 'complaint'... is shot through with anxieties about audience that in part derive from the absence of a theatrical space in which women might see, ex­ perience, live and rebel against their oppression enmasse, freed from the oppres­ sors' forbidding or disapproving gaze" (238). Berlant's description of the complaint reveals the extent to which the Ameri­ can jeremiad was a form which presumed and preserved a conventionally mas­ culine ethe. In other words, the task of the female Jeremiah was complicated by the rhetor's awareness of her social subject position, and the absence of a legiti­ mate female public space. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has noted:

Republican Rhetoric and Subversity

41

insofar as the role of the rhetor entails qualities of self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence, its very assumption is a viola­ tion of the female role. Consequently, feminist rhetoric is substan­ tively unique by definition, because no matter how traditional its argumentation, how justificatory its form, how discursive its method, or how scholarly its style, it attacks ... the most fundamen­ tal values of the cultural context in which it occurs. (398) The terms Campbell uses to define the role of the rhetor—"self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence"—correspond precisely to the roles of the republican citizen—the same roles Child was attempting to claim for both women and American Indians. Child's text reflects the difficulty of such a maneuver. As no acknowledged public space existed for a female rhetoric of indignation, Child, like other women writing, brought public concerns and issues into the home. The form of her text makes this relocation quite clear, as does its layering of titles: The First Settlers of New England; or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related By A Mother To Her Children, And Designed For The Instruction Of Youth. Ex­ cept for the introduction, the entire narrative is presented as a dialogue between a "Mother" and her two daughters, Caroline and Eliza. The daughters are indistin­ guishable from one another. Their function is to ask Mother questions about history, to rehearse received notions about American Indians that Mother can correct, to ex­ press horror and moral indignation at the stories Mother tells about the abuses Puri­ tans inflicted on Native Americans, and to reinforce and reiterate Mother's moral teachings and perspectives. Beyond the simple narrative framing, there is very little detail. There is no setting and little exposition. We learn that stories may commence only if the girls' "tasks are completed" (45). Domestic economy is learned along with his­ tory. At the end of chapters, the girls ask for more stories, which Mother defers to a later date. Child's representation of "Mother" combines the eighteenth-century notion of republican motherhood with the male-identified republican con­ cept of civic obligations, and the liberal concept of democratic participation. As a republican mother, she must instruct her children on their duties as citizens.In this case, however, her children are daughters, not sons. The mother's instruc­ tion of daughters would have been seen as central to their upbringing, in that they might have sons who would be citizens one day. But in writing such a book for children, Child can also be seen as redefining for the mothers (America's daughters), the duties and the rights of citizenship. While republican mother­ hood limits women's political participation to the home, republican citizenship requires political participation in the world. Such participation is what Mother expects her daughters to aim for: From the sketches I have given you of the sufferings of the Pequods, (which all the other tribes in this country were successively made to endure, till by continued persecution they were utterly destroyed;)

42

Professing Rhetoric

you will, I trust, my dear children, be impressed with strong com­ passion, and take a lively interest in the fate of those unhappy ones who have survived the ruin of their race; nor must you imagine that your exertions will be unavailing. Should you be able to excite a gen­ eral interest in their favor in the breast of your young friends, we may confidently expect that the rising generation will strive to me­ liorate their condition, as it is an axiom which admits not of dispute, that, in governments essentially popular, the voice of the people mustprevail. (44, my emphasis)6 The last phrase rings with the republican themes of America's founding docu­ ments and conveys the authority of public address, despite the fact that it is taking place between a mother and her daughters in the home. This passage is also the closest Child comes to offering the hopeful, prophetic vision of the fu­ ture typical of the jeremiad form. Mother's statement appears to correspond to the conventional and sentimental expectation of women's role in the politi­ cal sphere: to feel "compassion" and to exert their feminine influence by "excit[ing] a general interest" among (presumably white male and therefore empowered) others. However, Child's prose also resists some of the more con­ servative interpretations of the sentimental position in its refusal to limit the political action Mother advocates. In the passage just cited, Caroline and Eliza are instructed to "incite a general interest ... in the breasts of [their] young friends." Such friends are not explicitly gendered, nor is Caroline and Eliza's participation limited to such influence. As the paragraph proceeds, Caroline and Eliza and their friends become part of the "the rising generation" and ulti­ mately "the voice of the people." Their feelings and influence can be trans­ formed into public and political action, action that can determine the future of course of the nation. Child's narrative thus encounters and interrogates the construction of repub­ lican citizenship by making the home a site at which female public action begins, but to which it is not limited, and by offering historical examples of women (both white and American Indian) and male American Indians who fulfilled conventional expectations of the qualities required for republican citizenship. Significantly, however, public action is, in much of Child's writing, to be done by women not on their own behalf, but to relieve the sufferings of others. Women's concerns and rights are at times associated and aligned with those of American Indians, but rarely argued for explicitly by Child. In general, Child's strategy for promoting women's rights is to assume them, and to offer, without feminist commentary, examples of women whose actions reveal all women to be worthy.I would argue that this position is possible because of Child's relative privilege as a white middle-class Northern woman; at the same time, such privilege limits the extent to which she can envision or promote change in women's status generally. Likewise, while Child is clearly an advocate for American Indians, her writings also project Romantic and occasionally patronizing representations, and, as I

Republican Rhetoric and Subversity

43

have suggested, a failure to appreciate the desire and power of American Indians to resist and reject assimilation. Overall, Child's critique of American society is limited by internal contra­ dictions and inconsistencies produced, at least in part, by the negotiation of her complex position within the public sphere. Her text did not achieve the specific result she wanted: Congress's debate over Indian sovereignty would create the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and would end in 1838, for the Chero­ kees, on the Trail of Tears. It is unclear as to whether the text's larger effort to "undermine the ideological grounds for Indian removal" was ever noticed by the public at large (Karcher 90). There is no record of the book having been re­ viewed, no public trace of praise or censure. Child's biographer, Caroline Karcher, speculates that Child, who had become the primary breadwinner in her family, chose to keep the book off the market for fear of alienating the read­ ers of her popular children's periodical, the Juvenile Miscellany (97–98). An­ other possibility for the text's obscurity might stem from its contradictory radicalness—Child's positions on the Puritans, American Indians, intermar­ riage, and women's public role may have been suppressed by being ignored.7 In either case, my analysis should suggest some of the obstacles that female rhetors faced and some of the limits of rhetoric as a vehicle for social change in the early nineteenth century. Notes 1. Bacon cites Gary Woodward's study for her definition of the terms advisory and adaptory rhetoric. Child's interest in American Indian issues preceded her involvement in the abolitionist movement by just a few years, and my analysis of her text suggests that the rhetorical strategies she used were similar to those of the female abolitionist rhetors Bacon describes. 2. See Bancroft, for example. 3. This view of intermarriage was uncommon in the North. A few prominent Southerners, Robert Beverly and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had expressed similar opinions, see Bieder, Sheehan. 4. Child's earlier attitudes towards intermarriage can be seen in her first historical novel, Hobomok, which depicts a marriage between a Puritan woman and the legendary Native American inter­ preter. Before 1840, with the advent of the American school of ethnology and the popular accep­ tance of the notion of separate creations (polygeny) the new ethnology fostered, most Americans tended to subscribe to the view that Native Americans and whites shared a common origin (mon­ ogeny). Therefore, Native Americans could be expected to "improve" (that is, become more like whites) with education and "civilization," see Bieder. 5. Pearce analyzes this perception at length; see also Berkhofer. 6. I want to note here Child's assumption that the Pequot tribe was "utterly destroyed." As I discuss elsewhere, it is precisely against this commonplace assumption of "vanishing Americans" that William Apess, a nineteenth-century Pequot orator, minister, and activist, would have to assert the fact of Native American survival and existence (see Gussman 1993). 7. I'm thinking here about Henry Lewis Gates's speculations about the "oblivion" of Harriet Wilson's radical novel Our Nig (xxx–xxxi). Works Cited Bacon, Jacqueline. '"Do You Understand Your Own Language?' Revolutionary Topoi in the Rhetoric of African-American Abolitionists." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28:2 (Spring 1998): 55-75.

44

Professing Rhetoric

Bancroft, George. The History of The United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent. Ed. Rus­ sell B. Nye. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The AmericanJeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978. Berlant, Lauren. "The Female Complaint." Social Text 19/20, Vol.7: 1-2 (Fall 1988): 237–60. Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820—1880. Norman and London: U of Oklahoma P, 1986. Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. "The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron" in Lucaites, John Lewis, Celeste Michelle Condit and Sally Caudill, eds. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. New York: Guilford, 1999. Child, Lydia Maria. The First Settlers of New England; or Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother To Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth. Boston: Munroe, 1828. —. Hobomok & Other Writings on Indians. Ed. Carolyn Karcher. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Introduction." In Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. New York: Vintage, 1983. Gussman, Deborah. Remembering Plymouth Rock: The Making of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Narra­ tives ofColonia New England. Diss. Rutgers U, 1993. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1993. 9412633. Howard-Pitney, David. The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990 Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Dur­ ham: Duke UP, 1994. Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2nd. ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction:Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1973. Woodward, Gary. Persuasive Encounters: Case Studies in Constructive Confrontation. New York: Praeger, 1990.

WENDY B. SHARER East Carolina University

Rhetorical Education for Political Action: The League of Women Voters and the Subversion of Political Parties in the 1920s

With the imminent passage of the Nineteenth Amendment before her, Presi­ dent of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Carrie Chapman Catt urged delegates at the 1919 Jubilee Convention of the organiza­ tion to continue working together even after the victorious culmination of the suffrage campaign. To encourage future organizational work on the part of suf­ fragists, Catt told of a literacy crisis threatening American political life. Caught up in the nationalistic fervor of world war, Catt proclaimed illiteracy, particu­ larly among immigrant groups, a force "more menacing to the future security of our country than any other" (A Nation Calls 8). Illiterates, Catt argued, provided "hothouse growth potential" for foreign espionage. Catt also constructed those not able to read and write in English as threats to the progress of political institu­ tions because, she suggested, they provided fodder for corrupt political party men: "Not only would woman suffrage have been established many years ago, but political corruption ... would have been stamped out in all its worst mani­ festations long ago, had these millions not offered dangerous temptations to un­ scrupulous men"(13). To fight the "menace of illiteracy," the NAWSA, Catt argued, should reconfigure itself as a League of Women Voters that would pro­ fess literacy in English and, concurrently, spread the ideals of American democ­ racy. According to Catt, only by promoting this particular kind of literacy would newly enfranchised women witness an improvement in the political systems to which they were finally gaining access. While the League's educational role, as Catt initially formulated it, certainly derived in part from a xenophobic sentiment, her vision of the League of Women Voters just one year later reflects a much more subversive educational goal. Women quickly discovered that, although the Nineteenth Amendment allowed them to cast their votes in an already existing, highly structured two-party sys­ tem, it most certainly did not enable them to open partisan politics to unlimited female participation. Indeed, the political issues that interested many suffragists before 1920 remained foreign to the mostly male political parties after the ratifi­ 45

46

Professing Rhetoric

cation of the Nineteenth Amendment. A year after her address urging the NAWSA to reorganize itself into a women's organization dedicated to main­ taining political stability by teaching literacy and traditional democratic ideals to immigrant groups, Catt addressed the first convention of that new organiza­ tion, the League of Women Voters. In this later address, Catt did not condemn the threat of illiteracy to democratic ideals, but the threat of political partisan­ ship to those ideals. The established political parties, in Catt's view, were the true barriers to democracy because they prevented women from entering powerful rhetorical arenas and the debates therein. Catt previewed the experience of the new woman voter in the political parties thus: Probably when you enter the party of your choice you will find yourself in a sort of political penumbra where most of the men are. These men will be glad to see you and you will be flattered by their warm welcome ... but if you stay still longer and move around enough ... you will discover a little denser group, which we might call the numbra of the political party. You won't be so welcome there. Those are the people who are planning the platforms and picking out the candidates, and doing the work which you and the men vot­ ers are expected to sanction at the polls. ... And if you stay long enough and are active enough, you will see something else—the real thing in the center, with the door locked tight, and you will have a hard, long fight before you get behind that door, for there is the engine that moves the wheels of your party machinery. (Political Parties 5-6) Ultimately, Catt believed the vote did not give women political power because it did not guarantee them voices within the engines of electoral politics. Political historian Kristi Andersen suggests that Catt's description of the parties' recep­ tion of women is accurate. According to Andersen, party officials responded to suffrage by "tr[ying] to redefine politics so that women's activities and interests were clearly distinguished from men's: as a result, the space occupied by 'real' (male) politics constricted" (166). For women to gain access to the discussion rooms where platforms and candidates are made, they would need to decons­ truct and rebuild political parties, the primary arenas of political debate. Catt and the League hoped to overhaul the partisan electoral arena, thus granting women positions of public influence from which to argue for their in­ terests. What Jacqueline Jones Royster points out about African American women writers holds true for women trying to enter political parties just after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment: "As people of low status or of no sta­ tus or privilege, given the habitual hierarchies of power, in the discourse they are deemed unimportant and made invisible or non-entities." As a result of "such contexts of disregard," rhetors of low status "must not simply operate with rhe­ torical eloquence ... they must also create a space in which their eloquence can

Rhetorical Education for Political Action

47

be heard" (63). For the League of Women Voters, creating such a space meant breaking into and breaking open political party structures. Central to the League's educational endeavors was a commitment to the ex­ pansion of political communication beyond the boundaries imposed by political parties. The League's goals during their first decade focused on increasing popu­ lar access to political information and the means of political persuasion. In­ creasing access meant working outside of the well-entrenched practices of the political parties while also remaining immune to their power. Catt's 1919 speech arguing for the League of Women Voters as a needed response to a liter­ acy crisis illustrates one important way the League was able to avoid partisan at­ tacks. Catt could justify the organization of the League of Women Voters to the political parties and the larger public by appealing to a nationalist sentiment. Espousing the patriotic duty of molding immigrants into loyal Americans through literacy instruction enabled Catt to argue for the continued political work of the women in the NAWSA after they won the vote. The League also established itself as a "nonpartisan" organization in order to avoid party power. At election time, they did not endorse candidates, but in­ stead provided women with information about issues and candidates' positions. While League-circulated information surely resulted in some candidates appeal­ ing more than others to women voters, the policy of refraining from official en­ dorsement allowed the League to call itself nonpartisan and thus avoid party authority. From their position outside these entrenched and tainted channels of political communication, the League could then work to provide newly enfran­ chised women with the information and the tools for empowered participation and political influence. In keeping with these goals, the League employed numerous educational methods, including "fact-finding surveys; study and discussion groups; radio talks; public meetings; citizenship schools; ... pamphlets [... and] pre-election work, consisting of voters' schools, nonpartisan meetings of candidates; and vis­ its to legislative bodies" (Ely and Chappel 95). Here, I focus on two methods through which the League instructed newly enfranchised women about political structures and methods of political persuasion in their effort to gain positions of rhetorical power in the electoral arena: 1) classroom and course-based instruc­ tion and 2) hands-on experiential learning. To understand the pedagogical methods the League employed, it is impor­ tant to understand the context in which they developed and applied these meth­ ods. Leaders of the League were influenced by the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, particularly by John Dewey's theories of the interconnectedness of communication, education, and democracy. Dewey's ideas appealed to the League because, like many new women voters in the 1920s, he recognized that political discussion at the time was ruled by exces­ sively powerful political parties. Such control of political discussion by party ma­ chinery, Dewey argued, perverted democratic communication. Writing in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey lamented that

48

Professing Rhetoric

Instead of individuals who make choices which are carried into ef­ fect by personal volition, there are citizens who have the blessed op­ portunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and which is made up for them by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose operations constitute a kind of political predestination The public is so confused and eclipsed that it cannot even use the or­ gans through which it is supposed to mediate political action and polity. (120-21) Reviving democracy, Dewey contended, required improving channels of politi­ cal communication: "the highest and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breath life into it for democracy ... will have its consummation when free so­ cial inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communica­ tion" (Public and Its Problems 112). Additionally, the League sought to enact a Deweyian commitment to pro­ gressive education by promoting learning by doing. Throughout Democracy and Education, Dewey critiques the educational approach he calls "scholasticism"—or education that is concerned with theoretical arguments and remote facts divorced from the current experience of learners. As Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy explain, Dewey advocates, instead, the teaching of concepts "not as isolated ends in themselves, but as interdependent tools for addressing pressing social problems" (66). Similarly, League historian Valborg Fletty ex­ plains that within the League, "John Dewey's philosophy of learning to do by doing was adopted. Study was related to use and action. ... The end sought was not mere interest in government, but doing something about government" (7). The League's efforts to involve women in political communication first in­ volved teaching them about the existing mechanics of government through League sponsored "citizenship schools." After the 1919 Jubilee Convention, Catt, along with various faculty at the University of Chicago, organized what Catt called "a school of citizenship"—a series of lectures and discussions address­ ing topics such as political primaries, political parties and party machinery, fraud in politics, campaign funding and campaign finance laws, the distribution of power in the federal government, and the judiciary system. Citizenship schools, based on this first school in 1919, became a common feature of the League dur­ ing its first decade, with approximately 1,300 such schools held in localities through the nation by the end of the decade (Fletty 9). Often, these schools de­ veloped in conjunction with colleges and universities whose faculty assisted in the League's educational efforts. Schools from Yale and Brown to the University of Minnesota and the University of Alabama were involved in educating the new electorate through League-sponsored citizenship schools in the 1920s. Women's colleges were particularly important links to the broader public for the League's educational endeavors. At its first meeting, the League Executive Committee, acting on the offered assistance of Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard Col­

Rhetorical Education for Political Action

49

lege and President Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr, suggested that women's col­ leges serve as "research laboratories" that might assist in the study of civic life and the preparation of printed materials to inform voters about the findings of such study ("Where Citizenship" 18-19). Because effecting change within the existing system relied on the construction of persuasive arguments, much of the League's early work also involved teaching women about rhetorical tactics of political influence. Instruction in techniques of interviewing public officials, public speaking, testifying before legislative bodies, as well as organizational tasks including writing petitions, resolutions, and other documents of parliamentary procedure were central to the League's educational program. League members actively sought to integrate these topics into curricula at institutions that catered to women students, such as Normal schools and junior colleges. Boston League leader Grace Johnson, for example, taught courses in the rhetorical procedures of political influence at both the Wheelock School, a Nor­ mal school, and the Garland School for Homemaking, a two-year junior college offering otherwise traditional coursework for women in domestic issues such as cooking, child care, and interior decorating. At both schools, Johnson trained stu­ dents in parliamentary procedure, both to familiarize them with official proce­ dures of governmental activity and to familiarize them with the methods of choice for conducting meetings in women's organizations, such as the General Federa­ tion of Women's Clubs, the NAWSA, and not incidentally, League of Women Voters. These courses, according to course catalogues, covered "writing [commit­ tee] reports" (Wheelock 15); "the management of a meeting; the making, amend­ ing, and disposition of motions; writing formal resolutions, ... and constructing a constitution" (Garland 13–14). Such courses trained women for participation in male-dominated political arenas and in organizations that might further enable them to participate in those arenas. As early as 1915, rhetorical education at the Garland School also included Johnson's "English 7: Extemporaneous Speaking," or, as it was alternatively called, "Spoken English." In an overview of the purposes of the course, Johnson argued that skill in spoken English will enable the students "to be of influence in family, community, school, society, in the world (internationally)" (Course Sylla­ bus). Covering research, vividness, gesture, dress, and voice, among other things, the course was specifically geared to assist those new to the world of po­ litical influence. Johnson stressed that women needed to know how best to ad­ dress potentially hostile audiences that were not yet ready to accept their participation in political affairs, much less the changes they advocated. To this end, she provided students with suggestions for cultivating appropriate atti­ tudes toward hostile audiences. According to her lecture notes, Johnson urged that a speaker "should treat his [sic] audience with courtesy and respect [and] should be sympathetic toward his audience." Johnson also recommended that "a speaker should maintain good humor at all times in order to sustain an appearance of self-control" (Lecture Notes, emphasis in original). As an example of why courtesy and good humor are needed by those addressing a hostile audience on

50

Professing Rhetoric

political matters, Johnson relayed the story of abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher: "Under the most trying circumstances Henry Ward Beecher withstood the deri­ sion, hisses, and insults of a[n] ... audience, without any show of ill temper and eventually he got a hearing and won their respectful attention" (Lecture Notes). Johnson also offered the speeches of Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park, the founder and first president of the League respectively, as examples of successful management of potentially hostile audiences. Johnson's courses also incorporated another central method by which the League educated new voters in the rhetorical arenas of political life: experiential learning. The Garland School course catalogue indicates that students engaged in "Field Work" in conjunction with their studies of public speaking and parlia­ mentary procedure. This field work took them to the State House, the Public Li­ brary, or the Court House, thus allowing them to experience first hand the arenas of communication they hopefully would engage in after graduation, per­ haps even as members of the League of Women Voters. At the national level, League educational endeavors also involved applied learning in the techniques of debate and collaboration. To help women acquire facility with rhetorical practices of political activism, the League involved their national membership in the collaborative authoring of the annual program. This process, which still takes place today, includes three stages. In the first stage, members of the national program departments and standing committees identify legislative objectives the League wishes to accomplish in the coming year. In the second stage, information about these objectives circulates via pam­ phlets, bulletins, and study kits to members of the League in all states. Finally, based on study of and debate about these materials, members decide whether to support, reject, or amend the proposed program. First League President Maud Wood Park extended avenues of experiential education by using them when she established the Women's Joint Congressio­ nal Committee (WJCC) in 1920. The WJCC, a coalition of representatives from twenty-two national women's organizations representing an estimated ten mil­ lion women during the decade, provided a forum where women could organize coalitions in support of legislation and where inexperienced women could learn from other women well-versed in lobbying tactics, such as leaders of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and former NAWSA members. As an extension of the educational machinery put in gear by the League of Women Voters to challenge political party dominance, the WJCC trained its members to intervene in congressional activity. The WJCC Lookout Committee monitored Congressional sessions for measures that might be of interest to women. News of noteworthy legislation was then circulated nationwide via the WJCC's mem­ ber organizations. As a WJCC press release touted in 1921, "This committee acts as a clearing house for information concerning bills pending in Congress. Through it women from one length of the country to the other are kept in touch with the progress of legislation in which they may be interested" (qtd. in Annual Meeting Report 11-12).

Rhetorical Education for Political Action

51

Additionally, the WJCC provided training for women in lobbying and testify­ ing before congressional committees. Should five or more member organizations support a particular piece of legislation, the WJCC formed a subcommittee that actively lobbied for it by circulating publicity and interviewing and testifying be­ fore congressional committees and other legislative officials. To enable local, state, and national lobbying efforts, the Committee initiated educational programs for the women of its member organizations. The WJCC campaign for the Child La­ bor Amendment, for example, included plans for member organizations to assist in "the preparation by a series of conferences or training classes of a group of mem­ bers as speakers and active workers, equipped to speak with authority on the tech­ nicalities involved in the subject" (Meeting Minutes, April 3, 1925). Activities that educated women for direct involvement in the communicative practices of political persuasion, Park emphasized, were the most important contribution of the WJCC: "the great work of the WJCC is not to secure the passage of a few de­ sirable measures but that it should be the means of interesting the new voters of the country in desirable legislation and how such legislation may be obtained" (Meeting Minutes, April 3, 1925). In agreement with Dewey's belief that a reinvigorated democracy requires "the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and per­ suasion" (Public and Its Problems 208), the League of Women Voters and its affili­ ated body, the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, expanded political debate, discussion, and persuasion beyond the channels to which it had largely been confined. That League practices threatened established channels is evident from the resistance they generated. In 1923, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service of the War Department widely circulated the so-called Spider Web Chart, a doc­ ument that purported to reveal intricate connections among subversive com­ munist groups headquartered in Moscow and women's organizations such as the League and the WJCC. Some verses that accompanied the chart reveal the defensive rhetoric deployed against these organizations: Miss Bolshevik has come to town With a Russian cap and a German gown, In women's clubs she's sure to be found For she's come to disarm America She sits in judgement on Capitol Hill And watches appropriation bills And without her O.K. it passes—NIL For she's there to disarm America (qtd. in WJCC memo, April 17, 1924) Borne in a nationalistic literacy crisis, the rhetorical practices by and for which the League of Women Voters educated women for political influence may not be ideal, but these educational methods might prove instructive to

52

Professing Rhetoric

many of us who regularly wonder how the teaching of rhetoric can work to en­ rich civic discourse or to engage students further in political arenas. The acad­ emy was substantially involved in providing instruction in conjunction with the League, both through curricula that included courses focused on genres of political influence and through faculty participation in League-sponsored citi­ zenship schools. It seems worthwhile to consider if we in the academy today should alter our pedagogical practices in order to contribute to the work the League began in the 1920s. Works Cited Andersen, Kristi. After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics Before the New Deal. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Catt, Carrie Chapman. A Nation Calls: An Address to the Jubilee Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, St. Louis, MO March 24, 1919. Washington, DC: National League of Women Voters, 1919. —. Political Parties and Women Voters: Address Delivered to the Congress of the League of Women Voters, Chi­ cago, IL February 14, 1920. Washington, DC: National League of Women Voters, 1920. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1916. —. The Public and Its Problems. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1927. Ely, Mary, and Eve Chappell. Women in Two Worlds. New York: George Grady Press, 1938. Fishman, Stephen, and Lucille McCarthy. John Dewey and the Challenge of Classroom Practice. Urbana: NCTE, 1998. Fletty, Valborg. Public Services of Women's Organizations. New York: George Banta Publishing, 1951. The Garland School Catalogue, 1925–26. Boston: The Garland School for Homemaking, 1925. The Garland School Catalogue, 1931-32. Boston: The Garland School for Homemaking, 1931. Johnson, Grace A. Course Syllabus: English 7. Grace Johnson Papers (Woman's Rights Collection). Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. —. Lecture notes, ms. Grace Johnson Papers. Park, Maud Wood. "Organized Women and Their Legislative Program." Washington, DC: Women's Joint Congressional Committee, 1925, 12pp. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2000. Wheelock College Course Catalogue, 1931–32. Boston: Wheelock College, 1931. "Where Citizenship Has Been Taught." Woman Citizen (November 4, 1922): 18–19. Women's Joint Congressional Committee. Annual Meeting Report, 1921. Women's Joint Congres­ sional Committee Records, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. —. Meeting Minutes, Monday, February 14, 1921. ts. Women's Joint Congressional Committee Re­ cords. —. Meeting Minutes, April 3, 1925. ts. Women's Joint Congressional Committee Records. —. Memo, April 17, 1924. ts. Women's Joint Congressional Committee Records.

THOMAS AUGST University of Minnesota

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

What qualifies one to speak in a democratic culture, and what makes our words worthy of attention? What institutions and forms of discourse invest our words with moral authority? This paper addresses these questions by analyzing Frederick Douglass' rhetorical career. By analyzing three moments early in this career, this paper explores the ways in which Douglass helped to pioneer a new kind of civic discourse, embodied in the credibility of the personal experience dramatized in public. By negotiating competing Christian and classical models of rhetorical ethos, Douglass's work as a reformer suggests more broadly how the conditions of moral witness in a democratic culture are shaped by the institu­ tional and material contexts of mass media. 1841: What Gives a Slave's Words Their Power? In August of 1841, Douglass spoke before a white audience for the first time at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Convention in Nantucket. For activists in the abolition movement, this moment would acquire the status of legend. As The National Antislavery Standard reported: Temperance meetings were held at Nantucket at the same time ab­ olitionists were lecturing: and we indulged the hope that, as they had the testimony of reformed drunkards to sustain their glorious cause, so we might have some repentant slaveholder, or powerful slave to testify 'that which they themselves did know.' The morning of the twelfth instantly fulfilled our hopes. One recently from the house of bondage, spoke with great power. Flinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence, Our best pleaders for the slave held their breath for fear of interrupting him ... It seemed almost miraculous how he had been prepared to tell his story with so much power. (Lampe, 61) The "miracle" of Douglass's eloquence depended, of course, on two racist as­ sumptions. First, that African Americans, whether slave or free, are generally 53

54

Professing Rhetoric

incapable of the art of oratory that was termed "eloquence"—a standard of speech, which, as the newspaper implies, required "preparation." Reviews re­ peatedly expressed surprise that Douglass was "very fluent in the use of lan­ guage" and "spoke as well as men who have spent all their days over books," as The Higham Patriot observed after one of his speeches in 1844. In being so aston­ ished with Douglass's words, Northern audiences betrayed their ignorance about the informal means by which African Americans gained access to literacy and rhetorical training, even under slavery. As David Chesebrough, John Blassingame, and Gregory Lampe have shown in detail, Douglass's absorption of the precepts of The Columbian Orator, and his immersion in a rich tradition of folk preaching and storytelling, had prepared him well to speak in public. The second racist assumption about the "miracle" at Nantucket was that the value of Douglass's words came from their utility for the Abolition movement—not from the personal authority of Douglass, speaking for himself, but to the impersonal authority of his example. In this sense, he was frequently adver­ tised by the Abolitionists as a sort of novelty act: "the colored man speaks with great power and pathos" (Lampe, 64). The miracle here, in other words, was that the movement could acquire, at this moment, the firsthand testimony of "a pow­ erful slave" to serve its pragmatic ends. As if by divine dispensation, "our best pleaders for the slave" had been given precisely the rhetorical weapon they needed for their cause, and which they knew how to exploit, having the paternal foresight "to hold their breath," of allowing the slave to continue speaking. Nineteenth-century Americans found themselves in the midst of a propa­ ganda war for cultural reform pursued along a number of fronts, including not only abolition but most notably temperance and women's rights. Using the mass media of print and oratory to bring previously unrepresented voices into civic discourse, these movements pioneered an ethos of personal witness rooted in the Christian tradition of spiritual autobiography. As the temperance movement's use of reformed drunkards illustrated most powerfully, firsthand testi­ mony— "that which they themselves did know" as the National Standard put it—provided a new model for the rhetorical authority of moral suasion. And yet as the "miracle" of Douglass's public speech also suggested, the new media con­ tinued to be organized according to neoclassical literary values—a standard of rhetorical eloquence cultivated by "men who have spent all their days over books." Anglo-European elites certified public speech, and more generally the male exercise of power in civic life, as an exclusive prerogative of professional au­ thority: the result of college preparation for the ministry, law, medicine. Given these competing standards, how did Douglass realize his power of speech? Following his first appearance on the abolitionist platform at Nantucket, Douglass was recruited as an "agent" to work for Garrison's anti-slavery move­ ment. But he came on the public stage at a time when the nature and scale of civic discourse changed dramatically in nineteenth-century America as a result of the development of new oral and print forms of mass media. By 1833 there were three times as many newspapers published in the states as in France or England, and be­

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

55

tween 1825 and 1850 the number of magazines published grew from one hun­ dred to over six hundred (Porter 351). At the same time, the public lecture acquired unprecedented popularity and legitimacy as a channel of civic discourse, made possible by expanding infrastructure of lyceums and commercial venues as well as the "professionalization" of the lecturer (Bode, Scott). Douglass would em­ brace his role in this environment with tireless energy, giving in the last six months of 1841 over one hundred public lectures against slavery in sixty different towns (Lampe). Within this new institutional and material environment of civic dis­ course on a mass scale, with reform movements making multiple claims on the at­ tention of Northern audiences, Douglass fashioned a rhetorical ethos that moved across a variety of media, through public words that negotiated the competing standards of neoclassical eloquence and moral suasion. 1845: Literary License of Public Speech In 1845, Douglass published his first autobiography, The Narrative of Freder­ ick Douglass, in order to prove, ironically, that he spoke from personal experience. His public speaking had come to seem, for too many people who heard him in the lecture hall, too miraculous. As he later wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855): "People doubted I had ever been a slave. They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave...." (362). He used his autobiography not only to demonstrate a first-hand knowledge about slavery "written by him­ self," as its title declared, but to assume a traditional model of professional au­ thority founded on study of books. He staked his credibility in the lecture hall on a rhetorical performance in print—a paradox illustrated especially well by the moment when Douglass recounts his apostrophe to the moving ships on the shore of the Chesapeake. It is the only moment in the narrative when Douglass quotes himself, thus recording an act of speech. In contrast to the personal tone and realism of the work as a whole, Douglass's words mimic the self-conscious and formal lyricism of the orations and dialogues which Douglass had memo­ rized from Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator, a rhetoric manual intended for young gentlemen that was reprinted dozens of times and was the first book Douglass purchased, while still a slave. In the eighteenth-century aesthetic tra­ dition of Shaftesbury and associationist psychology, Douglass thus proves to his white middle-class readers that he possesses a capacity for moral sentiments by transcribing a rhetorical performance of sincerity, by writing a soliloquy of neo­ classical eloquence. In his preface to Douglass's narrative, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garri­ son singles this apostrophe as the single "most thrilling" passage "of great elo­ quence and power": "Who can read that passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity? Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment" (Douglass 33). For Garrison, it is not the eyewitness tes­ timony of Douglass's narrative, "Written by Himself" as the title indicates from the realistic authority of personal experience, that presents the strongest argu­

56

Professing Rhetoric

ment against the evils of slavery. Rather, it is through the impersonal and styl­ ized conventions of neoclassical rhetoric that Douglass makes his most persuasive claim to moral authority, by demonstrating in his printed text a "sub­ lime" capacity to embody the eloquence of nature and the idealized and divine truths it represents. It was the eloquent presence of Douglass as a speaker within his text that makes, for Garrison, those truths irrefutable: who could read and remain insensible? If, according to the Ciceronian cliche, eloquence was the best speech of the best men, its usage as a term of literary distinction in the nineteenth century continued to rationalize civic authority according to the elitist privilege of higher education. The 1830 edition of Noah Webster's dictionary, for example, defined "eloquence" primarily as "the act or art of speaking well, or with fluency and elegance," using "correct, appropriate and rich expressions" (290); it de­ fined oratory as a "speech or discourse composed according to the rules of ora­ tory, and spoken in public ... pronounced on special occasions" (574). Emphasizing elegance and propriety, Webster's definitions suggest the degree to which nineteenth-century oratory derived its social power from the social privilege of literary education acquired in the American college. Although Gar­ rison did not go to college, he secured his own professional authority as a jour­ nalist and a speaker by cultivating a neoclassical literary taste. Most Anglo-European male leaders learned eloquence from the examples of Cicero, Quintilian, and other Greek and Roman orations they encountered in the col­ lege curriculum where, as Michael Halloran has pointed out, rhetoric "was the classical art ... of public discourse," standing "very near if not precisely at the center of pedagogical concerns" (257). Outside the classroom as well, American culture was profoundly committed to the art of oratory (Cmiel, Graff). Young men formed literary and debate clubs in which they competed with one another for rhetorical distinction; Americans attended public speeches in huge numbers, while the press followed political speech with the sort of detail it now reserves for professional sports. The values of the neoclassical oratorical tradition were dis­ seminated across the spectrum of formal and informal educational settings by such "speakers" and "readers" as Caleb Bingham's The Columbian Orator, which had been reprinted dozens of times by the time Douglass got his hands on an edition. Garrison's praise of Douglass's eloquence in his preface to the Narrative was a form of professional certification for work on the lecture platform. In the same way that slave narratives typically required prefaces of white sponsors testifying to their authenticity, Garrison authorized Douglass to speak by invoking the professional ethos of literary education—the studied elegance of classical elo­ quence preferred by Anglo-American elites. The first page of his preface recalls that miraculous moment in 1841 when Douglass first spoke in public: "I shall never forget his first speech at the convention " Garrison immediately fol­ lowed him to the lecture podium to declare that Patrick Henry "never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty ..." (Douglass, 29–30). In fact, as

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

57

Douglass later noted, "Mr Garrison followed me, taking me as his text," for an oratorical "effort of unequaled power," given with "almost fabulous inspiration" (358). Like so many other abolitionists and reviewers who would praise Douglass's eloquence throughout his career, Garrison marshaled his own con­ siderable eloquence to argue for the specific value of the slave's words as a speech—an accomplished performance of oratory, its "power" indexed not to per­ sonal experience but to literary standards measured against the study of books. As Garrison and so many other leaders of reform assumed, we owe our deference in matters of civic life to those "best men" who speak with the authority of a col­ lege education—those who have mastered rules of rhetoric and who, by speak­ ing with elegance, invest our public life with civic dignity as a "special occasion" and presumably become entitled to our heightened respect as citizens. 1850s: The Power of Trembling in Public At the end of his 1845 Narrative, Douglass described his 1841 debut before the white audience in Nantucket: "I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease" (104). By 1855, however, when Douglass published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, he claimed not to "remember a single connected sentence. It was with utmost difficulty that I could stand erect, or that I could command and articulate two words without hesitation and stammering. I trembled in every limb. I am not sure that my embar­ rassment was not the most effective part of my speech, if speech it could be called" (358). This was the very same speech that Garrison and others praised as a masterful oratorical performance, and that launched Douglass's very long and very public ca­ reer as a professional orator. The different way in which Douglass recalled the same event suggests more than a faulty memory. Douglass and other popular reformers used the popular lecture hall to pio­ neer what has become a predominant form of civic discourse in the American culture: the moral witness of ordinary experience. Like William Garrison, Douglass was committed to moral suasion because he saw it as an alternative, re­ demptive means of power to the corruption and hypocrisy of traditional political interests and actors who customarily dominated civic discourse. Until their splintering along regional lines in the later 1850s, the national parties managed through repeated legal "compromises" to keep slavery from becoming a source of open political conflict. If for this reason the slave-holders did not worry about the political movement for abolition, Douglass noted, "it is the moral move­ ment, the appeal to men's sense of right, which makes them and all our oppo­ nents tremble One great recommendation of this power of moral suasion is, that everybody may exercise it, women as well as men, children as well as adults" (Chesebrough 18). Where politics depends on the inequality of interests and the competitive struggle for advantage, the power of moral suasion depends on its radical universal potential: women, children, even ex-slaves may wield it and cause opponents to tremble. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's highly rhetorical

58

Professing Rhetoric

anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Douglass is here redefining the values that make public speech a medium of civic power. Like Stowe, Douglass was drawing on a Christian tradition of rhetorical ethos which, as Nan Johnson has suggested, can be traced to Platonic idealism. As evangelical Protestantism made the spiritual witness of ordinary people more visible in public life, and as sentimental culture of an emerging middle-class in­ creasingly gave new priority to the capacity for moral agency in women and chil­ dren, the influence of abolition as a movement was distinguished from merely political rhetoric by its egalitarian, even promiscuous use of a rhetoric as a me­ dium for moral divination. The power of moral suasion is founded in the univer­ sal nature in the human body, and especially when wielded by those unused to raising their voices in public, it bypasses the arguments, sophistry, and hypocrisy by which learned men seek to avoid confronting moral truths. Trembling is no longer merely the sign of political marginalization, the discomfort and fear ap­ parent in those unused to raising their voice in civic affairs; it is shared by the cit­ izens operating the political machinery of slavery, who have grown so used to manipulating the civic prerogatives of their privileged literacy as to have no de­ fense against its emotional power—no resistance to hearing the ordinary voices of firsthand witnesses. Like Garrison, Douglas believed that the abolition of slavery would be accom­ plished entirely through moral suasion. It was through the power of its speakers that it would effect political change. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the criteria by which public speech was understood and experienced as a form of power were under revision. In Douglass's early reception in the lecture hall, his physical appearance—the visual sign of his race, and the subservience and igno­ rance which it signified for white audiences in the Antebellum north—became a new kind of proof of his moral power, a new means of literally defining the nature of eloquence. Note for instance the Herald of Freedom's coverage of Douglass's ora­ tory in the months following his debut in the lecture hall. "There was great oratory in his speech—but more of dignity and earnestness than what we call elo­ quence. ... He is one of the most impressive and majestic speakers I have ever heard. I have never seen a man leave the platform, or close a speech with more real dignity and eloquent majesty" (Chesebrough 25). The reviewer qualifies the term, "what we call eloquence," as though to draw attention to a more narrow, conven­ tional, or technical usage to connote learned and elegant speech, only to praise Douglass for his "real dignity and eloquent majesty." In contrast to the formal conventions of classical eloquence, the "real dig­ nity" of Douglass's oratorical presence was measured according to physical cues (gender, class, and race) by which Northern audiences developed a senti­ mental rhetoric of moral life. Douglass's audiences frequently invoked his im­ posing physical presence: As Douglass stood there in many attitude, with erect form, and glis­ tening eye, and deep-toned voice, telling us that he had been se­

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

59

cretly devising means to effect his release from bondage, we could not help of thinking of Spartacus, the Gladiator; ... A man of his shrewdness, and his power both intellectually and physically, must be poor stuff ... to make a slave of ... (Chesebrough 21). The impressive majesty with which Douglass comports himself as a speaker re­ minds us of the power Cicero attributed to oratory to tame savages. Here too is the enduring fantasy of popular rhetoric in America: that an ordinary man might rise to distinction on the strength of his own character rather than the pretensions and artifice of the aristocratic learning. Instead of relying on a false dignity, predicated on privileges of formal education and its literary cultivation of imagination, Douglass possesses the plebeian dignity of a Spartacus, defend­ ing himself without any advantages besides those nature gave him, in body. Without the aid of book learning, Douglass speaks with the direct, untutored, earnest sincerity of his own example of classical manhood, but his racial example in particular. On the crucial feature of his example, Maria Weston Chapman, an officer of the Anti-slavery society, observed that "it is interesting to see with how few words a man of color, like Douglass, can beat down the mountains of preju­ dice, which a white man might work a day in vain to pile up proofs against" (Lampe 103). In the context of abolition, as Chapin astutely recognized, the si­ lent spectacle of an African American man standing in the lecture hall was not only superior in force to the alienating abstractions of racial prejudice, but also more effective as a weapon of civic reform than the classically inspired oratory of Anglo-American reformers. With the palpable evidence of Douglass's body repeatedly invoked to certify the power of his rhetoric, he came to emphasize the rhetorical value of the "real," of trembling in public. Following his break with Garrison in 1847, Douglass came to define the power of eloquence according to the moral authority of ordi­ nary experience, against the classical tradition of eloquence invoked by Garrison and himself in the Narrative of 1845. The evidence of learning, apparent in the elegant use of language by which Webster defined eloquence, were no longer the optimal means of influencing public opinion. For those women and slaves from whom learning in classical rhetoric had traditionally been proscribed, trembling bears the moral authority and dignity of ordinary experience: it is a force of the heart, incommensurable in its influence against prejudice, the proofs piled up by learned men. Douglass's increasingly identified the power of his own public speech with the specific potential of the lecture medium itself, through which large numbers of Americans for the first time came to recognize the "real dig­ nity" of our physical difference in public. By the 1850s, Douglass had developed a new appreciation of the unique civic influence which the public lecture could have as an instrument of moral suasion, distinct from the professional mediation of an elite literary education. As Douglass noted in 1854, abolition could best be accomplished though the pub­ lic lecture because of the opportunity it provided to exploit the medium of the

60

Professing Rhetoric

human body itself: "The live, calm, grace, clear, pointed, a warm, sweet, melodi­ ous and powerful human voice is [the] chosen instrument of humanity, justice and liberty demand the service of the living human voice" (Blassingame xxv). This "instrument" of the human voice could affect audiences more effectively than print because of the sensory immediacy of "the living human voice." But Douglass also saw the lecture hall as a more efficient medium for moral suasion than the time-consuming reading of books by individuals. In his newspaper the North Star, Douglass described the lecturer as a modern invention, called forth by the increasing demands of rest­ less human nature. His office is to communicate knowledge to make men wise, happy and free. He performs the work of instruction on a grand, yet economic scale, dispensing to thousands what before was only received by fifties, and doing in one hour what could only be ac­ complished in weeks. (Blassingame xxv) This "invention" had a unique capacity to efficiently exploit the spectacle of the human body for moral suasion. To feed the particular needs of the medium, Douglass went on to argue, the reform movement needed "men of heart rather than learning," whose eloquence came on the inspired authority of corporeal ex­ perience, rather than the secondhand study of books and literary conventions of classical eloquence. Oratory was perhaps the most popular and venerated literary form of nineteenth-century America. As the case of Douglass's early career on the lecture cir­ cuit suggests, however, it was a contested form, subject to competing claims about the source and nature of truth in civic discourse. The competing claims of moral suasion and classical eloquence made on Douglass's words, by others and by himself, were emblematic of larger struggles over the nature and medium of civic authority in a democratic culture. We might trace our own culture's sensa­ tional commodification of "real" experience, apparent, for example, in television and radio talk shows and the fad of "live" coverage and personal biography, to the emergence of reform rhetoric that emerged in the nineteenth century with the maturation our culture's first truly mass media. Works Cited Blassingame, John. Introduction. The Frederick Douglass Papers. New Haven: Yale U, 1979-1992. Chesebrough, David. Frederick Douglass: Oratory From Slavery. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence . Berkeley: UC, 1990. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Ed. David Blight. New York: Bedford, 1993. —. My bondage and My Freedom. New York: Dover, 1969 [1855]. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature, An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. Johnson, Nan. "Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric." Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Ed. Robert Connors, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U, 1984.98–114.

Frederick Douglass, Between Speech and Print

61

Lampe, Gregory. Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818–1845. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1998. Porter, Carolyn. "Social Discourse and Nonfictional Prose." Columbia History of American Literature. Ed. Emory Elliot. New York: Columbia, 1988. 345-63. Scott, Donald. "The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Amer­ ica." Professions and Professional Ideologies in America. Ed. Gerald Geison. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1987. 12-28. Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary for the English Language. New York: Samuel Converse, 1830.

This page intentionally left blank

DERRYN E. MOTEN Alabama State University

When the 'Past Is Not Even the Past': The Rhetoric of a Southern Historical Marker

I live in Montgomery, Alabama, where, in the words of William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."1 Faulkner's observation is particu­ larly keen given my newfound home's moniker as "The Heart of Dixie." When one thinks of American history during the last one hundred and forty years, Montgomery, Alabama, is akin to ground zero in that the two epochal events that define modern American democracy, namely, the Civil War and the modern Civil Rights Movement, both began there. On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis stood on the west portico steps of the Alabama state capitol and took his oath of office as President of the Confederate States of America. Consequently, the inception of the Confederacy began in Montgomery: its constitution was written there; its Congress first assembled there; and its first White House was located there. Montgomery remained the capital of the Confederacy until May 1861 when it was subsequently moved to Richmond, Virginia. Nearly one hundred years after Davis's inauguration, America's second cata­ clysm occurred when Rosa Parks's December 2, 1955 arrest for violating Montgomery's segregation ordinance launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and ostensibly, the modern civil rights movement. Five years prior, historian E. Marion Prior wrote of the Civil War in a manner that historians would later speak of the Civil Rights Movement, "These four years (1861–1865) were of al­ most equal importance to all Americans, for what took place in the South re­ acted on the whole country with greater effect than that of any other four years in American history."2 Because the defeated South never fully reconstructed, the Civil War precipitated the Civil Rights Movement. For freedwomen and freed­ men, and for their descendants, the promise of Reconstruction remained largely unfulfilled. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this point the eve of the bus boy­ cott. Addressing an overflowing crowd assembled at Montgomery's Holt Street Baptist Church, Dr. King asserted, "The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest If we were trapped in the dungeons of a totalitarian regime—we couldn't do this. But the great glory of American de­ mocracy is the right to protest for right."3 Dr. King understood that the U.S. Constitution was never color-blind, and that only when it became color sensi­ 63

64

Professing Rhetoric

tive, did democracy for all Americans improve. Robert Penn Warren also knew this. In his book commemorating the one hundred year anniversary of the be­ ginning of the Civil War, Penn Warren wrote, "The Founding Fathers were not really 'democratic' ... democracy stemmed from the Civil War."4 Given this backdrop, my paper examines the topic of historical markers dedi­ cated to the memory of the "Blue and Gray" located in Montgomery. Many scholars have delved into the efficacy of war memorials and monuments as "texts," and as "works;" however, very little research by comparison has been done on historical markers. Although markers do not constitute a building or edifice as monuments or memorials do, like the former, historical markers do at­ tempt to "instruct their visitors about what is to be valued in the future as well as in the past." For these reasons, I am interested in historical markers as rhetoric, "as apartisan and meaningful language."5 Historical markers are not innocuous. There is perhaps no greater partisan historical moment in American history than the Civil War, and there are perhaps few places where partisanship in "The Lost Cause" runs deeper than in "The Cradle of the Confederacy." In Montgomery, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South, Civil War memorials, monuments, and historical markers represent "consecrated forms of piety."6 One only has to consider the brouhaha over the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina. Questions about whether the Battle Flag, and by extension, the Confederacy represented racism continue to polarize our nation. Again, Robert Penn Warren offered a perceptive observation when he concluded, "A clear objective fact is that the Civil War abolished slavery, even if it did little or nothing to abolish racism."7 There are currently eighteen historical markers highlighting the Civil War in the city and county of Montgomery. The procedure to obtain a marker is fairly perfunctory: requests are reviewed by a committee of the Alabama Historical Association Historical Marker program which decides whether the site is histor­ ically significant as well as whether the text is accurate. The text can run up to fifteen lines with forth-three spaces per line, and the cost today is between $1,350 and $1,695. There are markers for the first Confederate Soldiers' Home, and the building where the telegraph message to fire on Fort Sumter was sent. These were, of course, the first shots of the Civil War. There are also historical markers for when the U.S. flag was raised over the Alabama capitol, marking its surrender on April 12, 1865. Only one historical marker has ever raised hue and cry, and only one marker has ever been stolen. They both are the same, and the controversy over this marker is what this paper concerns. On or about October 26, 1995, a historical marker denoting the capture of Montgomery by Union Major General James Harrison Wilson was stolen from its location on Dexter Avenue near the state capitol. It seemed that someone was so incensed by the ideal of paying tribute to the man whose soldiers looted and burned the University of Alabama, as well as the city of Selma, that a person or persons literally lifted the one-hundred-pound aluminum cast marker. Despite a $1,000 reward offered by the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce's

The Rhetoric of a Southern Historical Marker

65

Historical Preservation and Promotion Foundation, police had few clues and no suspects. Animus toward the marker and its sponsors seemed to have come prin­ cipally form two sources: individual and organizational Southern patriots who reasoned that the "persons responsible for erecting the marker should be 'tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.'"8 One angry Alabamian indi­ cated then when Cleveland, Ohio, erected a monument to Nathan Bedford For­ rest, then, and only then, would he accept a marker to Wilson inMontgomery.9 The most vociferous outcry came from groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of Confederacy. When the UDC met in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during the first days of this story, members were aghast at the idea of a marker to Wilson. Said UDC member, Pat Godwin, "I'm thrilled. My hat's off to whoever did it, and I hope that it (the marker) is at the bottom of the Alabama River. Erecting an historic marker to Gen. Wilson was a 'scalawag thing to do.'"10 For their own part, the Sons of Confederate Veterans were more matter-of-fact. They complained about the language or text found on the marker. In particular, SCV objected to the reference to Wilson as "An Exceptional American Soldier." I suppose the "exceptional" was too strong a modifier for the likes of the SCV, after all, just before his triumphant occupation of Montgomery, Wilson had defeated the legendary General Nathan Bedford Forrest. At twenty-seven, James H. Wilson was the youngest major general in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, earning the appellation "boy general." With approxi­ mately 14,000 soldiers under his command, Wilson had charge of the largest cav­ alry on either the Union or Confederate side.11 Any reference to him as exceptional was no hyperbole. The Montgomery Chamber of Commerce position regarding the text was unambiguous. As the former Chamber chair responded, "This isn't China, we don't edit and revise our history to please those who want it a certain way...."12 The Chamber official was only partly correct; one only has to think about the Enola Gay controversy between the Smithsonian Institute and the Vet­ erans of Foreign Wars as one recent example of capitulation and altered text. The SCV also objected to the mention of the "heroic volunteer firefighters" who saved Montgomery from burning to the ground when retreating Confeder­ ate troops set fire to downtown warehouses filled with cotton and corn. The esti­ mated value of the cotton alone was put at $40,000,000.13 The SCV wanted the marker to specify that the firemen were Montgomery citizens. While one might understand the SCV concerns, they simple misinterpreted the text and readfire­ men to mean "Union soldiers." Conversely, perhaps many rank and file members of the SCV would have been surprised to learn that while the volunteer firemen were all Montgomery residents, they were not all Montgomery citizens. In fact, many of these firemen were slaves who replaced the white regulars when all able-bodied white males were conscripted into the War with the Conscription Act of 1862.14 The black firemen literally helped to save Montgomery from destruction by fire and not even the original historical marker to Wilson mentioned these slave firemen. Testi­ mony of their valor can be found in one Montgomery newspaper: "The city fire companies deserve the highest commendation. The members of the negro fire

66

Professing Rhetoric

company especially deserve great praise. The brave fellows, reckless of life and limb met the furious flames at every advance."15 Postmodern rhetoricians such as Blair, Jepperson, and Pucci teach us that the goal of textual reading in architecture is to look for fragments. According to them, "The critic's intervention begins with the construction of the text, not with the se­ lection of the work."16 To be sure, knowing that black men made up the conten­ tion of volunteer firefighters that saved Montgomery is an important "fragment" if we are going to wrest as much of this narrative (history) as possible. The stolen historical marker to Major General Wilson was finally recovered but never returned to its original location. It now resides at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery for reasons that are not entirely clear, except, maybe, if the marker were stolen now, it would be a federal crime. The city itself is currently undergoing a historical renaissance. The Montgomery branch of Troy State University is just months away from opening its brand new Rosa Parks Library and Museum. Work is underway to complete the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, and my own univer­ sity, Alabama State, just announced the debut of its National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. In fact, the cities of Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuskegee, and Selma are now working to interface information about their respective civil rights histories. Hence, historical markers denoting Alabama's civil rights movement will soon proliferate. Crafting the text for these markers is a challenge given the concerns about too heavy-handed analysis. The reason that historical markers, monuments, and memorials denoting the Civil War are so fraught with tension today has little to do with whether the War was fought over noble intentions or fought by noble men. This debate has more to do with our nation's struggle to balm over its original sin, African enslavement. Thomas Jefferson once said that he trembled when he considered that God was just, and that His justice would not sleep forever. Yet, this concern did not keep Jefferson from holding his slaves in bondage until the day he died. These squab­ bles over markers, monuments, and memorials attempt to obfuscate the more painful reality; that is, our nation is still split into white and nonwhite, separate and unequal. I began my paper by suggesting that Montgomery is America's Concord for the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement were really struggles for democracy and citizenship under the purview of the Constitution. Take, for example, Michael Hill, historian and President of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama-based League of the South, a Southern nationalist organization that wants to secede from the United States. In a talk show interview that he gave in August 1999, Hill labeled the NAACP as a "hate-mongering organization" be­ cause, as Hill put it, "The NAACP came out with a plan in the mid to late 1980s to go after the monuments, the symbols of my ancestors whom I think were honorable men ... "17 The point here is not to deny that Robert E. Lee was a pa­ triot; the point is that where Hill sees just honor for his ancestors, when I con­ sider his ancestors, I see shame, misery, and dishonor. Section 3, part 3 of the Confederate Constitution stated in part, "The institution of slavery as it now ex­

The Rhetoric of a Southern Historical Marker

67

ists in the Confederate States shall be recognized and protected by Congress." Slavery was not just an ignoble institution; it was also an unmitigated evil. Be­ fore 1861, the South was a plutocracy controlled by a slave planter class. And while it was true that the majority of whites did not own slaves, and the majority that did were yeoman farmers, the South was a slave-based economy. To use a cliche, slavery was the South's bread and butter. The defense of slavery was a very strong reason why the South fought the Civil War. Michael Hill knows this and is loathed to concede it. Although I am not a rhetoric teacher per se, I am a humanities teacher who happens to teach rhetoric as part of my composition classes. One of the chal­ lenges in teaching this class to mostly first-year students is getting them to de­ construct their notions of Truth, and language's ability or inability to reveal the truth. Sharon Crowley defines rhetoric as a "search for persuasion rather than the truth." My students and I often struggle with this issue as we attempt to recon­ cile Southern history and culture. If rhetors, as Crowley advises us, are obligated by their membership in communities to always speak and write as good persons,18 how then do we resolve intracommunity and intercommunity differences over the definition of a good person or an honorableperson? These thoughts are para­ mount as we think about Confederate battle flags and historical markers to Yan­ kee generals in Confederate capitals. Southern patriots are fond of referring to the Civil War as a struggle for sover­ eignty or a struggle to protect sacred traditions. These same loyalists describe the North's actions as unprovoked, and as unchecked aggression. Such views of the South and of Southerners ignore completely the millions of black South­ erners and their circumscribed lives. I am reminded of a defense of the Confeder­ ate battle flag given by June Murray Wells, President General, and Director of the Confederate Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. She noted, "The Battle Flag was the soldier's flag used by the military.... I was there [at the South Carolina state Capitol] in 1962 when the flag was raised over the dome. There was absolutely no negative intent. It was raised as a symbol of Southern pride and unity, and as a memorial to all of those who lost their lives defending our right to live as we choose" (emphasis added).19 Wells's selective mediation of history con­ veniently glosses over the second civil war in full assault against the ramparts of Jim Crow in 1962 by another group of Southerners who wanted to change the way they were being forced to live. "What does it mean for a culture to remember?" is a simple yet thought-provoking question put forth in Marita Sturken's Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. For Sturken, cultures often contest the meanings or the interpretations of their monuments, memorials, and history. This seems particularly true in the case of the Confederacy and the Civil War. After all, is it not true that "a nation's monuments efface as much his­ tory from memory as they inscribe in it?" (63). Until very recently, it was as­ sumed that since Blacks played an insignificant role in the Confederacy's war effort, black Southerners today would have little interest in reifying Confederate

68

Professing Rhetoric

history. That is perhaps partially true; I believe that black Southerners in partic­ ular, and Blacks in general, have little interest in pursuing a Confederate history that serves as an ode to dead white men or a history where Blacks only have agency given to them by Whites. Sturken talks of the National Vietnam War Memorial as a screen onto which personal memory and cultural memory con­ verges, and collides (45). I believe the same can be said about the Civil War. All of this musing leaves us still pondering the question asked by Frederick Douglass in the wake of the Civil War, "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?"20 Notes 1. Quoted from Requiem for a Nun in Tony Horwitz. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfin­ ished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998) 352. 2. E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1950) ix. 3. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon, 1988) 140. 4. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Mediations on the Centennial (New York: Random, 1961) 15, 79. 5. Carole Glair, Marsha S. Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, Jr. "Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Prototype," Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 264, 266, 269. 6. Penn Warren 23. 7. Penn Warren 7. 8. John D. Alcorn, "Union General's Marker Stolen," The Montgomery Advertiser 27 Oct. 1995: B1. 9. Tony Horwitz 359. 10. Alvin Benn, "Historical Marker Theft Finds Support," The Montgomery Advertiser 28 Oct. 1995: F3. 11. James Pickett Jones, Yankee Blitzkrieg: Wilson's Raid through Alabama and Georgia (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987, 1976) 3. 12. "Union General Marker's Stolen," 13. Frank Mastin, Jr. "Marker Honoring Union General Kicked Out of Town," The Montgomery Adver­ tiser 29 Mar. 1996: A1, A3. 14. William Rogers, Jr. Montgomery During the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999) 83. 15. Montgomery Daily Mail 17 Apr. 1865. 16. Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci, Jr. 282. 17. Alan Colm, "Dr. Hill and the Crawfish on Talk Radio," The Alan Colm Show: News Talk 1050 WEVD New York 19 Aug. 1999 http://www.dixienet.org/pressquotes WEVD.htm 18. Sharon Crowley, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (Boston: Allyn, 1994) 110. 19. June Murry Wells, "South Carolina Flag and the Lee Mural in Richmond, Virginia" 29 Jan. 2000 http://www.hqudc.org/PGl.htm 20. David W. Blight, '"What Will Peace Among the Whites Bring?" Reunion and Race in Struggle over the Memory of the Civil War in American Culture," The Massachusetts Review 34 (1993): 396.

JERRY BLITEFIELD

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Kairos and the Rhetorical Place

Kairos is more than a vital rhetorical term: it is quintessentially a term of ethi­ cal agency. Matters of right timing and due measure, or any of their offshoots, imply a doer poised at the rhetorical crossroads of doing. Hence kairos situates the rhetor in time and place at the point of social action. For the attuned rhetor, kairos forces not just decision but also judgment, and as such kairos is at the van­ guard of both ethical and rhetorical action. Understanding kairos in this way tags the action to follow as emanating from the rhetor, placing the responsibility upon the rhetor to determine when to make his or her rhetoric present, when to make the private public. Seen this way, kairos is a logic of rhetorical intervention. Even as I hold to this concept of kairos, I also think it perhaps incomplete. As a fix, I would like to offer a reading of kairos not intended to compete with but rather to augment the already well-established resurrection of that ancient term. According to this complimentary reading, kairos is less about the "right-timing" of rhetoric and more about a domain of time created for rhetoric, a time which makes possible the emergence of a multitude of meanings not at­ tributable to any particular rhetorical agent. Shifting away from a human focus, rhetorical agency here is in large part given over to the confluence of kairos (a temporally bordered domain) and place (a physically bordered domain), a con­ fluence in which rhetorical time and rhetorical action are marked off and con­ tained. I come to this reading of kairos by way of a 1967 essay by Frank Kermode, and my application of place to kairos and rhetoric derives from Aristotle's Physics. I will get to both writings shortly. First though, I would like to gloss three well-established commentaries on kairos for some perspective. James Kinneavy tells us that kairos appears as early as the seventh century BCE, by the Greek poet Hesiod: "Observe due measure, and proportion [kairos] is best in all things" (80). By the fifth century, Kinneavy tells us, Gorgias ex­ pands on Hesiod's maxim, making "kairos the cornerstone of his entire episte­ mology, ethics, aesthetics, and rhetoric" (81). Though "complex," "the two basic elements ... the principle of right timing and the principal of proper measure" as key rhetorical concepts "continue unabated through Cicero" (85), but "the re­ sidual influence of kairos is almost a negligible chapter in the history of rhetoric 69

70

Professing Rhetoric

since antiquity, partly because of the overwhelming influence of Aristotelian rhetoric in this history" (82). John Poulakos writes that "the Sophists were interested in the problem of time in relation to speaking ... The Sophists stressed that speech must show re­ spect to the temporal dimension of the situation it addresses, that is, it must be timely. In other words, speech must take into account and be guided by the tem­ porality of the situation in which it occurs" (27). Coupled with "the sense of ur­ gency" which "compels a rhetor to speak" (28), Poulakos arrives at the Sophistic implication that "ideas have their place in time, and unless they are given exis­ tence, unless they are voiced at the precise moment they are called upon, they miss their chance to satisfy situationally shared voids within a particular audi­ ence ... The choice is not whether to speak but whether to speak now" (28). In "Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief," Dale Sullivan locates kairos outside classical rhetoric and in early Christian theology. In his study of the New Testa­ ment, Sullivan finds kairos used in four different ways: One is simply a neutral, non-rhetorical, word for time, a meaning that is relatively rare ... The other three meanings ofkairos,which are rhetorical in their associations, can be distributed along a con­ tinuum of time lengths, from a single point to a season to a time of fulfillment, but they all suggest that there is an opportune time for something to occur, that there are special times determined by God, shown by God, and filled with God. Put succinctly, kairos in these three meanings signifies "loaded time." (321) Following further elaboration of the three rhetorical meanings of kairos, Sullivan summarizes that "in these cases, as in those mentioned earlier, the word conveys the sense of ripening" (322). Here I depart from commonly held notions of kairos and offer an alternative interpretation, one which I think stretches the idea of rhetorical agency. Bor­ rowing kairos from early Christian theology as well, but secularizing it, literary theorist Frank Kermode takes what Sullivan would have called "ripening" and applies it to fiction. In an essay called "Fictions," Kermode argues that readers entering the realm of fiction enter a temporal dimension wholly separated from "real-time" or clock-time (even as the fiction is submersed in "real-time," i.e., our real daily living). A story's plot subjects the reader to the fiction's own unique rhythm, where minutes can be exploded to last for chapters, and decades can be traversed with the turning of a page. Whatever the fictive rhythm, time stays open, alive, for as long as the reading takes. The reader is only as close to finishing the story as the story is to finishing itself: if I bookmark a 200-page book at page 100 and leave it for a day, a month, a year, when I pick up that book again, its story resumes right where I left off. Immersed in this temporality, the reader is captive of the conclusion. Not knowing how or when the sequence of events will conclude, the reader is pulled

Kairos and the Rhetorical Place

71

along an arc of narrative time in which each unfolding present moment is not just the successor but the summation of all moments past, since the Beginning. It is a time which, like the story's twists and turns, builds and accumulates, and which the reader must store and carry. A load of time, to play on Sullivan. It is time marked by growing suspense in that the outcome remains unknown yet each word, each page, impels one forward, implying that some unifying signifi­ cance awaits come The End. The outcome, the conclusion, can be anticipated, even predicted, but not known until it is finally reached. And it is only when we arrive at The End, Kermode argues, that we can look back on all that has taken place since the Beginning as an organic narrative whole, and thereby organize our understanding of it. This fictive expanse, from a Beginning on to and includ­ ing an Ending, is how Kermode envisionskairos, and the plot which fills this ex­ panse, what he calls the Middest, is the narrative equivalent of Sullivan's theistic "ripening." Likening it to the tick-tock of a clock, where tick awaits tock to close the kairos, to organize the "time," Kermode's fictive reading of kairos adds to its classical forbears not only a narrative structure, but closure. That is, not only does Kermode's kairos suggest an opportune time to do—to Begin—by its very be­ ginning it commits to an End, and to the interrelatedness of all that transpires in between. In this sense we receive kairos not as a strategic point in time but as a set of linked points, who are not only connected to each other but which produce a coordinated Ending, a way of summing up and interpreting the preceding chain of narrative events traceable back to the Beginning. In the real world, Kermode's kairos implies for us a way to organize the mean­ ing of an event, to make, as the title of his essay collection suggests, "sense of an Ending."Tick-tockprompts us to look for causation, a way to explain, a belief that life's events can be understood relationally. In strictly rhetorical terms, this also gives us a way to think of kairos as not just a timely interjection into an opportune moment, but also as a time-filled construction which envelops us. That is, if kairos can be understood as an unfolding arc of time, rather than as a timely punctuation, we are then invited to imagine the kairos of rhetorical discourse in new ways. I sug­ gest that places can serve as sources of new discourse. In his Physics Aristotle asserts that "things that are are somewhere, because what is not is nowhere" (208a27). Though this sounds a little like 2,500-year-old Beat poetry, in fact Aristotle is trying to nail down that which must be before anything else can be, and for him, place is primary. Therefore, prior to the kairos of discourse, we must take into account the place of that dis­ course, for the kairos of discourse (discourse itself), can no less be "somewhere," i.e., in a place, than anything else that "is." Aristotle uses the idea of a vessel, a container, to serve as a metaphor for place. A vessel contains whatever is poured into it, the shape of the vessel shaping its contents, but never becoming one with them. That is, the vessel does not be­ come wine when filled with wine, nor does it become oil when filled with oil. Though they may differ in kind, when in the vessel both oil and wine identically

72

Professing Rhetoric

take on the vessel's shape. Put differently, the shape of the vessel determines the shape of its contents. And once its contents are displaced, the vessel as place re­ mains, ready for new contents. Consistent with this containing and shaping notion of place is that at the same time a vessel limits its contents and holds them intact, keeps them from spilling out, the vessel simultaneously protects its contents from outside infiltra­ tion or contamination. That is, it protects. Place, therefore, as container, serves the dual purpose of closing in as it closes out. But it is axiomatic: before there can be containment, there must be a container. In Aristotle's place terms, then, we can say that before there can be any rheto­ ric, and especially that which we might call public rhetoric, there must be a place for that rhetoric. And by place here, I mean quite literally a physical domain of some kind able to contain, shape, and protect the discourse, able to serve as a vessel for it. For instance, without the Hyatt-Regency Washington (or some ho­ tel of its kind), the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) would not have had a place within which to hold its 2000 conference (at which this paper was presented), would not have had a place which simultaneously contained, shaped, and pro­ tected participants and their discourse. Yet, the place was not without discursive restrictions: even within the conference, even among the RSA membership, only so many rooms apportioned over so many alphanumeric sessions allowed for just so many panels and presenters. What has happened to the unripened projects of those who submitted proposals but who did not find a place within that hotel, over the course of that conference, to present? What has happened to that dis­ course? In other words, the physical limitations of the place (Hyatt-Regency Washington) forced decisions about the discourse it could contain. How then does kairos relate to this notion of place? Quite simply in this way: like Kermode's model oftick-tock,all places too come into being—tick, and as logic suggests, eventually will cease to be—tock. Places too, then, are kairotic, even if they seem outside of kairos's arc. Again, take for instance Hyatt Regency Washington hotel, owned by the Hyatt Corporation, constructed in 1977. Since its opening—its tick—it has set out on a corporate narrative of "hospitality-cum-profits"; someday the hotel will be sold or torn down—reach tock as a Hyatt hotel narrative—and with its closing will end the decades long arc of tick-tock, the Hyatt Regency Washington story as a place of hospitality-cum-profits. (Punning Kermode, in poring over the numbers, corporate ac­ countants and financial officers no doubt will then try to make both sense and cents of its ending.) Yet as the Dissoi Logoi shows us, depending on where one stands, different stories stand out, and so even beneath the corporate kairos overarching this place, this hotel, other kairoi have been and continue to be inscribed, so that the hotel becomes a palimpsest of kairoi large and small. A case in point: most RSA conference attendees likely had no sense of the Hyatt narrative the hotel is living out and, just as likely, would have little cared. All, however, were aware that the conference began on May 25, and ended on May 28. Ticking on

Kairos and the Rhetorical Place

73

Thursday, Tocking on Sunday, this four-day period formed the RSA's 2000 con­ ference kairos, itself having been made present within the overarching kairos of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. Long after the RSA packed up and went home, the Hyatt narrative carried on. In short, kairoi come into existence in places, as places. Place, then, is the pri­ mary medium. Place provides the pages upon which kairoi can get written and across which kairoi can endure. Place provides the material room for kairos to range, and kairos, as a range, provides the temporal room for rhetorical action. Hand in glove, the temporal dimension of kairos within the physical dimension of place creates the rhetorical place. Hence, within a rhetorical place, kairos is not simply a matter of rhetorical perception or willing agency: it cannot be seen apart from the physical dimen­ sions of the place providing for it. In addition, a rhetorical place is not just a mat­ ter of location or address: it must contain some kairotic narrative in media res, from which discourse or rhetorical action can emerge. Understood as such, the rhetorical place represents a place-bound temporal room which might precede our entering, might continue past our exiting, into which we might even stum­ ble unaware: imagine a true Burkean parlor—physically—and you will have imagined one example of a rhetorical place as I have tried to construct it. Here is another. Two years ago, just a few miles down the Hudson River from where I live in Troy, New York, a stretch of grass adjacent to the bike path that runs along the Albany riverfront park became host to the Moving Wall, a half-scale black-brushed aluminum replica of the Wall at the Viet Nam Memo­ rial in Washington, D.C. Designed to get to those who couldn't themselves get to Washington, the Moving Wall has been touring the country continuously during warm weather months since 1984, seeking out places in municipalities large and small where it can be temporarily erected and hosted for about a week at a time ("Moving Wall"). The week-long emplacement of that half-scale Wall along the Albany riverfront created many rhetorical possibilities for visitors which its absence did not. As a created rhetorical place—that is, as a week-long kairos emplaced by a plot of land able to both provide for and contain the 250-foot-long structure—the Moving Wall created rhetorical prospects for those who entered into and were swept along its bell-curve of names. Within the greater, protective context of the week-long rhetorical place and its overarchingkairos, many indi­ vidual kairoi likely emerged. No doubt, for some the tick-took experiencing of the Moving Wall was protracted, both psychologically and temporally: a place of meditation, remembrance, grief. For others, it may have been quite brief, a walk-through, a curiosity, an obligation. Some visitors to the Moving Wall likely made the trip expressly to see it, and having never been to the park before, per­ haps will never return. Others (e.g., me) had only stumbled on it unsuspectingly while riding a bike or while on a casual stroll. Regardless of how they got there or how they experienced it, the temporary exhibition of the Moving Wall, its kairos, created the room for these personalized kairoi by constructing a rhetorical place

74

Professing Rhetoric

in which they could emerge. In this way, we can say that the Moving Wall in that park during that period of time collaborated in rhetorical agency. And then it was gone, without a trace. And had one not known ahead of time that the Moving Wall had been scheduled, and by not knowing, missed it, so too would that one have missed the opportunity, the week-long kairos of that rhetor­ ical place, to find in that park the memorializing rhetoric which that transient replica attempts to (re)construct. The tick-tock of the Moving Wall would have passed without a sound. Because every place is progressing through its kairos, as it simultaneously provides for kairoi within it, no place is ever really fixed, despite appearances. Even though the durability of places measured against the swiftness of human time often puts their kairoi beyond our perception, high-speed time-lapse pho­ tography would show us the tender mutability of even the most seemingly sta­ ble places. This is not meant to suggest, however, that the kairoi of places change only over long periods of time: sometimes, the kairos in a given place can change in the blink of an eye. On the morning of April 19, 1995, a bomb went off outside the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, creating a blast face which reduced much of the building's nine floors to rubble, and taking 168 lives with it. The explosion produced the greatest terrorist act ever on American soil, one whose shrapnel and debris pierced the hearts of Americans regardless of their proximity to the inconspicuous-looking Ryder van parked on Fifth Street. The broad details of the story are well known. Less well known perhaps is the extended wake. After the rescue mission had ceased, the building stood, gaping like a wound, until May 24, 1995, when the remaining structure was imploded. In mid-July of that year, a memorial task force was convened by the then Mayor of Oklahoma City, Ron Norick, to plan a memorial site. After reviewing 624 entries, from all 50 states and 23 countries, the task force selected a design by a Boston firm, and groundbreaking began in October 1998. A year and a half later, the memorial officially opened to the public on the fifth anniversary of the bombing, April 19, 2000. Anyone aware of the events of April 19, 1995, will visit this memorial sol­ emnly. The ground itself has been hallowed with blood, and standing on it will inspire a sense of loss, a bleeding of emotions. Yet, respectfully, I want to look be­ yond the autonomous, historical impact of this memorial's location and speak instead about the memorial's design, because in it I see physically inscribed the tick-tock narrative of place, in place, how tick-tock transpires through place, and the way that time in this memorial so graphically eludes, even rebuffs, simple clock time. The limits of the memorial extend lengthwise the one block of Fifth Street which the Murrah Building occupied, between Robinson and Harvey Avenues. Widthwise, the memorial covers the combined footprints of the Murrah Build­ ing, the parking lot of the Journal Record Building (along with the sites of the demolished Oklahoma Water Resource Board Building and the Athenian

Kairos and the Rhetorical Place

75

Building), and the section of Fifth Street that formerly divided them. Having been permanently closed off to vehicular traffic, this section of Fifth Street has since been transformed into a 318-foot-long reflecting pool ("Architectural Models /four/"). At each end of the block-long reflecting pool, curbside at both Robinson and Harvey, spaced pairs of 42-foot-tall arched gates known as the "Gates of Time" stand opposed, bookending the memorial grounds and estab­ lishing the plot of land as a place, contained and protected. Above each streetside archway façade reads this outward inscription, desig­ nating the memorial as a defined place: We come here to remember those who were killed, those who sur­ vived, and those changed forever. May all who leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope, and serenity. ("Architectural Models /three/") From the designers, we get this note: On the inside of the East gate, [the inscription] 9:01, represents where innocence is left behind. The West gate represents the mo­ ment 9:03, where the healing in the aftermath of the tragedy be­ gins. Together the gates frame the moment of the explosion, 9:02. ("Architectural Models /three/") 9:01, tick; 9:03 tock. Together, the two gates frame this memorial's kairos. Separating the gates, yet also drawing them together, is the symbolic narra­ tive of the bombing: set back a ways on a parcel of grass, 168 empty bronze chairs tiered in 9 rows silently face the arch—to—arch, 9:01 to 9:03 reflecting pool, and any who would look up from it to them ("Architectural Models /five/"). The empty chairs represent "each life lost, articulated as the absence felt by fam­ ily members and friends" (Oklahoma City National Memorial). Across the pool from the chairs blooms the Survivor Tree, badly damaged during the blast, but which "bears witness to the violence of April 19 and now stands as a profound symbol of human resilience" ("Oklahoma"). And then the Rescuers' Orchard, "Like the people who rushed in from near and far to lend a helping hand, this army of fruit-and-flower bearing trees surrounds and protects the Survivor Tree" ("Oklahoma"). Anyone visiting the memorial today, and anyone visiting well into the future, will be aware—even if only vaguely—of the three narratives stacked one atop another in the same place, covering the same footprint. Buried bottommost is Pre 9:01, when, since 1977 the Murrah Building routinely functioned as a place of Federal Administration, playing out the general narrative of the "government serving its people"; above that is 9:02, when the bomb leveled that narrative in that place, shearing it and overwriting it with a script of violent, apoplectic op­ position to the symbols and bodies of the federal government; and finally on top,

76

Professing Rhetoric

9:03, the open-sky narrative of national and personal loss, of grieving, but more, of "healing," a narrative whose story has only just begun to unfold. Though in the same, single place, stretching between those arched gates, all three narra­ tives live, all three kairoi. Two have reached their ending, their tock. One has not. When one steps within those gates one occupies a unique point between them: and when one moves between them, one moves, however incrementally, from one moment to the next, from 9:01 to 9:03, even as one is captured hori­ zontally in the encompassing 9:02—the instant of the blast. As humans, no visi­ tor can remain forever: eventually, the place must be left behind and each visitor's kairos will conclude, even as the kairos of the place endures. Such is kairos. Every entrance commits to an exit, every beginning to an end. Yet, we can also see here the rhetorical depth of place and the way in which a sin­ gle place provides at once the repository of kairoi past and the medium forkairoi present. This one-block parcel of land in Oklahoma City has been a vessel, and innocence, evil, and repair its contents. No doubt, other kairoi have preceded these on that plot of land, and in time these too may fade, get overlain, overwrit­ ten, or superimposed on by other kairoi. Of course, our reflexive response is to say "Never!"—but we know better. The Oklahoma bombing at least has taught us this. Works Cited "Architectural Models." Aristotle. Physics, Books III and IV. Trans. Edward Hussey. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983"Dissoi Logoi." The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1972. 279-93. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford U, 1967. Kinneavy, James L. "Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric." Landmark Essays onRhetorical Invention in Writing. Ed. Richard E. Young and Yameng Liu. Davis: Hermagoras, 1994. 221–40. "Moving Wall." Oklahoma City National Memorial. Oklahoma City National Memorial. Oklahoma City, 2000. Poulakos, John. "Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric." (1983). Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. Ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999.25–34. Sullivan, Dale."Kairosand the Rhetoric of Belief." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 317-32.

ANNALISA ZANOLA MACOLA

Università Cattolica di Milano (Italy)

Rhetoric and the Body: A Lesson from Ancient Elocutionists

There is no less eloquence in the tone of the voice, in the eyes and in the air of the speaker, than in his choice of words. (François La Rochefoucauld, Maximes)

A real, living, growing language has always been a collection of spoken sounds. The sounds that accompany our thoughts, the prosodic features that join them in a complex "melody", and the gestures that accompany any speech are moulds into which we pour our own thought. It is our voice that gives form and direction to our ideas; it is our body that gives life to them. The strong link that joins rhetoric—in all its forms and functions—and ges­ ture is too important a subject to be underestimated. It concerns linguists, who make a scientific study of language. It concerns phoneticians, who analyze the sounds of human speech. It concerns musicians, who are interested in the nature of rhythm. It concerns anthropologists, who must look at all communicative be­ havior as a whole and who will find in the human voice the spoken counterpart of facial expression and physical gesture. It concerns all those in the language arts, for whom the coloring of a phrase or the gesture accompanying it is as im­ portant as the phrase itself. Many years ago scientists tried a "mechanical speech" approach, intended to develop machines that produced speech from a vocabulary of prerecorded words, joined together to form sentences. For very short messages this technique was valuable, but for more complex purposes the quality of speech was so unnat­ ural that it was practically unintelligible. The failure of this approach has many lessons to teach us about successful oral speech. In fact, there can be no sponta­ neous oral communication without a balanced mixture of contents expressed with vocal sounds and physical gestures. Thomas Sheridan taught us that there are two kinds of language:

77

78

Professing Rhetoric

The one is, the language of ideas; by which the thoughts which pass in a man's mind, are manifested to others; and this language is com­ posed chiefly of words properly ranged, and divided into sentences. The other is the language of emotions; by which the effects that those thoughts have upon the mind of the speaker, in exciting the pas­ sions, affections, and all manner of feelings, are not only made known, but communicated to others; and this language is com­ posed of tones, looks and gestures. The office of a public speaker is to instruct, to please, and to move. (132–33; my italics) While studying two of the main aspects of any linguistic performance, namely its semantic content and its phonetic and/or phonological form, we have to deal with a basic principle of successful oral communication, that is, the perfect har­ mony between intonation and gesture, where intonation and gesture are the human ideal devices to convey meaning. Our "ancestors" in this field may be found among the so-called Elocutionists: the group includes all those eigh­ teenth- and nineteenth-century British and then American scholars who con­ centrated on the study of voice management and elocution. Intonation and Gesture Intonation is different from most of the other channels of communication studied by rhetoricians and linguists, because it has more in common with ges­ ture than with semantic contents or grammatical forms. Nevertheless, both ges­ ture and intonation are tremendously important to any linguistic performance. Intonation is the manner of utterance of the tones of the voice in speaking, the modulation of the voice, the rise and fall in pitch of the voice in speech. It indi­ cates the act of performing the movements of pitch. Speaking sounds must have a slide, or inflection: any monotone inflection would be perceived as uninterest­ ing by a listener. Gesture is any movement made with a part of our body, espe­ cially the hands and head, to express emotion or information, either instead of speaking or while speaking. As for intonation, there is no absolute gesture. Ev­ ery intonational contour, as well as every gesture, is unique, because tones of in­ tonation and body movements are relative, not absolute. The objection which follows here is: if neither intonation nor gesture is abso­ lute, may we have a model for "good" intonation and "proper" gesture, as the ancient elocutionists suggested, or not? The history of linguistics seems to dem­ onstrate that a model for both was once considered possible. As far as the study of oral performance is concerned, examples are scattered throughout the centu­ ries: the sixteenth-century treatises on punctuation (Hart 1569; Puttenham 1589; Dobson 1968) made the first steps towards the definition of a written transcription of an oral text; in the seventeenth century the study of English in­ tonation and rhythm was improved with the precise aim of demonstrating the "Excellency" of the English language (Butler 1634); the eighteenth and nine­

Rhetoric and the Body

79

teenth centuries saw the flourishing of delivery, because speaking opportunities were developing rapidly in parliament, at the bar, in the pulpit, in the theatre and in polite conversation, and the demand for expressing ideas in oral English increased. In particular, that was the ideal period for the studies on intonation and gesture to be developed. In 1775 the first impressive study of English in­ tonation by Joshua Steele appeared (Zanola Macola 1996): this work pio­ neered a number of important frontiers in the subject of prosodic features as a whole. It was followed by John Walker's The Melody of Speaking (1787), a markedly pedagogical treatise aimed at giving a guide to those who wanted to read and speak well. Apart from Sheridan (1762), other eighteenth-century el­ ocutionists kept to the traditions established by early English grammarians and elocutionists. In fact, the great majority of eighteenth-century writings confined the treatment of oral language to inaccurate generalizations on the motivational power of words, but concentrated on the relationship between language and gesture. As a consequence, we have a consistent number of vol­ umes that may be very interesting for a psychologist, a communication expert, or a rhetorician (cf. Burgh 1761; Blair 1788; Priestley 1762). In spite of this long list of studies, no fixed rule about the correct and proper use of intonation and gesture can be found. However, what has been clearly stated since the seventeenth century (Hart 1569) is that the listener's eie and eare (sight and hearing) should be harmoniously involved by the speaker'smel­ ody of voice and gesture. The parts of a speech ought to be combined into a suit­ able and attractive arrangement. Without harmony, the entire effectiveness of oral communication may fail. Harmony means agreement, cooperation, ac­ cord, unit, balance, and symmetry.

Principles of "Delivery" We have started from the apparently obvious consideration that effective­ ness in oral communication comes to nothing unless it is combined with varia­ tions in the speaker's voice and body movements. As a consequence, we are obliged now to concentrate on the great value of delivery. The traditional fifth canon of classical rhetoric must be reconsidered as one of the historically important characteristics of powerful and persuasive speech. Highly regarded Roman orators such as Cicero and Quintilian both recog­ nized delivery and its importance in speeches: although neither of them dealt directly with the relationship between the speaker and the audience, they both noted how speaking may be affected by variations in the voice and body move­ ments. As a consequence, they stressed the necessity for proper sounds and gesture in meeting the situational demands of rhetoric. The word used by the great Roman authorities to name this part of rhetoric was pronuntiatio or actio.

80

Professing Rhetoric

Pronuntiatio est ex rerum et verborum dignitate vocis et corporis moderatio. (Cicero, De Inventione, 1.7.9) Cumque esset omnis oratoris vis ac facultas in quinque partes distributa; ut deberet reperire primum, quid diceret; deinde inventa non solum ordine, sed etiam momento quodam atque iudicio dispensare atque componere; tum ea denique vestire atque ornare oratione; post memoria saepire; ad extremum agere cum dignitate ac venustate. (Cicero, De Oratore, 1.31.142; my italics) Est enim actio quasi sermo corporis, quo magis menti congruens esse debet. (Cicero, De Oratore, 3.59.222) Pronuntiatio a plerisque actio dicitur, sed prius nomen a voce, sequens a gestu videtur accipere. (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 11.3.1) In English, pronunciation had been established since the early sixteenth century as the technical term for the oral delivery of discourse. Only when the science of phonetics began to emerge did the term acquire a new techni­ cal meaning.1 In 1617 Robert Robinson wrote The Art of Pronunciation (Dobson 1968: 200–14), a treatise on phonetics, describing in detail "the el­ ements and parts of the voice" together with the main problems of spelling and pronunciation: this book was considered a work on voice and gesture for years, because in Robinson's time the art of pronunciation would technically have referred to the art of delivering a speech. The dangers involved in hav­ ing two different technical meanings for the same word may have worried the elocutionists, who were the first to withdraw the termpronunciation from its setting in rhetoric and to use it in an unambiguous technical sense in lexi­ cography and phonetics. If the difference between delivery and pronunciation is now clear, it is neverthe­ less not easy to understand why the word elocution was chosen by British, and then, by American elocutionists to name the fifth part of rhetoric. This is a prob­ lem widely discussed by Wilbur Samuel Howell in his tribute to The British Elo­ cutionary Movement (1702-1806): After all, was not elocution already recognized in England as the term for the lore of the tropes and figures and for the doctrine of the three kinds of style? If so, how was a new ambiguity to be avoided when the term was made also to mean oral delivery? ... The elocutionists could have avoided this sort of confusion, of course, by calling the fifth and last part of rhetoric by the alternate name of action, as classical authorities would have authorized, or by the new term delivery, as the twentieth century was going to do. (149–50; my italics)

Rhetoric and the Body

81

As a matter of fact, these rhetoricians refused both the term action, because it could be associated in English with the idea of gesture (physical motion) rather than of oral utterance, and the term delivery, probably because it had no roots in that Latin rhetorical tradition of which they were proud. In the eighteenth century the word elocution was finally used in its full present meaning: traditionally connected with rhetoric, this term was a close relative of eloquence. Thomas Sheridan, one of the most influential British elocutionists, em­ ployed this word in its new sense in 1756, translating it directly from the Latin pronuntiatio in the well-known passage taken from Rhetorica ad Herennium: "Elo­ cution is a graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture" (Sheridan 1756: 158).2 British Studies As a modern study, elocution originated in England in the eighteenth cen­ tury. Training in elocution became a need especially for the clergy, often criti­ cized for their colorless reading; on the other hand, the seventeenth-century growing interest in the English language had brought an increased attention to­ wards all its aspects, both written and spoken. The Elocutionary movement was a direct development of the main seventeenth- and eighteenth-century linguis­ tic trends. All the greatest English lexicographers, grammarians, and, in some way, phoneticians of these two centuries have left wonderful pages on voice management and elocution. The movement may best be understood by an examination of the books that were produced in its name. There were hundreds published, but we can distin­ guish three main categories: 1. Investigative treatises. They are volumes which contained the substance of the elocutionary ideas and established the subject (Burgh 1761; Sheridan 1762; Walker 1787; Bell 1867); 2. Manuals designed for use in different professions; namely, manuals for clerical elocution (Wesley 1770); 3. Books for school and home use, from the "reasoned textbooks" to the illustra­ tive anthologies and the books of extracts (Thelwall 1812). The printed page, the voice, language and the body supplied the material upon which the movement brought to bear philosophy, rules, principles and no­ tation. In devising ways to analyze these materials the elocutionists used the pre­ cepts of ancient rhetoric as well as the practices of the stage. They generally referred to their subject as an art during the whole of the eighteenth century, but with the beginning of the new century the subsidiary subjects investigated be­ came nearer to science, in the sense that elocution tended to be concerned with speech correction, with the anatomy of vocal physiology, and with the physics of

82

Professing Rhetoric

sound production. Only nineteenth-century elocutionists, such as Thelwall (1812) and Bell (1867), looked upon elocution as a science. Scientific or artistic, their contributions concentrated on three main fields: bodily action (modifications of facial expressions, manner and attitude, move­ ments of arms and legs); voice management (vocal flexibility, control, and buoy­ ancy through proper use of accent, emphasis, force, rhythm, tone, pause, pitch); pronunciation (identification and production of speech sounds, standard vs dia­ lectal variations, first studies on the anatomy of speech mechanisms). All these writings aimed at improvement in delivery, together with development of a taste for culture and quality. American Studies The work of British rhetoricians was eagerly accepted in America. The de­ mand for elocution in this country being as great as, or even greater than, in England, it is not surprising that British elocutionists found there the market for their publications. The Elocutionary Movement in America takes origin from the British school of Elocution and until the second half of the nineteenth cen­ tury shows little originality. The Americans, in the early stages of the movement's history, republished British authors, copied them, sometimes modified and adapted their teachings to their own situations. They finally created a U.S. movement "which possessed attributes of independence as well as adaptation" (Wallace 105). Desire for education and the wish to be entertained contributed to the elocution­ ists' success. Many people, often trained for professions such as medicine or the theatre, became "teachers of elocution" in response to a growing demand for training in this field; their personal background was often vital to the scientific knowledge of the vocal system, and of the most suitable teaching methods, as a consequence. One of the greatest elocutionists of the time, James Rush (1893), was a doctor; Jonathan Barber (1830) worked as a physician while teaching elo­ cution in Harvard and Yale; Andrew Comstock (1837, 1844) did the same. Rush, in particular, made a very detailed analysis of human vocal expression, based on philosophical and scientific enquiry. His study was divided into fifty-one sections devoted to: the English sounds (description and production), the melody of speech (intonation, tones, rhythm, accent, stress, emphasis, pause), and elocutionary practice (with particular attention to time, force, pitch, cadence and monotony). The book's apparent and immediate usefulness to teachers made Dr. Rush a recognized authority in the discipline of elocution: in­ fluential teachers of preachers, doctors, actors, together with all the specialists in speech therapy, phonetics and voice training were attracted to his masterpiece. A great disciple of Bacon, Rush experimented his theories with his own voice (he was also a musician) and narrated the process of his evolving ideas: his method demonstrated that it was time physiology took the study of the human voice out of the hands of rhetoricians and grammarians. The development of a natural,

Rhetoric and the Body

83

systematic, analytic science had to be supported by new and precise observa­ tions. His way of describing and teaching elocution not only signalled the end of the British elocutionary practice, but also stimulated many American teachers to produce their own textbooks. In the theatre circuit, from Boston to New Orleans and to California, more than fifty companies were scattered throughout the United States in 1850 (Wallace 180): most of the actors gave programmes of readings in schools and universities.3 Also among the clergy we find some elocutionists who made his­ tory: Rev. James Chapman (1821); Rev. William Bryant, episcopal schoolmaster in Philadelphia (Bernstein 5); Rev. Ebenezer Porter, professor of Sacred Rhetoric in Andover Seminary (Wallace 181). As in England the century before, the production of treatises, manuals or textbooks on the subject was enormous. The elocutionists' manuals soon began to have wide circulation. They were in most cases small volumes of easy consul­ tation, very concise and clear in theoretical explanation, and full of precious sug­ gestions and advice for the reader.4 Inside them, there emerged a lesson on the typical gestuality of conversation and public speaking on one hand, and on the main prosodic features of the voice on the other: posture, hands, eyes, and voice were given the same importance as the content of words and sentences in the whole act of communication. Conclusion The linguist Dwight Bolinger used a wonderful metaphor to describe the hu­ man voice: The surface of the ocean responds to the forces that act upon it in movements resembling the ups and downs of the human voice. If our vision could take it all at once, we would discern several types of motion, involving a greater and greater expanse of sea and volume and water: ripples, waves, swells and tides. It would be more accu­ rate to say ripples on waves on swells on tides, because each larger movement carries the smaller ones on its back. (19) Like a sea-storm, the human voice produces waves of sounds, supported by the in­ termingling of intonational contours and by gestures. We think that a "new ap­ proach" should be given to the study of oral communication. Speech communication should be considered a form of rhetoric in that it uses the five tradi­ tional rhetorical canons to get a point across to the audience effectively. Invention, ar­ rangement, style, memory and delivery are fundamental keys to speech. The last one, delivery, particularly influences the effectiveness of any oral performance. Although elocution was sometimes declared a subject distinct from the study of rhetoric, classical rhetoric always considered delivery as an important part of speech. The orator, lawyer, politician, actor, minister of the church have all been

84

Professing Rhetoric

always concerned with the manner of speaking. In the American Elocutionists' writing, a first attempt was made to develop a science of speech: their manuals are an endless mine of information about reading and speaking skills, speech sounds (isolated or in context), prosodic features, speech defects and speech cor­ rection. The teachers from this movement were all eclectic in their theories and methods, taking what they considered best from other colleagues and adding ideas of their own. Their common aim was the sincere desire to improve the speaking and reading of the American people; their common interest was to study vocal mechanism and body movements, as the main cues to effectiveness in oral communication in general, or to public speaking in particular. Unfortu­ nately, their followers sometimes brought discredit upon their scholars, by mis­ interpretation and lack of serious study and appreciation. We think it is time for the value of the American Elocutionary movement to be brought to light again. Thanks to its efforts, elocution became an important part of the educational plan of any American student: the subject matter and purposes of public speaking courses nowadays present a heritage in the U.S. uni­ versities as classical as that of literature, while yet suiting the pragmatic temper of the modern United States. Notes 1. For various instances where pronuntiatio has been rendered into English as "pronunciation," see Howell 1961: 81–82, 89,104,112, 255–56, 325. 2. The Latin version was: "Pronuntiatio est vocis, vultus, gestus moderatio cum venustate" (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.2.3). 3. James Murdoch, for example, extended the Rush system by his lectures and public reading enter­ tainments (Bernstein 1974: 12, n. 15). 4. From an examination of college catalogues (1821-1859), Guthrie (1954) found that the most used textbooks were those written by three well-known teachers of elocution: Rev. E. Porter (Wallace 1954: 181), followed by J. Barber (1830) and W. Russell (1845). Works Cited Barber, Jonathan. A Grammar of Elocution, Containing the Principles of the Arts of Reading and Speaking. New Haven: Maltby, 1830. Bell, Alexander Melville. Visible Speech. London: Simpkin, 1867. Bernstein, Melville. The Collected Works of James Rush. 4 vols. Weston: M&S, 1974. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Pres­ ent. Boston: Bedford, 1990. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Basil: Tournesein, 1788. Bolinger, Dwight. "Around the Edge of Language: Intonation." Intonation: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 19-29. Burgh, John. The Art of Speaking. 1761. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1953. Butler, Charles. Charles Butler's English Grammar. 1634. Halle: Niemeyer, 1910. Chapman, James. The Original Rhythmical Grammar of the English Language. 1821. Hildesheim: Olms, 1976. Cicero. De Inventione. Trans. H. M. Hubbel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. Cicero. De Oratore. Trans. E. W. Sutton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976. Comstock, Andrew. Practical Elocution or a System of Vocal Gymnastics. Philadelphia: Kay, 1837.

Rhetoric and the Body

85

Comstock, Andrew. A System of Elocution with Special Reference to Gesture. Philadelphia: Butler, 1844. Dobson, Eric John. English Pronunciation 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. Hart, John. An Orthographie, Conteyning the Due Order and Reason, How to Write or Paint thimage of Mannes Voice, Most Like to the Life of Nature. 1569. Menston: Scolar, 1969. Howell, Wilbur Samuel. "The British Elocutionary Movement (1702–1806)." Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. 145-256. Priestley, Joseph. A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar. 1762. London: Routledge-Thoemmes, 1996. Puttenham, George. The Arte of Englishe Poesie. 1589. Westminster: E. Arber, 1895. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953-59. Rush, James. The Philosophy of the Human Voice. 7th ed. Philadelphia: Grigg, 1893. Russell, William. Orthophony; or, the Cultivation of the Voice. Boston: Fields Osgood, 1845. Sheridan, Thomas. British Education. 1756. Menston: Scolar, 1971. Sheridan, Thomas. A Course of Lectures on Elocution: Together with Two Dissertations on Language; and Some Other Tracts Relative to Those Subjects. 1762. New York: Olms, 1970. Thelwall, John. Selections for the Illustrations on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language. Lon­ don: McCreery-Cornhill, 1812. Walker, John. The Melody of Speaking, Delineated; Or Elocution Taught like Music. 1787. Menston: Scolar, 1970. Wallace, Karl, ed. History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954. Wesley, John. Directions Concerning Pronunciation and Gesture. Bristol: Pine, 1770. Zanola Macola, Annalisa. "La melodia della parola secondo Joshua Steele." L'Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria 1 (1996): 173-203. zanola Macola, Annalisa. English /American Intonation and its Historical Foundations. Milan: ISU, 2000.

This page intentionally left blank

R. MICHAEL JACKSON University of New Hampshire

Live from the Operating Room: A Generic Visual Rhetoric

It has happened that people, after having seen frightening sights have also lost presence of mind.... In this way the sight engraves upon the mind images of things which have been seen. And many frightening impressions linger, and what lingers is exactly analo­ gous to spoken. —Gorgias (41) Introduction The rhetorical visual images Gorgias had in mind here included a warrior who could cause his enemy to flee merely by buckling on his "warlike accouter­ ments of bronze and steel." Such an image could make the future possibility of defeat seem as though it were already present. I must warn you that in this paper I show some graphic photographs from the operating room. These photographs by Max Aguilera-Hellweg have the potential to be even more frightening than Gorgias's example of the warrior. The epigraph from Gorgias's "Encomium of Helen" demonstrates that rhet­ oricians have long known that rhetoric isn't limited to the verbal realm. In this paper, I use genre as a tool by which to read culture and photographs together. While genre has long been used as a critical tool, rhetoricians have highlighted the cultural significance of genre over aesthetic, formal features. To the rhetori­ cian, genre becomes a way of identifying typically recurring situations within human realms of activity and rationality. As such an entity, genre becomes a bridge in a hierarchy of rhetorical action—between culture and artifact. The genre includes information about the social exigency which precedes the rhetor­ ical action and the action itself. As Carolyn Miller has said, when we learn a genre, we learn: what ends we may have: we learn that we may eulogize, apologize, recommend one person to another, instruct customers on behalf of a manufacturer, take on an official role, account for progress in achieving goals. We learn to understand better the situations in 87

88

Professing Rhetoric

which we find ourselves and the potentials for failure and success in acting together. (165) As an abbreviated name for a typical rhetorical situation, the genre plays a dual role as social frame of a situation and rhetorical action taken within that situation. In contrast to a semiotic visual calculus, a rhetorical concept of genre seems to be a more limber, provisional critical tool. For when cultural contexts change, rhetorical critics (as well as those who use genres) must adapt as genres some­ times "evolve, develop, and decay" (Miller). As Catherine Schryer has described them, genres represent "stabilized-for-now" or "stabilized-enough" frames for and modes of socio-rhetorical action (111). Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell have noted the phenomenon of "productive but transitory" (147) rhetorical hybrids. Such hybrids occur when the dynamics of several differ­ ent genres are operating on and within a single rhetorical artifact. In the rest of this paper, I analyze Max Aguilera-Hellweg's The Sacred Heart as such a rhetorical hybrid.1 This book began as an assignment by a business maga­ zine to get portraits and documentary photographs of a female neurosurgeon. At the time, Aguilera-Hellweg was a veteran photojournalist, and this project was sandwiched in between such assignments as an eighteen-year-old mass murderer, the Vice President, girl gangs in east Los Angeles, Mexican migrant workers, and so on. The result of Aguilera-Hellweg's project in the operating room is a collection of stunning photographs with six short essays penned by the photographer. Aguilera-Hellweg also wrote an appendix which he calls "Post­ mortem: Notes on the Photographs and the Procedures Involved." A brief intro­ duction was written by well-known surgeon and writer Richard Selzer, MD; the brief afterword by well-known photography critic A. D. Coleman. Aguilera-Hellweg followed through with this project, he says, "for those who could not bear to look at even one [photograph]" (78). His professed rhetorical ex­ igency is to provide even these nonreaders "a visual text by which one might be­ come less afraid of the body, medicine, and ultimately, less afraid of death" (78). For those who do read it, however, it must be read in light of several different gen­ res: science journalism, medical documentation, pornography and horror, and documentary photography. In fact, these genres provide necessary exigencies by which one might justify taking up such a book from the coffee table. Science Journalism The Sacred Heart comes to us first as science journalism. For without the pur­ poses of this rhetorical genre, our possession of such a collection of photographs would appear to be the symptom of a gratuitous blood lust. As a rhetorical genre, science journalism aims at instruction and epideictic by translating the content and value of technical knowledge into versions the laity can understand. The science journalist accomplishes these goals through many topoi, including entertainment and progress (Anderson 361). Some science journalism, as a re­

89

Live from the Operating Room

cent NPR segment on science publication demonstrates (All Things Considered), overlaps with the rhetoric of science project of experiencing the socio-rhetorical aspect of creating and applying knowledge. For example, in one of his "Postmor­ tem" descriptions of the procedures photographed, Aguilera-Hellweg notes the surgeons' need to negotiate with each other as they try to read the anatomical variations from one person to another (117). As science journalism, The Sacred Heart seeks to translate for a lay audience the secrets of the medical fraternity through the topoi of progress and entertain­ ment. As a witness to the progress of medicine, the book features several photo­ graphs of organs such as this eyeball harvested for transplanting (fig. 1). These photographs cause the lay audience to acknowledge and celebrate in their full radiance and luminosity the noble deeds of surgeons and donors alike (Rosenfield 146). But, conversely, these photographs also invite familiar, enter­ taining stories, and the accompanying text sometimes furnishes them. The title photograph of a harvested heart (fig. 2), for example, collaborates with Aguilera-Hellweg's account of the night he got these photographs. The re­ sult of this collaboration between text and image is a love story not unlike the re­ cent movie Return to Me, in which a widower coincidentally falls in love with the recipient of his wife's heart. However, Aguilera-Hellweg, after a night of wit­ nessing her nobility and the all-night application of medical progress she has spawned, falls in love with the donor rather than the recipient. Medical Photography In addition to its journalistic rhetorical action, The Sacred Heart establishes itself as medical photography both textually and visually. In contrast to the mystical title,

Fig. 1 (12)

Fig. 2 (45)

9.0

Professing Rhetoric

the subtitle is quite technical: "An Atlas of the Body Seen Through Invasive Sur­ gery." This title lends itself to the rhetorical goals behind the more encyclopedic photographic atlases which are required for nearly every anatomy class. Dr. Rich­ ard Selzer's "hesitation in introducing these photographs to an innocent laity" (13) implies that these photographs trespass across the line between journalistic translation and a more graphic presentation of what the surgeon actually knows and does. The Sacred Heart takes medical pedagogy seriously: several times throughout the book, readers are assured that the photographer has, at the age of thirty-nine, gone off to medical school. So no matter how many or few anatomy classes require future surgeons to study The Sacred Heart, these photographs have still initiated one real medical student and future surgeon. According to Pierre Bastionelli, the chair of the medical photography depart­ ment at Dartmouth Medical School, such photographs from the operating room have several advantages over the photographs of cadavers in the encyclopedic photographic atlases. Among these advantages are the following: they feature the colors, textures, fluids, and ambiguities of living tissues; they illustrate the strength, stamina, and precision required of the surgeon; they remind students and surgeons alike of the patient's humanity; and they can help in the designing of equipment for the operating room. The Sacred Heart also offers several sequences of photographs which lend them­ selves to the rhetorical goals of the instructional surgical atlases, which usually rely on illustration rather than photography to demonstrate surgical procedures. This liver transplant sequence, shown in a series of four images in the original (fig. 3), represents only one removal of the liver. As medical photography, the ultimate goal here is not an allusion to a Promethean torture; rather it demonstrates the feasibility and technique of a manageable procedure. As all anatomical and surgi­ cal atlases must, The Sacred Heart has to deal with "the question of labeling" (Rob­ erts and Tomlinson 610): labeling is handled (for better and worse) by means of the "Postmortem" appendix. Pornography and Horror Pornography and horror are two of the genres lowest in esteem in our culture. Carol Clover has characterized these as body genres which create a spectacle of the body caught in intense ecstasy and terror. What places these genres so low in the genre hierarchy is the fact that audiences are expected to mimic with their bodies the ecstasy and terror experienced by the characters in the stories and pic­ tures. In other words, these genres are often thought to fail to provide a sophisti­ cated aesthetic distance for their audiences. However, many theorists have tried to salvage these low genres. Thinking of The Sacred Heart in terms of these two genres does two things: lowers its status, and raises the status of pornography and horror toward the level of medicine. Linda Williams characterizes pornography as a scientia sexualis which formu­ lates "sexual pleasure as a problem, with solutions involving the need for further

Live from the Operating Room

91

Fig. 3 (63-67)

sex and further speculation about that sex" (276). Its ultimate goal is to speak an elusive "essential, self-evident sexual 'truth'" (14). Williams compares the highly conventionalized formulations of hard-core pornography to the musical—each has its highly choreographed numbers which can be classified by their function within the narrative (270). In its early versions pornography featured the "meat shot." Later the genre shifted to an emphasis on the "money shot," which demonstrates sexual pleasure. According to Williams, female pleasure re­ mains a visual frontier for pornographers in a serious endeavor to "speak sex" in a way that resists a monolithic, patriarchal sexual discourse (57). As pornography, Aguilera-Hellweg's photograph of a penile implant procedure (fig. 4) rehearses (through three images of penetration) the pornographer's primary problem of sexual pleasure: how to make it visible. It may not be what the connois­ seurs of'Playboy and Hustler want to see, but as Laura Kipness has said, pornography can be as polysemic as sex itself (156). It may mean to critique and resist the familiar numbers in Playboy and Hustler. To quote Linda Williams again, "Visual hard-core pornographic speculation about sexual pleasure demonstrates more convincingly than any abstract theoretical statement... that resistance is built into the very struc­ ture of the power and knowledge that speak" (275). In his essay "Why We Crave Horror Movies," Stephen King characterizes the genre in terms of inoculation. According to King, the horror film offers a way of

92

Professing Rhetoric

Fig. 4 (82)

naming and staving off various threats: economic ruin, political violence, tech­ nological trespass, insanity, and, of course, death. James Twitchell and others have added to this list various sexual anxieties, such as puberty, incest, and motherhood. In the darkness of such threats, the horror movie "has a dirty job to do." As King says, taking in a good horror film is like "lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath" (246). As I said earlier, inoculation is also Aguilera-Hellweg's goal, but he is more graphic than King about what he would feed the alligators: human hip (fig. 5). The effect of horror is similar to that of the sublime. According to Hugh Blair, It is not easy to describe, in words, the precise impression which great and sublime objects make upon us, when we behold them; but every one has a conception of it. It produces a sort of internal eleva­ tion and expansion; it raises the mind much above its ordinary state, and fills it with a degree of wonder and astonishment, which it can­ not well express. The emotion is certainly delightful; but it is alto­ gether of the serious kind; a degree of awfulness and solemnity, even approaching to severity, commonly attends it when at its height; very distinguishable from the more gay and brisk emotion raised by beautiful objects. (32) Blair also says sublime objects require sublimity in representation for their effect:

Live from the Operating Room

93

The object must not only, in itself, be sublime, but it must be set be­ fore us in such a light as is most proper to give us a clear and full im­ pression of it; it must be described with strength, with conciseness, and simplicity. (39) Figure 5 might seem to violate Blair's criteria of sublimity in writing. However, in the "Postmortem," Aguilera-Hellweg concisely, simply explains that "[w]hat looks like a knife and fork are instruments for holding back the margins of the incision" (121). Many of Blair's exemplary sources of the sublime are presented by the photographs in The Sacred Heart: The obscure is illuminated with the help of "retracting tools" or surgeons' hands. Water flows, pools up, and falls to irrigate a wound (fig. 6). There is disorder on and around a cirrhotic liver crowded by a tumor (the upper right image in fig. 3). As an example of the hor­ ror genre, The Sacred Heart achieves its inoculating effects through a sublime representation of sublime objects. Documentary Photography As documentary photography, The Sacred Heart reenacts the ambiguous pro­ miscuity of documentary photography itself. Martha Rosier has explained how documentary photography has become a genre which aims primarily at know­ ing and promoting itself as a high art. W. J. T. Mitchell's reading of Walker Evans's "Tenant Farmer's Wife" demonstrates how the genre transforms a simple portrait of a woman into "the Mona Lisa of the Depression" (Mitchell 294). When we regard The Sacred Heart as documentary photography, we can ex­ pect similar transformations. In fact, one of Aguilera-Hellweg's short essays

Fig. 5 (94)

Fig. 6 (59)

94

Professing Rhetoric

provides the following anecdote about a visit with an editor which encourages such transformation: "You showed me these pictures before," she told me ... reminding me that two years earlier I had shown her some of my first surgical photographs. At the same time I had shown her a little book I had compiled, a handmade volume filled with portraits of Mexicans I had taken on the border. "That night, I had a nightmare," she said. "I was looking at your precious little paper book of the Mexicans; but the images weren't the photographs of Mexicans, it was a surgi­ cal procedure." (48) In this anecdote, to both photographer and editor the surgical photographs come closer than the "precious little paper book of the Mexicans" to the ulti­ mate goal of a reified documentary photography. As documentary photography, Aguilera-Hellweg's portrait of a woman un­ dergoing reconstructive plastic surgery (fig. 7) could be a substitute for the "Tenant Farmer's Wife" or any of "the portraits of Mexicans ... taken on the bor­ der." The absence of surgeon's hands and the symmetry of the idle surgical equipment seems to remove her from the critical circumstances of the operating room. The functional cloth and thread along with the sculpted face become the exigency for a fascinating study in framing, depth, lighting, focus, and texture. And since the patient seems etherized upon the table for poetic rather than med­ ical reasons, the photographer, for this eye procedure, might be more trusted than the surgeon.

Fig. 7(115)

Live from the Operating Room

95

Conclusion Like Aguilera-Hellweg's entire book, the single photograph of a cochlear im­ plant (fig. 8) participates in pornographic, horror, journalistic, technical, and photographic aims. As pornography, this photograph can be read as a contribu­ tion to the scientia sexualis: belly, vagina, umbilical chord—pregnancy a la Demi Moore (Dickson). As horror, the pregnancy (following one of Twitchell's read­ ings of Frankenstein) may result in a monster. As journalism, it expresses rever­ ence for the miracle of medicine. That is, as natural birth brings forth life, the surgeon's heroic and sacred endeavor continues life. As technical documenta­ tion, the remainder tissue reveals one of the fundamental principles behind sur­ gery: the body can be altered and not all parts are necessary. As documentary photography, this stray tissue reminds us of the digital death of photography. The surgeon is a metaphor for the new photographer, who can use photoshop to clean up the mess or reinsert the removed object. There are many, perhaps, who would seem better prepared to speak about documentary photography from the operating room: the art critic, the art histo­ rian, the surgeon, the photographer, the (medical or photo) lab technician. While the rhetorician studying these photographs may seem like a mere pho­ tographer in the operating room, our discipline's recent interest in genre as a dy­ namic cultural index can help us better understand such hybrid artifacts as The Sacred Heart.

Fig. 8(15)

96

Professing Rhetoric

Note 1. All images reproduced in this paper are taken from The Sacred Heart with page numbers given in parentheses. Reprinted with permission. Works Cited Aguilera-Hellweg, Max. The Sacred Heart. Boston: Bulfinch, 1997. All Things Considered. Host Linda Wertheimer. Natl. Public Radio. WEVN, Concord, NH. 4 Feb. 1999. Anderson, Ray Lynn. "Rhetoric and Science Journalism." Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 358-68. Bastionelli, Pierre. Personal Interview. 4 Apr. 2000. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Ed. Abraham Mills. Philadelphia: Kay, 1846. Clover, Carol. Men Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Dickson, Barbara. "Reading Maternity Materially: The Case of Demi Moore." Rhetorical Bodies. Ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 297-313. Gorgias. "The Encomium of Helen." The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford, 1990. 40–42. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. "Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Ele­ ments." Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 146-57. King, Stephen. "Why We Crave Horror Movies." Playboy Jan. 1981: 150-54. Kipnis, Laura. "Pornography." Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 153-57. Miller, Carolyn. "Genre As Social Action." Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Roberts, K. B. and J. D. W. Tomlinson. The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustra­ tion. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Rosenfield, Lawrence W. "The Practical Celebration of Epideictic." Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric. University Park: Penn State UP. 131–55. Rosier, Martha. "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)." The Contest of Meaning. Ed. Richard Bolton. Cambridge: MIT, 1989. 301–41. Schryer, Catherine. "The Lab vs. the Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres." Genre and the New Rhetoric. Ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994. 105—24. Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

ELIZABETH BIRMINGHAM North Dakota State University

Policing the Architectural Canon: The Gendered Discourse of Architectural Studies

Jennifer Bloomer begins her book, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, by (dis)claiming: All conventional scholarly work ("original research") is written in the implied first person. Under the mask of objectivity, "I am inter­ ested in" becomes "The focus of this study is." The following ... make(s) no claim at objectivity: it represent(s) the residue of my self, my cultural condition, my passion (love and hate) for architecture. The non-neutrality of language and history (and architecture) are my concerns. (3) Though my project is vastly different, I make the same disclaimer. I am not ob­ jective. And unlike Bloomer, I am not an architect, though I finished the course work of a graduate program in architectural studies. My relationship with that discipline is one of love and hate. I wrote once, in a short story about language and architecture and my passion for both, that we all follow the paths of our pa­ thologies. Producing this text leads me back to that line again and again. This project is the path of my pathology, my return to a dysfunctional home: I know now there are better places to live, but none of those are quite home, for me. Here, up front, is a truth as far as I know it: I couldn't cut it in architecture school. There were many reasons, some having to do with the discipline's callous treatment of women, the lack of female faculty, the lack of female peers, and courses peopled by what seemed an unending stream of the worst sort of conser­ vative, anti-intellectual little boys. I so internalized the discipline's discourse that I feared being a feminist, because I knew viewing the discipline through a critical lens would interfere with the pleasure I found in beautiful buildings, and feminism, I knew, taught that beauty came with a price. I pushed on through all that. But when I wanted to write my thesis on Marion Mahony Griffin's archi­ tecture and its connection to the accident that I saw as the architectural canon, I was told by my major professor that to do so would be academic suicide, and to 97

98

Professing Rhetoric

focus instead on a contextual analysis of Walter Burley Griffin's Rock Crest/Rock Glen housing development in Mason City, Iowa. I like to think that this kind, gently paternalistic man, who was a very fine scholar, saw scholarly potential in me, and wanted to shelter me from the potential fallout of such a project—fallout like being unable to gain admission to a doctoral program. But it was ten years ago and I was a very good girl and I tried to do the thing he wanted, only I could not. I had no idea what a contextual analysis was, except that I was fairly certain my goal in writing one was to show that history was no accident, that a logically linear path of causes and effects led to an entire neigh­ borhood of Sullivan School1 houses in Mason City, Iowa. I never defended that thesis (and I likely could not have "defended" it, as its goals and claims were en­ tirely foreign to me, written with the objective, third person disinterest of a per­ son truly disinterested). So I am a failed architecture student and a good girl who was so good that rather than disappoint my professor, the kindly, controlling fa­ ther of my dysfunctional family, I preferred to walk away from a degree into which I had invested thousands of dollars and more than two years of my life. That passive act was my avoidance of the discipline's attempt to discipline me—to make a man of me. At the center of the discipline that is architecture is this profound, gender-related crisis. Women are almost entirely absent from all areas of the discipline: they nearly do not exist in classrooms where tenured women make up only 2.8% of architecture faculty;2 they are underrepresented in practice where women constitute 10.8% of practicing architects (and women of color represent .64%);3 they are absent from histories of architecture, whose texts often include no women and never include more than four women.4 This is in spite of the fact that nearly half of the students declaring a first year interest in majoring in architec­ ture are women. Somewhere between that initial interest and architectural prac­ tice, women abandon their dreams. (This makes architecture very different from fields like engineering, mathematics, and the hard sciences, which have a diffi­ cult time attracting young women initially.) Clearly, there is something occur­ ring in the academic discipline of architecture that discourages women students in far greater numbers than it discourages male students. At least half of this "something" must labeled pedagogical practice. Over the past ten years, theJournal of Architectural Education has begun to address the gen­ der issues that plague architectural education—a studio system that not just tol­ erates but exacerbates sexual harassment, a jury system that at its best ignores women student's work, and an almost exclusively male faculty who assert what Groat and Ahrentzen call "a tacit double standard whereby male students are perceived as inherently more architect-like" (172). Dana Cuff, in her history of architectural practice, reaffirms that notion, asserting, "The acculturation pro­ cess indirectly teaches that full-fledged architects are supposed to be men" (145). However, the other half of this "something" that discourages women stu­ dents is what I call discursive practices. The discourse of architecture is neither objective nor innocent; it is raced, gendered, and classed in ways that have led to

Policing the Architectural Canon

99

a history of racism, sexism, and classism in practice and in the academy that have been well documented in the last decade (see Kingsley and Glynn, Ahrentzen and Anthony, Groat and Ahrentzen, Ahrentzen, Kingsley, Frederickson). The absence of women and people of color from the history of architecture is both the cause and the effect of the absence of women and people of color in the present tense of architectural practice and scholarship. While certainly these gendered discursive practices also permeate the design studio, they are most manifest in the ways historians and critics have defined the discipline of architecture. My dissertation research, which informs this paper, employs a case study analysis of the critical-historical apparatus surrounding the work and life of one woman ar­ chitect, Marion Mahony Griffin, discussing in particular the ways in which her relationship to the discipline of architecture has been undermined by the ways in which she has been repeatedly gendered as an architect. Because the field asserts a masculine identity for a "great" architect, Mahony Griffin's work has been consistently described in terms that foreground her female gender, undermining her position within the canon of great architects. I want us to just spend a moment thinking about how many architects we can name and how many of those are women. I realized as I began my research that there's a very good reason for this—no major art history survey text includes a single woman architect, and no architectural history survey text includes more than four, most of whom receive mention in a single sentence, with no examples of their work given. For example, Marion Mahony Griffin is the woman who is mentioned in the most architectural history survey texts (five), but her mention is usually part of a subordinate clause in a sentence about her husband and/or Frank Lloyd Wright, the two men with whom she collaborated most in her life (Griffin 26 years, Wright 14 years). As Cheryl Glenn explains, "all historical ac­ counts, even those most seemingly objective historical records, are stories. And even these stories are selected and arranged according to the selector's frame of reference" (388). In the history of architecture, that frame of reference has been the masculine norm in describing architects and the notion that women have an unnatural relation to architectural creativity. The story of Mahony Griffin's life as she tells it in her autobiographical manu­ script, The Magic of America, is quite different from the characterizations in sec­ ondary sources. Born in Chicago in 1871, the year of the great fire, Marion Lucy Mahony claims she was carried from the fire in a clothes basket. After the fire, her family settled in Winnetka, Illinois, a Unitarian enclave just north of Evanston. When she graduated from MIT's school of architecture in 1894, Mahony was just the second woman in this country to graduate from an archi­ tectural program. She became the first to succeed in placing herself in an ap­ prenticeship position and after that one of the earliest to undertake a career in an architectural practice, working first for her cousin Dwight Heald Perkins and then for many years in Frank Lloyd Wright's studio as his senior draftsperson. Mahony Griffin's life and work are not well known, perhaps in part because her career spanned sixty years and three continents, but in great measure be­

100

Professing Rhetoric

cause she worked collaboratively with famous men. Her early work is both influ­ enced by and influenced Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom she worked for around fourteen years. In fact, her biggest break came when Wright left the country with the wife of a client in 1909. She was put in charge of several important com­ missions, the most impressive of which was the neighborhood of Millikin Place, in Decatur, Illinois. In 1911, the 40-year-old Mahony married the 34-year-old architect Walter Burley Griffin, the man whose architectural style "delighted" her—whose work she claimed she loved more than she loved the man. Their 26-year marriage led them both to great achievements, creatively and intellectually. They practiced architecture in the United States, in Australia, and in India designing over 500 structures and communities of which roughly half were built. Five hundred pro­ jects is a huge number, representing an incredible level of creativity—particularly at that time for their small office. After Walter died in India in 1937, Marion returned briefly to Australia briefly and then to the United States, where she continued to design intermittently, but never had another commission built. She lived until 1961, mainly writing, drawing, and teaching. She died in Cook County Hospital. Her 1000+ page autobiography, Magic of America, written between 1940–1949, has never been published and was nearly universally dis­ credited in the first wave of secondary scholarship concerning the Griffins, as was Mahony Griffin herself. As Griffin scholar James Weirick writes, "Marion Mahony has been fre­ quently relegated to a supporting role in discussions of the work of Wright and Griffin. Quite apart from her architectural work, the simple facts of her life have been treated with a disregard verging on contempt." (49) In 1988, nearly twenty-five years into the history of Griffin scholarship, Weirick was the first scholar to note the lack of correct biographical material on Marion Mahony Griffin. At least 22 of the most commonly cited sources on Mahony Griffin con­ tain serious factual inaccuracies; I refer to just the basic facts of her life that are easily available in her own autobiography or public record.5 This number doesn't begin to reach the number of sources that contain problematic critical analy­ sis of her architectural practice. Weirick correctly identifies the cause of misinformation, I think, when he calls it "a disregard verging on contempt." Mahony Griffin was not studied for her own contributions to architecture, but to situate (and sublimate) her and her work in relation to the men in her life, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. Because the goal was not to es­ tablish her place in the architectural canon, the specifics of her life (spelling of her name, dates of birth and death, for example) fell victim to the primary schol­ arly effort—to establish and fix the canon of "great men" whose personalities, buildings, and texts would become central to the story of architecture. While such a record of scholarship is indeed appalling, what is even more startling are the ways in which early scholars of the Griffins depicted Mahony Griffin. The number of comments about her physical appearance, her "stormy" relationships with others, and her "bitterness" serve to create a gendered picture

Policing the Architectural Canon

101

of her, one that is in conflict with the standard picture of the architect as a ratio­ nal and cultured "gentleman." In addition, because the history of professional­ ization in architecture has consistently presented a picture of a man as a great architect,6 and has described his attributes in masculine terms, clearly the pre­ sentation of Marion Mahony Griffin in gendered language undermines her posi­ tion to architectural practice and greatness. I do not argue that such use of language was entirely intentional or that its purpose was to keep women from the architectural canon. Rather, such gendered readings of women in the arts represent the status quo—a habit of scholarship that habitually omits the con­ tributions of women; as Christine Battersby argues, "the achievements of women who have managed to create are obscured by an ideology that associates cultural achievement with the activities of males" (305). For example, many authors describe her, rather than her architecture. H. Al­ len Brooks is compelled to note that Mahony Griffin was "so homely she was al­ most distinguished" (Prairie School 79). Peter Harrison asserts, "Although she was less than six years older than Griffin, those who knew them in Australia as­ sumed she was at least ten years older" (25). Other authors note that she was "taller than Walter" (Harrison 25), "angular," "sallow-skinned," and had a "beaked nose" (Brooks Prairie School 79, Rubbo 18), or "tomahawk profile" (Harrison 82). Brendan Gill describes her as "gaunt and beaky" (186). While providing physical descriptions may add another layer of character to the stories these historians hoped to tell, little physical description is typically provided about male architects, and in these texts Griffin's good looks are only described in contrast to Mahony Griffin's "homeliness." Moreover, in many cases, she is re­ duced to these descriptions, because they exist in the place of descriptions of her architectural work, which is always the focus of texts on male architects. In addition to constructing her as physically unattractive, these texts create a character that is unnatural and ridiculous. One of the ways in which she is shown as ridiculous is in her "old maid" status. As James Birrell writes, "Although their acquaintances greatly admired Marion's technical ability, many felt she married Walter because of his stupendous rise to fame after Wright had left...." (14). Even the construction of the sentence undermines her work (technical ability) to her grasping attempt to catch Griffin's ascending star. There are several other problems with the unsubstantiated assertion. The first is that "many" of their acquaintances were not cited in Birrell's research, and the second, and more im­ portant, is that Griffin's "stupendous rise to fame" did not occur until after his marriage to Mahony in 1911. In a similar vein Brooks writes, "Marion fell inextricably in love with Walter, of­ fered her rendering services to him as bait, and on 29 June 1911, married him" (Prairie School 165). Brooks's use of the word "bait" suggests that the love was one-sided and Griffin entered into a business arrangement, an arrangement that had to be baited for him to accept. While this may be true, there is scant evidence in the primary sources to suggest such a reading and Brooks does not cite anyone to explain this assertion. David Van zanten makes a similar assertion, also without

102

Professing Rhetoric

citing a source: "What had been a friendship ... now became love, at least on Marion's side" (19). He also discusses the Griffin's courtship in terms of battle— Mahony Griffin "pursued," laid "siege," and "took him by storm" (19). Peter Har­ rison reports that Australian acquaintances wondered how the "shy Walter Grif­ fin" could have proposed marriage. "The initiative," he writes "was attributed to Marion with the words 'Come along now, Walter, we must get married'" (25). All suggest a very reticent Griffin, pursued by a comical spinster. In addition, the language employed in these early secondary sources at­ tempted to describe Mahony Griffin as an unnatural woman and in gendered terms. Harrison asserts that "By all accounts, Marion lacked most feminine graces" (25). Anna Rubbo asserts, "She never did any domestic chores" (18). Birrell describes her in overtly masculine terms when he writes, "Her forceful, businesslike, coldly intellectual manner, held her, and eventually Walter, apart from the family" (14). But to contrast her "coldly intellectual manner" Harrison calls her "impetuous" (39), a word often suited to a young girl, Birrell calls her "bitter and critical" (132), and Brooks claimed that "To hypothesize, it is proba­ bly true she lacked the imaginative mind to create ..." (164). Readers are also told variously, that she "was not much liked by Griffin's family" (Birrell 14), "that some standards at Castlecrag were lowered by Marion Griffin" (Birrell 132), and that when Griffin's design arrived too late for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition that "Marion must have failed in her role" (Harrison 67). Most of these comments are throwaways, clearly the author's opinion: Marion must have failed in her role; it is probably true she lacked the imaginative mind to create. And some of such a list of comments might serve to deepen a reader's un­ derstanding of Mahony Griffin's character, if they were augmented by other in­ formation about her or her work. It was Birrell's 1964 book that seemed to set the tone for Mahony Griffin's depiction in later texts. Several later authors picked up his repeated use of the word "bitter" to describe her. In addition, Birrell asserts several times that Mahony Griffin was less than generous with money, writing that she "intellec­ tualised on economics" (184) and "refused financial advances to Lippincott"7 (132). Each time she is mentioned in Birrell's text, Mahony Griffin's character is drawn as cold, calculating ("she married Walter because of his stupendous rise to fame"), bitter, and alienating of pleasant Griffin's family and friends. In contrast, Mahony Griffin haunts David Van zanten's 1970 book Walter Burley Griffin: Selected Designs like a ghost. Though she drew the majority of the designs that comprise the book, she is only mentioned once in the accompany­ ing text—as Griffin's unnamed "wife" when Van Zanten writes: "Three of the following pieces are taken from undated and unidentified texts transcribed by Griffin's wife in her manuscript biography, The Magic of America" (31). Although Van Zanten discusses the chronology of Griffin's work in detail, never does he mention that "Griffin's wife" was the architect who drew the majority of the drawings included in his book, and who had been credited by some scholars with close collaboration on some of the designs. She is therefore reduced to the role of

Policing the Architectural Canon

103

typist (and a poor one at that—he goes on to assert he has had to correct her spelling errors and typos). These examples are just a brief survey of the way Mahony Griffin herself was characterized in architectural texts. Not surprisingly, her buildings and her writ­ ings received equally scathing characterizations, when they were associated with her. Interestingly, when the same buildings were mistakenly attributed to Wright or her husband, the reviews were entirely positive, doting upon the architect's genius. The examples of these gendered discursive practices labeling Mahony Griffin and her work permeate the historical writing about her—and she is not an isolated example in the architectural world. In fact, examples of women in architecture who have not been defined by these limiting discursive practices are the exception. Women are consistently "first-named" in order to draw attention to their gender and to undermine their authority; their work is described in gendered language, as one Griffin biographer, Donald Leslie John­ son, reports of Mahony Griffin, "Her own work prior to their marriage was in­ consistent, lacked restraint, and was not architecturally rationalized as an aesthetic and technical whole" (12). He thoroughly imbues her work with femi­ nine qualities—inconsistent, unrestrained, irrational, unwhole, suggesting con­ versely, that there is a masculine thing, architecture, which is consistent, restrained, rational, and whole. Such is the practice, not the exception, and is the work of some of the most lauded scholars in the field. My greatest concern in pursuing this research is to examine the chilling effect these depictions of women architects have on young women who hope to enter the discipline. As long as women constitute a negative presence in the field of ar­ chitecture and the discipline of architectural studies, there will not be a welcom­ ing space for women in the discipline, which will continue to experience what Francesca Hughes describes when she writes, "One thing is clear, however: just as the absence of either sex from a large constituency must indicate some inter­ nal crisis in which gender plays a crucial role, the absence of women from the profession of architecture points to a profound gender-related crisis at the base of architecture" (xi). Notes 1. The term "Sullivan School" was recently suggested by historian Paul Sprague in his article, "The Significance of Griffin's Indian Architecture." Sprague argues that this term, rather than the more commonly used "Prairie School" more accurately reflects Louis Sullivan's (1856–1924) role as the intellectual parent of this architectural movement (85-6). Sullivan, who imported the history of American Transcendental thought into architecture to argue for the development of a truly Amer­ ican form, was hugely influential on the young, radical architects practicing in Chicago near the turn of the century. Because Sullivan's influence is especially more appropriate to the Griffins and their work than Frank Lloyd Wright's (1867-1959), I use this term instead of "The Prairie School," which had been the favored term in architectural studies for many years. While "Prairie School" would accurately describe the Griffins' work early in their careers, Griffin's later work in the U.S. and the couple's work in Australia and India reflect the inspiration of Sullivan rather than the stylistic indebtedness to Wright that the term Prairie School connotes. Moreover, the Griffins themselves wrote of their inspiration by Sullivan.

104

Professing Rhetoric

2. In 1990 the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Task Force on the Status of Women in Architectural Schools found that tenured women represented only 2.8% of architecture faculty. Many architecture programs still have no tenured women on their faculty. Reasons for this almost total absence of women are complex, but some possibilities lie in Karen Kingsley and Anne Glynn's 1992 study published in the Journal of Architectural Education. Kingsley and Glynn found that while 70% of women in architectural practice claim they feel sexual discrimination, in the acad­ emy that number is even higher, with only 8% of women claiming they did not feel discrimination. The authors of this study call the academic environment "an isolated and sexist one" (18). 3. In 1995,10.8% of the members of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) were women. In contrast, women were 20% and 24% respectively of the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association members. Women of color represented only .64% of the AIA membership in 1994. 4. This information comes from Roxanne Williamson's "Index of Fame," a listing she has compiled for her book. American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame, by studying the survey textbooks of Ameri­ can architectural history and counting the mention each architect receives in the texts. Her book establishes the fact of a rigid canon in architectural studies—a canon that historically has omitted women's contributions to the field. 5. For example, Mahony Griffin's name was consistently misspelled. Dr. Robert McCoy's 1968 "Rock Crest/Rock Glen: Prairie School Planning in Iowa" refers to Mahony Griffin as "Mahoney" throughout. Robert Twombly's 1973 biography of Wright also names her "Mahoney " as does Wesley Shank's single mention in the 1979 Iowa Catalogue of the Historic American Buildings Survey (72). Paul Larson's 1982 and 1984Prairie School in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin also refers to her as Mahoney. (In the second printing a note was made of the error, but it remained uncorrected in the text.) Vincent Scully's 1988 American Architecture and Urbanism misspells her surname in a sin­ gle mention of her (126). An anonymously written 1964Prairie School Review article "A Portfolio of Prairie School Furniture" also refers to her a "Mahoney." Her first name is misspelled Marian by Carl Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture (209); Dr. Robert McCoy's 1968 "Rock Crest/Rock Glen: Prairie School Planning in Iowa" refers to Mahony Griffin as "Marian" intermittently. In ad­ dition, the facts of her life, her birth, death, family relations, dates of marriage and graduation re­ ceived equally careless documentation: Griffin scholar Donald Leslie Johnson made these errors not once, but across four books (Weirick 50). Mark Peisch in The Chicago School of Architecture gets both her dates of birth and death wrong; H. Allen Brooks, whose The Prairie School is still consid­ ered the "seminal" text on the Sullivan School, corrects the date of birth, but still mistakes her date of death as 1962. The date remained uncorrected through several reprintings of the book and was also mistaken in his second book, Prairie School Architecture: Studies from "Western Architect." David Van Zanten's 1966 article in the Prairie School Review mistakes the year of her birth and asserts she was the first woman to graduate from M.I.T.—she was the second. More than 20 years later, Van Zanten's 1987 chapter in John Zukowsky's Chicago Architecture 1872-1922 mistakes the year of her death. Wilson and Robinson's 1977 The PrairieSchool In Iowa mistakes the date of her death. Most of these facts are a matter of public record; some are available in Marion's Magic of America, and after 1975 they were available in a secondary source, as well, Berkon and Kay's "Marion Mahony Griffin, Architect." 6. Elizabeth Grossman and Lisa Reitzes trace professionalization in architecture to a more and more gendered male norm. They point out that language about the profession was cast in gendered (male) terms, while discussions of women in the profession were also gendered, but gendered female, to highlight the ways in which women were incompatible with architectural practice (29–32). 7. Roy Lippincott, the husband of Griffin's sister Geneveive, the Griffins' architectural partner who emigrated to Australia with them.

Works Cited Ahrentzen, Sherry. "The F Word in Architecture: Feminist Analyses in/of/for Architecture." Recon­ structing Architecture: CriticalDiscourses and Social Practices. Ed. Thomas A. Dutton and Lian Hurst Mann. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 71-118. Ahrentzen, Sherry, and Kathryn Anthony. "Sex, Stars, and Studios: A Look at Gendered Educational Practices in Architecture." Journal of Architectural Education 47-1 (1993): 11-29.

Policing the Architectural Canon

105

Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1989. Berkon Susan Fondiler, and Jane Holtz Kay. "Marion Mahony Griffin, Architect." Feminist Art Journal 4 (Spring 1975): 10-14. Birrell, James. Walter Burley Griffin. Brisbane: U of Queensland P, 1964. Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (S) crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Brooks, H. Allen. The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries. New York: Norton, 1972. —. Prairie School Architecture: Studies from 'The Western Architect'. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1975. Condit, Carl. The Chicago School of Architecture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964. Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1991. Frederickson, Mark. "Gender and Racial Bias in Design Juries." Journal of Architectural Education 47.1 (1993): 39–49. Gill, Brendan. Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987. Glen, Cheryl. "Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography." College English 62.3 (2000): 387–89. Groat, Linda, and Sherry Ahrentzen. "Reconceptualizing Architectural Education for a More Diverse Future: Perceptions and Visions of Architectural Students." Journal of Architectural Education 49.3 (1996): 166–83. Grossman, Elizabeth, and Lisa Reitzes. "Caught in The Crossfire: Women and Architectural Educa­ tion 1880-1910." Architecture: A Placefor Women. Ed. Ellen Perry Berkeley. Washington: Smithso­ nian Institution P, 1989. 27–39. Harrison, Peter. Walter Burley Griffin, Landscape Architect. Ed. Robert Freestone. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995. Hughes, Francesca. Introduction. The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice. Ed. Francesca Hughes. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996. x–xix. Johnson, Donald Leslie. The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin. Melbourne: The Macmillian Co. of Australia, 1977. —. Australian Architecture 1901–1951: Sources of Modernism. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1980. Kingsley, Karen. "Rethinking Architectural History from a Gender Perspective." Voices in Architec­ tural Education. Ed. Thomas A. Dutton. New York: Bergin, 1991. 249–64. Kinsley, Karen, and Anne Glynn. "Women in the Architectural Workplace." Journal of Architectural Education 46.1 (1992): 14-20. Larson, Paul. "Introduction: The Prairie School in its Midwestern Setting." The Prairie School in Minne­ sota, Iowa, Wisconsin. Minneapolis: Minnesota Museum of Art, 1984. 8-16. McCoy, Robert E. "Rock Crest/Rock Glen: Prairie School Planning in Iowa." The PrairieSchool Review V3 (1968): 5-39. Rubbo, Anna. "Marion Mahony Griffin: A Portrait." Walter Burley Griffin—A Re-View. Clayton, Vic­ toria: Monash U Gallery, 1988. Scully, Vincent. AmericanArchitecture and Urbanism. New York: Holt, 1988. Shank, Wesley I. The Iowa Catalogue: Historic American Buildings Survey. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1979. Sprague, Paul E. "The Significance of Griffin's Indian Architecture." Ed. Paul Kruty and Paul E. Sprague. Two American Architects in India. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. 83–89. Twombly, Robert C. Frank Lloyd Wright: An Interpretive Biography. New York, Harper, 1973. Van zanten, David T. "The Early Work Of Marion Mahony Griffin." The Prairie School Review III.2 (1969): 5 + . —. Walter Burley Griffin, Selected Designs. Palos Park, IL: Prairie School P, 1970. Van Zanten, David. "Walter Burley Griffin's Design for Canberra, the Capital of Australia." Chicago Architecture 1872-1922. Ed. John Zukowsky. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago: 1987. 318-343. Weirick, James. "Marion Mahony at M.I.T." Transition 25.4 (1988): 49-54. Williamson, Roxanne Kuter. American Architects and the Mechanics of Fame. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991. Wilson, Richard Guy, and Sidney K.Robinson. The Prairie School if Iowa. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1977.

This page intentionally left blank

KATHRYN T. FLANNERY

University of Pittsburgh

Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Collective Authorship: Rethinking Ethos and the Politics of Disclosure

Nedra Reynolds has defined ethos as "a complex set of characteristics con­ structed by a group, sanctioned by that group, and ... recognizable to others who belong or who share similar values or experiences" (327). Reynolds is at­ tempting to reconcile ethos with notions of postmodern subjectivity: ethos is thus conceptualized not as a stable quality possessed by the rhetor but as a rela­ tional location articulated in writing. However provisional and contingent such location may be in postmodern terms—Reynolds says, "it shifts and changes over time, across texts, and around competing spaces"—ethos, nonetheless, re­ tains for Reynolds its meaning as guarantor of seriousness. As she puts it, "writ­ ers earn their rhetorical authority by being responsible—by stating explicitly their identities, positions or locations, and political goals" (330). Like many of us, Reynolds wants it both ways: she wants to register her understanding of the constructedness and flux of subjectivity, and at the same time she wants to con­ ceptualize an ethical ground for authority. I understand the paradoxical aims of this rhetorical move especially as articu­ lated by Adrienne Rich in her "Notes Towards a Politics of Location": as the writer delimits her range of vision to make clear that she cannot speak for every­ one, for all time, and across all difference, she at the same time claims the au­ thority to speak out of a particular body, place, historical and cultural moment. But must one disclose one's self—even a transitory version of one's self—explicitly in writing to be responsible? Does authority rest on such acts of disclosure? As I have been working with a wide range of print materials produced by second-wave women in the late 1960s and early 1970s—one might say that this is a moment in time that serves as origin for recent work in feminist rhetoric—I find that the idea of ethos as location only gets me so far as a reader of these ma­ terials. What happens, for example, to notions of authority and responsibility when writers choose to withhold their names or choose to use pseudonyms, or when a collective chooses to compose together, as is often the case with second-wave materials from underground newspapers, newsletters, flyers, and manifestos? I don't want to say that such writers are not located through the act 107

108

Professing Rhetoric

of writing, but the fact that one is always already located, positioned in and through the culture, in and through acts of language, is not the same thing as saying that to be responsible one needs to disclose one's location. Isn't it possible that sometimes refusing to explicitly name one's location is the politically re­ sponsible thing to do? to adopt an authority that the context does not grant the writer? to refuse the ways in which one has been positioned? or to choreograph multiple and conflicting positions as does someone like Patricia Williams in her book Alchemy of Race and Rights'? Might not disguise be a strategic rhetorical move under certain circumstances and thus the most rhetorically responsible thing to do? I appreciate Reynolds's effort to negotiate an ethical space for agency, but I want to trouble the connection she draws between responsibility and disclosure, and authority and explicitness. I have found Lorraine Code's Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations par­ ticularly helpful in thinking through the problem of ethos. Code emphasizes the extent to which "human beings are social creatures all the way down," and that "sociality is embedded in and shaped by all the myriad story lines into which each of us is thrust at birth" (73). In these terms, Code goes on to say, subjectivity is produced and continually reproduced out of a multi­ plicity of crisscrossing, sometimes mutually supportive and some­ times conflictual, discursive, dialogic relations which are lived not on a geographic analogue of a tabula rasa, but in specific rhetorical locations—spatial, historical, racial, cultural, gendered—themselves embedded in and part of the ongoing stasis and flux of narra­ tive ways of making sense. Hence every life is always already partially scripted, partially contained within pre-existing narrative lines: a film that is already running colors and flavors even one's simplest utterances, and hence one's ... knowledge claims, one's testimonial moments. (73) I take Code to mean that rhetorical spaces are not simply literal texts, but the multiple discursive arenas in and through which we live, in and through which we write. Rhetorical spaces enable and constrain acts of writing. We don't con­ trol such rhetorical spaces, but we do have the capacity to remake them as we live in and through them. As Judith Butler has put it, none of us follow the as­ signed scripts perfectly, and our very deviations from script have the potential to alter the script, to be repeatable and therefore potentially disruptive. As I un­ derstand Code, responsibility cannot be readable simply by reference to isolated acts of writing, but that any act of writing is readable in relation to a complex web of interrelations that cannot be fully knowable to a writer or a reader. In this sense, ethos isn't something simply in the text—but rather a name for the web of interconnections between text and world, text and reader. Ethos might be conceptualized as a way to name part of the dynamic of any literacy event. Thus, it isn't that "stating explicitly one's location" is therefore useless or futile,

Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Collective Authorship

109

but that it is only one writerly move that invites the reader to trust in but cannot serve as surety for the rhetorical authority of the writer. Let me concretize this abstract talk through a consideration of a particular lit­ eracy event, a particular workshop that took place as part of the 1972 program of the New York State Women's Political Caucus. Workshop #13, on the "Poli­ tics of Inclusion," was supposed to consider how the Caucus could "reach the un­ affiliated, the poor, the aged, the young, the minority women and why it [would be] essential to do so" (see Appendix A), bell hooks has noted that initially, "radi­ cal participants in [the] women's movement demanded that women" from dif­ ferent cultural and economic spheres "penetrate" the cultural isolation that had kept them apart in order to "create space for contact." She argues that for a short time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many radical publications attempted to address a wide audience that was not exclusively white, middle class, straight, college-educated, and adult. But these efforts were not sustained. According to hooks—and I think she is generally correct in her analysis—"as more and more women acquired prestige, fame, or money from feminist writings or from gains from [the] feminist movement for equality in the workforce, individual oppor­ tunism undermined appeals for collective struggle" (6—7). This shift from a vol­ atile movement attempting to create space for contact across difference to a more limited, white and middle-class dominated movement can be seen as part of the rhetorical context enabling and constraining the work of Workshop 13. A flyer produced by Workshop 13 I take as representative of much of the written work women produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the decentralized and widespread women's movement (see Appendix B). Much of this material is of the moment, produced for a particular occasion, intended to incite others to action, and much of it was collectively composed. If we came upon the flyer without the accompanying Caucus program, we would no doubt be at a loss. No names are attached. No date is given. "Women's political cau­ cus" appearing in the first line is not capitalized so it does not necessarily signal a specific organizational entity. We might do some digging to find out about the Children's March for Survival or the Nixon-Mills Welfare Reform bill (men­ tioned under item 2 on the flyer)—but beyond that, we would be hard pressed to make much headway with this document. With the Program to provide some sense of the rhetorical context, we can begin to read the flyer, but as I hope to make clear, there are still a number of pitfalls. The three women whose names appear on the Program for Workshop #13 did not in fact compose the flyer. They were conveners who served as resource people to the workshop participants. It was the anonymous workshop partici­ pants who did the talking and writing that produced the flyer. They do not "earn rhetorical authority by ... stating explicitly their identities, positions or locations"—to harken back to Nedra Reynolds's formulation—nor is it clear what their "personal" or "individual" relationships might be to the political assertions that make up the bulk of the flyer. Are these white women speaking for vari­ ously named Others? What is their investment in the issues they raise? Who is

110

Professing Rhetoric

this We? This piece of paper—the text itself—does not speak its own context, any more than any piece of writing can. I'd like to suggest in fact that the anony­ mous text is not so unlike a text with an author's name attached—no text is ever readable independent of a complex rhetorical matrix—either the context from which it was produced or those from which it is read, nor is its meaning simply determined (or limited to) its contexts of production and reception or appropria­ tion. The name of an author itself signals an outside, a body that stands prior to the written text, carrying with it a history that is more or less available to us as readers however explicit the writer is about naming herself. Like much of the ephemera of activism, this flyer assumes an immediacy of context, presuming a close proximity between the bodies that made it and the bodies that received it. In this case, the flyer was read to an assembled plenary session, with cameras rolling. While a written text, it nonetheless worked initially—for its first audience—more like oratory. The body of the woman who read the flyer to the as­ sembled Caucus served in complex ways as guarantor of a certain kind of seriousness and physically invested the text with an authority the words them­ selves do not command. But how do I know that and what kind of authority can I claim to support my reading of this document? On the one hand, I was there. I was a participant in Workshop #13- Like much of activist print production, this flyer exists because ordinary people like me saved such materials—sometimes donating them to college libraries, sometimes packing them away in files. But the experiential knowledge for which the flyer serves as mnemonic prompt—powerful as it is for me—is not by itself sufficient. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman reflect on this kind of authority in useful ways: Authority is the privilege to speak as author, as an originator. Such a privilege is often understood to come from wisdom, insight, or ex­ perience of the author. If authority is claimed on the basis of per­ sonal experience, then authority becomes a matter of interpreting one's life, often without reference to the assumptions, beliefs, or methods by which that interpretation is accomplished. When per­ sonal experience is the basis for critical knowledge, such knowledge may be premised on a fairly unexamined opinion, whose rhetorical force comes from its appeal to the "authentic." When opinion claims to be unassailable because it is based on experience, authority becomes tautological—it is because I say it is and who are you to question my life? (93) I can write about the Workshop #13 flyer from experience, but I am also at 30 years remove. I have ways of making sense of that event now that I did not have available to me then, and yet of course I cannot reproduce the moment as lived nor can I speak for all those other participants. Here in capsule is the paradoxical rhetorical move I mentioned before: I announce—as caveat emptor—that I have

Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Collective Authorship

111

special and necessarily limited experiential knowledge in order to claim author­ ity to speak, knowing that the authority is at best provisional and that my expe­ riential knowledge is not sufficient. I have to bring other knowledges to bear in order to frame my experience for purposes of critical analysis (cf. Personal Nar­ ratives Group). I participated in the Caucus as part of a Welfare Rights delegation from the western part of upstate New York. I was a VISTA (Volunteer in Service to Amer­ ica) working for a migrant housing project in the "stoop fruit" producing mucklands of New York. Most of the migrant workers were African Americans in the Florida to New York "stream"—picking citrus in Florida and tomatoes, onions, cabbages and other vegetables in New York. I was asked by the local Welfare Rights organizer, a white woman who was not a migrant worker but who had grown up in this part of upstate New York, to drive a group of local women to Albany to attend the Caucus. Once there we met with women from around the state, most of whom were representing other Welfare Rights groups. I served as recorder for the workshop, and helped to put in final form the report to the plenary session. I have kept a file from the Caucus with various flyers, a bibliography on voting and political involvement, a list of pending legislation having to do with women's issues, steps on how to become a committeewoman (for whatever party), and the like. In addition, the folder includes a set of notes from the Inclusion Workshop of the minutes and the drafts of the workshop report—as well as the mimeo flyer distributed in the plenary session reporting on the Workshop. While the participants in Workshop #13 were a racially and ethnically diverse group, I was the only middle-class, college-educated white woman. I thus occupied a position just this side of male: presumably I could know more than a man could know about "women's experience" but I couldn't know from the inside what it meant to be poor, on welfare, with limited access to schooling and jobs. My role as recorder may have made it easier on some level for other participants to teach me what I could not know first hand: they could di­ rect their comments to me, face me, with criticisms of the class and racial bias of the Political Caucus organization, to make sure I "got it" in the sense of getting it down on paper, but also hoping I got it on a deeper level. I was an individual who happened to be recorder but I also felt myself to be surrogate for that group of prominent women—the headliners—who had organized us into an "Inclu­ sion" Workshop relegating us to last place on the conference program. An Afri­ can American woman volunteered to chair the meeting; much of the final language of the plenary flyer is hers; and it was her body that rose at the end of the conference and it was her voice that gave force to the words. I didn't know then that our positioning in the Caucus program was a result of conflicts among the leadership. I do remember that we were all struck by the po­ sitioning, and we joked about this warp of the Sleeping Beauty story—that like the excluded fairy godmother, we would end up causing the Caucus more trou­ ble than they had bargained for. We knew we were tokens, but that we were nonetheless going to make the most of the opportunity—to make it difficult for

112

Professing Rhetoric

the leadership to simply use us for political window dressing. Collective ano­ nymity was the position we had been assigned but it was also the position that we reclaimed asserting that "Women will no longer accept anyone else's defini­ tion of their self-value and the value of their work" (Item #2). It wasn't for oth­ ers to name us. We were the nameless Rank and File in defiant contrast to the Headliners. With historical hindsight, I can see that we were on the verge of the change that bell hooks has described—that the brief moment of volatility dur­ ing which women were attempting to create space for contact across difference was coming to a close. And the very visibility and relative success of such organi­ zations as the National Women's Political Caucus ironically helped to bring that moment to a close. I know now that the National Women's Political Caucus was formed in 1971 by a coalition of women including Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Patsy Minsk, and Gloria Steinem. Their purpose was to increase the numbers of women and sympathetic men participating in the electoral process at all levels. The earliest meetings held at various sites around the country at­ tracted a wide range of groups from religious organizations, the League of Women Voters, various business and professional organizations for women, as well as trade unions, Welfare Rights groups, and various feminist organizations (Garden 139). But from the earliest discussions, there was a split between those who wanted to focus exclusively on women's issues defined narrowly in such a way as to exclude questions about welfare, abortion, sexual orientation or racism (most prominently this was Betty Friedan's position), and those—particularly Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem—who urged a broader understanding of femi­ nism and warned that the Caucus could easily become simply a haven for the white middle-class (Heilbrun 214). The 1972 meeting of the New York State Women's Political Caucus (NYWPC) attempted to address this split by including—ironically and tell­ ingly, as I've noted—as its 13th of 13 concurrent workshops a session on the "Politics of Inclusion." A representative from the NAACP, a Welfare Rights or­ ganizer, and the chairwoman of the National Caucus of Spanish-Speaking Women served as the conveners and resource people for this session. Of the al­ most 200 conveners listed for the Caucus, including nationally-known figures such as Shirley Chisholm (who had only recently declared her candidacy for President of the United States), most represented relatively "mainstream" po­ litical, religious, and educational organizations. However wise any of these women as individuals might have been, in the context of the Caucus, they made too evident their sense of priorities in relegating primarily poor and mi­ nority women to the last workshop as if as an afterthought. Even though the sessions ran concurrently and thus no session was technically "last" in real time, the women who participated in this so-called inclusion workshop under­ stood that they were last and least. But that is not the whole of the story. As Kathleen Weiler has argued, "peo­ ple will use the means at hand, the power that they can employ to meet their

Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Collective Authorship

113

needs and assert their humanity" (51). To look below or behind the Women's Political Caucus's apparent sidelining of difference requires that we consider how the workshop participants—knowing full well how they had been posi­ tioned in this rhetorical context—nonetheless made use of rhetorical resources at hand. In reflecting on what she calls "fractured identities," Donna Haraway notes that among U.S. women who have affirmed their historical identity as U.S. women of color, "this identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm a capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (198). The we-saying of this flyer suggests not a claim to unity that erases dif­ ference but something like the coalition-building that Haraway describes based not on "natural identification" but on claims to political kinship. Gay Women, the Aged, Women in Prison, Single parents, ethnic groups, the young, the working poor are named in the flyer and given a material reality in the Caucus. Participants of Workshop #13 felt that we were standing in the stead of such women even when we were not literally so representative. In standing for such a coalition, the Workshop members were also pointing out the absence of this coalitional array within the Caucus at large. In other words, the coalition across difference does not yet exist except on the page as the assertion of the collective authors' coalitional vision. They do not state explicitly the positionality of the individual authors, nor of the literal collective membership of the workshop, but project a possibil­ ity for the assembled body of women. I'd like to call this an ethical projec­ tion. By not stating explicitly the identity of the writers, the flyer attempts to create the occasion for the building of a coalitional "we." The we-saying is thus doubly valenced: offering ideal and critique at once. If the leader­ ship wants to include more women in the political process—to use the Women of Workshop 13 and those they stand in for political purposes—they are going to have to consider the "mechanics—the system and tactics that keep women divided and that encourage oppressed people to fight each other." In a sense, the ethical appeal of the flyer rests on the need for mainstream members of the caucus to join in coalition with an imag­ ined, a projected "we" (rather than the we they have assumed as the de­ fault, white middle class we), to locate themselves as part of a coalitional "we" in order to realize it, to make it real—not to speak for others, not to do all the talking, but to listen, to learn and to educate themselves to a sense of political kinship across difference. Or, as Adrienne Rich puts it, to imagine a "We who are not the same. We who are many and do not want to be the same" (225). To do this the authors of the flyer consciously chose not to identify themselves as separate individuals, but to use the power and au­ thority of a textual, choral anonymity. In this context, the Workshop par­ ticipants' rhetorical choice strikes me as the exercising of politically responsible authority. Their's is an ethos that is projected as a possibility, as a challenge to the taken-for-granted.

114

Professing Rhetoric

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993. Carden, Maren. The New Feminist Movement. New York: Sage, 1974. Code, Lorraine. Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York: Routledge, 1995. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem. New York: Dial, 1995. hooks, bell. "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory." Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End, 1984. 1-15. New York State Women's Political Caucus. Program. March 4, 1972. —. Workshop 13 Plenary Statement. March 4, 1972. Personal Narratives Group. Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989­ Reynolds, Nedra. "Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority." Rhetoric Review 11 (1993): 325–38. Rich, Adrienne. "Notes Toward a Politics of Location." Blood, Bread, and Poetry. New York: Norton, 1986.210-31. Roof, Judith, and Robyn Wiegman. Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity. Urbana: U of Illi­ nois P, 1995. Weiler, Kathleen. Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class and Power. Critical Studies in Education Se­ ries. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988. Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

APPENDIX A

March 4, 1972

Saturday

8:00 A.M. - 10:00 A.M. Registration Lobby 10:00 A.M. Plenary Session Lower Lobby

Welcome: Linda Lamel - Conference Coordinator

Greetinga: Coastaae* Osok - New York State

Assemblywoman (R-125 A.D.)

Speakerai Liz Carpenter - former Prees Secretary

and Special Asslltant to Mrs. Lyndon

Johnson

Barbara G. Kllberg - former

Namber President lixon's White

Houee Staff; Member, Board of

Directors, Common Cause

Laurie Beers - Co-chairvoman,

National Youth Caucus

Jonnle Jones - Ceordinatlng Committee,

Manhatten Women's Political Caucus

Amy Betanaos - New York City Commissioner

of Housing Relocation

Barbara Smith - Coordinator, Saratoga

County Women's Political Caucus

12:30 P.M. Box Lunch Lobby

1:30 - 5:30 Workshops.

1.

2.

3.

4.

State Structure

Starlight Boom

Evaluation of proposals for temporary state

structure

Resource people:

Anne Cohan - Co-chairwoman, State Structure

committee

Joyce Ahrens - Co-ooairwomaa, State Struc­

ture committee

Ronnie Felt - Rational Policy Council,

National Woman's Political

Caucus) member, State Structure

committee

Prioritiea Lower Level #4

formulation of goals and politioal targets for

Nev York State Women's Politioal Caucus

Resource people:

Representatives from local caucuses

Party Bules and Thalr

Reforn

Room 331

The rules by which the parties operate and how

they should be changed so that they no longer

systematically exolude women from decision-

making

Resource people:

Nancy Dubner - member, Democratic State

Oommittee (Rochester)

Sarah Llebehutt - Professor, Politioal

Soienoo, S.O.I.Y. Brookport

Delegate Party

Saleotlan

and

National

Lower Level #3A

Convention

How are delegates to the national conventions

chosen; how to become a candidate for delegate;

what role you can play at the convention

APPENDIX A

Reeouroe peoples

Ksther Lewis Judith Glasor

10. .

- former chairwoman, Legisla­

tive lotion Committee, New Yerk

State League of Women Tetors

• Director of Special Prelecte,

S.U.F.Y. Purchase; President

of Board of Eduoatlon, Rye

Yolanda Quitman - founder of Pulse of Women

(P.O.W.)

Public

Relations

Room

549

Image-building and use of the media

Resource people:

Letty Pogrebin - Editor of Me magazine; former

publicist for major publishing

firm

Bllen Loohoya - Public relations director

for succeseful candidate for

Albany County District

Attorney

11.

Candidatee

Room

548

How to become a candidate and who should be one

Resource people:

Karen Burstein - former Democratic

12.

13.

candidate for 4th Con­

gressional distriot

Janice Dooley - former Democratic

candidate for Albany

Oounty Legislature

Liz Lynch - former candidate Sohen­

eotady County Board

Mary Ella Reutershaa - former candidate East

Hampton town beard;

Legislative Chairwoman,

Ajaerloan Aseooiation of

Uairersity Women

Analysing Incumbants Room 546 finding the weak ones; what information to get,

where to get it and how to use it

Resource people:

Joanna Banthin-Stelser - Politieal eoientist

Cornelia letter - Planning aseooiats,

New York State Office

of Planning Serrioesi

paid campaign organ­

iser and manager

Linda Darldoff - Urban planner; Author,

the Suburbs Must Ocan

Their Gates

Ihe Politlcs of Inclusion

Lower Level #2

How to reach the unaffiliated, the poor, the aged,

the young, the minority women and why it is essential

to do BO

Resource people:

Althea Simmons - Secretary for Training,

National Association for the

Adraneament of Colored People

Irna Santaella - lastera Regional Chairweman

Bational Caucus of Spanish

Speaking Women

Jeanette Washington - Welfare Mothers Organiser

APPENDIX B

Workshop # 13 Politics of Inclusion The women's political caucus will, address itself to the problems of all women. We are particularly concerned with, the problem of getting people to come and participate. Most important is to have a relevant program 1. avoid unnecessary rhetoric,

2. know local issaes&& devise programs to deal w i t h local problems— let people now whet you can do for them, and what you can do together Specific i s s e s to be concerned about include: Quality education—wake sure schools teach the a u t u e u t i c history of the American peoples and recognize and expose the roots of white racism Support and p a r t i c i p a t e in the C h i l d r e n ' s riarch for Survival on March 24 and 25. Contact your local Welfare Rights for further info, Women should be guaranteed the right of self determainf.tion and econ­ omically sustained to implement this goal. We oppose thePixon-millsHRI plan for so called Welfare Reform as a .measure that violates w o m e n ' s right to self deter intition. We will support all women, this includes Gay Women, the Aged, Women in Prsson, Single P a r e n t s , . goups, tho young, .ALL WOMAN Woman will no lon er accept anyone else's d e f i n i t i o n or thier self valuie and the v a l u e of their work The w o m e n ' s causus must address itself to the working poor--to racog­ nize their con onalitv with other oppress-d people We must work for economic j u s t i c e for all. We shall educat o u r s e l v e s and o t h e r s to the f a c t that we all are dependent on the governmetns assistance in some way and there fore, are all, in e f f e c t on w e l f a r e . 3. kn Use neighborhood communications--contact organziat ions such as the Golden Agtsrs, welfare Rights, H A A C P , grass roots poverty organiza­ t ions. Organize voter regastration, use the media —multui langiage radio, underground papers, people's papers--go knocking door to door and talk and listen. 4. The structure of the csucus must allow all women to speck for thethelves. 5. BLliminst, econemicic barriers tomembership.Thereshouldbe no mumbership d u e s . Each should c o n t r i b u t o according to hermeans.Provide funds for low income womea to a t t e n d meetings, provide t r a n s p o r t e t i o n . 6. Recogmize the . i o c n o n i c s - - t h e s y s t e m and t a c t i c s that keep us all divided and that encourece o p p r e s s e d people to fight each othor SOCIGTY SNOJLD THE CAME OF US BECAUSE ARE SOCIETY

This page intentionally left blank

JOYCE MAGNOTTO NEFF Old Dominion University

Mediated Ethos: Instructor Credibility in a Televised Writing Course

In a recent College English article, Chris Anson poses an important question: "What will multimedia do to alter the personae of teachers and students as they respond to each other virtually?" (276). A study I completed in 1998 prefigured Anson's question and included a description of how students construct a writerly ethos when they have "voice or verbal presence" but not "bodily or ma­ terial presence" in televised courses (Neff, "From"). Anson's question is clearly worth additional consideration; thus, my current study examines human and technological interactions that shape teacher ethos in writing courses delivered from a distance. I find Tita Baumlin's work on ethos helpful in this examination. She defines ethos as "the interrelations among language, authority, private char­ acter, and public self ... intricately interwoven with the culture's concepts of power, gender, and rhetorical self-fashioning" (230), and she concludes that the "traces of capitulation to, and exploitation of, both authority and other" are present in the process of fashioning an ethos (253). In the distance education sys­ tem that I study, producers, technicians, site directors, and instructional design­ ers share authority over what is seen and heard by distant students. Other pedagogical decisions, traditionally the province of the instructor, are mediated by microphones, cameras, computers, and studio arrangements. In the video­ taped recordings of each classroom session, lie traces of these human and techno­ logical interrelations, traces of an instructor refashioning her teacher ethos in the new world of distance education. Background and Research Questions My original study of a distance education system that uses interactive televi­ sion (ITV) as its delivery medium led to several findings. In ITV, students are constructed as educational consumers, courses are packaged as products to be purchased, site directors serve as sales representatives for those courses, and market research is used to assess satisfaction with products consumed. Fortu­ nately, ITV constructs students as producers as well as consumers. Student texts are the products offered in exchange for grades, and the value of student texts in­ creases in proportion to distance and invisibility. That is to say, the less an in­ 115

116

Professing Rhetoric

structor knows about a student, the more that instructor bases evaluation on the written text. ITV creates a virtual space in which students can develop writerly subjectivities because their texts are valued commodities in this culture. In a face-to-face (f2f) classroom, a text is packaged in the physical presence of a stu­ dent (her level of class attendance, how well her personality fits with the instructor's personality, physical markers such as race, ethnicity, gender). This is not to say that these markers are unavailable except through physical presence; it is to say that a student text carries more weight when an instructor assesses it with­ out knowing much about the author. I would compare the experience to blind review of a journal submission versus face-to-face review of a colleague's draft. In the present study, teacher ethos is the salient issue. While students rate ITV courses highly in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, faculty dis­ like ITY A look at stereotypes of the classroom that our culture perpetuates may be instructive here. These stereotypes are so ingrained that even before we begin kindergarten, many of us can "play school" according to the rules of our particu­ lar part of the world. In the 1950s, middle-class, suburban culture in which I was immersed as a child, I knew that a classroom lesson unfolded in a three-part format (teacher asks a question, student responds, teacher offers an evaluative comment). I knew that the teacher had all the power. She got to call on students and to reprimand them if their answers were wrong. I can recall the classroom my playmates and I constructed under the weeping willow tree in the front yard. The teacher's role was best, and we fought for it. I can also recall the 1970s class­ room my children and their playmates set up in the basement recreation room, and these days, my granddaughters are repeating the scenario. In contrast to these face-to-face classroom stereotypes, where the assumption is that the teacher manages all things, let me describe the ITV classroom. The teacher talks to a camera; students press microphone buttons to contribute to the discussion; the engineer announces that one site is not receiving the broad­ cast; students at another site complain that their exams were not returned in the mail; and simultaneously, a producer switches cameras to show the electronic chalkboard instead of the instructor. Such a scenario raises several questions: What happens to teacher authority (and by extension to writing instruction) when producers, technicians, site directors, and instructional designers appro­ priate course delivery? What happens when microphones, television screens, cameras, computers, and studio arrangements demand the instructor's atten­ tion and affect her timing? What happens when students can talk among them­ selves at their separate sites, and the instructor does not know that they are talking? And most insidious, what happens when a high-ranking administrator tells students they can get their money back for a course they find too rigorous? At its simplest, what happens is that the instructor does not want to play this particular teaching game, and many faculty refuse ITV assignments. The power and glory of the teacher as "Subject Supposed to Know" is diminished. My goal is to learn whether, and how, faculty can reinvent or fashion a teacher-ethos that works for them and for their students in distance-education writing classes.

Mediated Ethos

117

Methodology and Data The current phase of the study focuses on an advanced composition course taught over ITV by Dawn Hayden during the spring 1998 semester. Using methods from grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss; Strauss and Corbin), I ana­ lyzed videotapes and other data from the course. Grounded theory encourages the blurring of researcher-participant positions by valuing the experiences that all agents bring to a project. As the researcher moves through recursive cycles of data analysis and theory building, findings are shared with participants so that all stances are interrogated by other stances. (For a detailed explanation of grounded theory in composition research see Neff, "Grounded.") In the follow­ ing sections, I describe several authority issues that emerged in Hayden's ITV writing course: access, content, timing, who has the floor, pedagogy, and text ownership. Access to the course: Demographic studies show that students who have limited physical access to higher education are eager to earn a four-year de­ gree through ITV (Feenberg; West). Some mediating elements, such as televi­ sion transmission and electronic mail, improve demographic access to courses at the same time that other mediating elements (site directors, electronic registra­ tions) impinge on the instructor's authority to prevent overrides or late registra­ tions or enrollment by students who have not met prerequisites. In Hayden's course several students did not meet prerequisites but were allowed to register by their site directors. Sometimes access is an issue because a receive site may be closed for a holi­ day (as occurred during Hayden's course) while the main campus is open, and broadcasting is scheduled. In ITV students can attend a "live" class at their re­ ceive sites while it is being delivered, or they can watch a videotape of the class later if they are absent. The instructor may push for "live"attendance, but her authority is undermined by the promotion of ITV as a system that permits stu­ dents to time their own learning. In Hayden's situation, she could not physi­ cally see who was or was not present on a given day. Neither could she see who was paying attention. Course content: In face-to-face (f2f) classrooms, the instructor merges content and presentation of content into what she hopes is a seamless fabric. She uses presentation methods to signal the relative importance of the content she covers. In ITV, presentation is controlled by the technician who deter­ mines what is shown on the screen. In one of Hayden's classes a guest speaker uses power point slides, and the technician shows the slides, not the speaker, until well into the presentation when he shows the speaker in a small box in the lower corner of the screen. When content and presentation do not support one another, students become confused about which content the instructor wishes to emphasize.

118

Professing Rhetoric

Timing: One of the biggest paradoxes in ITV concerns time versus tech­ nology. ITV classes are slower, not faster, as one might expect. Everything from calling role to distributing papers takes more, not less, time in spite of the tech­ nology. When a guest speaker in Hayden's class needs the microphone, there's a pause while it is transferred. Another guest stops to sip water many times be­ cause she says she is nervous about being on television. The frequent repetition of instructions because of botched transmissions (in one class a thunderstorm eliminated all communication from a site) affect Hayden's decisions about which activities to attempt, when to switch activities, and whether to repeat material when the downtime ends. In a parallel study of how time is allocated in an ITV class, early results show technological interference at a 26% rate (Dare). That means one fourth of class time is lost because of problems with things like microphones, bandwidth transmission, and the weather. Who has the floor: Technology mediates the instructor's authority to designate who speaks in an ITV classroom. In Hayden's one-way video, two-way audio situation, students speak without waiting to be recognized be­ cause the instructor can not see them to call on them. They press a microphone button and then choose whether or not to identify themselves before they speak. Hayden, who may be in the middle of a sentence, hears a voice coming out of the air without warning. In her virtual classroom, there are eighteen floors, but Hayden is physically standing on only one of them. Pedagogy: Hayden uses various methods including lecture, small group work, conferences, student presentations, and guest speakers. She invites her graduate assistant to co-teach with her on occasion. Hayden cannot easily switch from a planned activity to an unplanned one because of conditions and constraints such as the large font size required for items shown on the electronic chalkboard and the requirement that all handouts be distributed in a course pack several weeks before the semester begins. Paradoxically, Hayden often must switch activi­ ties because of technological problems such as a student's slides not arriving at the studio in time to be broadcast during his presentation or a student paper that is delayed by the mail room and thus can not be copied, distributed, and discussed in time to be pedagogically valuable. In one class session, to compensate for a dis­ tribution problem, Hayden reads a student's paper aloud. Her frequent inter­ spersing of "quote/unquote" detracts from the reading. In another instance late in a class session, Hayden finishes a lecture and di­ rects students to work in their peer response groups. One group, made up of stu­ dents who are alone at their sites, is told to use the audio bandwidth of the broadcast so they can conduct their peer work orally. All other sites are directed to turn off the sound on their monitors. The bandwidth group struggles to do the work of peer response without being able to see one another. They spend much of their time asking each other to clarify points from the lecture. One stu­ dent says, "I am a full-time student and this is probably the hardest class I have

Mediated Ethos

119

this semester just going through these extra steps just to communicate. I'm try­ ing to work with it, but it's taking so much time." A few students finally decide to phone each other during the coming week. At the end of the tape, a student asks: "Is Rosemary there? Is Christy there? Is anybody there? Hello?" (West). Most of the students have walked out on the discussion, sound pedagogy not withstanding. Text ownership: Somewhat prophetically in the first class session, Hayden comments that she has never lost a student's paper. Perhaps that's be­ cause she has control over such things in her f2f classes. Just a few weeks into the ITV course, a student at one site notes that she received someone else's personal narrative paper by mistake. The mailroom, UPS, and the site directors assume authority over paper exchanges in ITV Discussion In each of the areas discussed above, the instructor finds her authority chal­ lenged. The irony is that the tacit authority she wields in a f2f class becomes visi­ ble in ITV precisely because the classroom is now electronic (see Moran for a reverse twist on this phenomenon). Videotape analysis shows how Hayden re­ fashions her teacher ethos under these conditions. First, she reconfigures student-teacher roles. She talks openly with her students about the complications of the system. She makes jokes, she admits defeat, she soothes students who get upset about their work not arriving on time, and she discusses how an individual might cope with being alone at a site. Likewise, students soothe Hayden by tell­ ing her not to worry and by suggesting alternatives for paper exchanges. Hayden graciously accepts their support. In one instance, when a student at a distant site gives an oral presentation, Hayden becomes a student notetaker whose actions are visible to everyone since one camera captures her as she writes, and another displays her notes on the electronic chalkboard. Second, Hayden invites students to help her shape future ITV writing classes by completing a survey. Students record their answers and then discuss them eagerly in whole-group format. In response to a question about peer re­ view, students suggest that Hayden send drafts to different sites so that peers do not always respond to writers at their own sites. Hayden asks students what would help them cope with distance education. They suggest an orientation video for first-timers, a commercial that previews English 327 for future stu­ dents, and a separate commercial previewing the next writing course Dawn is scheduled to teach. Jarratt and Reynolds in "The Splitting Image" conclude that "ethos revised through feminism can help students see themselves as positioned in a social and political setting" (57). When students move away from "generalities aimed at a general audience" and "identify themselves and those to whom they write and speak within networks of gender, class, and power," they are able to

120

Professing Rhetoric

"both split and resuture textual selves" (57). Likewise, in distance education, the interrelations of technological and human intermediaries enable teachers to split and resuture their pedagogical selves. These changes in ethos reverber­ ate beyond the fifteen-week semester. For example, at the urging of ITV fac­ ulty, the English Department has composed a position paper which has been sent to the Provost, explaining the problems of continuing with ITV as a means of writing instruction and proposing solutions such as dividing one broadcast time slot among three sections of Advanced Composition. That way, faculty can combine on-line instruction with televised instruction in various proportions, and the English department can keep enrollments for writing courses capped at twenty-three students while the administration can claim that three times as many students are being served for the same cost. (Admin­ istrators must factor the per-hour broadcast cost into the cost per student for delivering distance education.) If we look at teacher ethos as a core category in theorizing distance educa­ tion, we can see that giving up power and taking up power become an interac­ tive dance with several new steps for traditional f2f teachers and students to learn. However, changes in classroom authority are not inherently negative. It's funny that we as teachers do not want to give up too much of our power, yet we want students to assume more power. At the same time that we com­ plain about the administration making pedagogical decisions that should be reserved for faculty, we are not asserting ourselves by making technological decisions. ITV allows us to look at ourselves from new perspectives (after all, our f2f class sessions are captured permanently on videotape) and to learn from what we see. We can find ways to intervene earlier—ways to share power with administrators just as we say we want students to share it with us. Distance ed­ ucation gives us the opportunity to make visible and material our tacit deci­ sions about classroom authority. Let me conclude with a look to the future when my great grandchildren may be playing school. I see that they will be on-line with their cousins who live in different cities. Individual monitor-mounted cameras will transfer their digitized images and audio tracks. Each monitor will receive split-screen im­ ages of all the other players. For these children, the mediating technology will be invisible because teaching with technology will be the norm. But I wonder whether the pedagogical choices will be the same. Will the children compete for the role of teacher? Will teaching time rotate every ten minutes? Will grades be assigned? By whom? As for teacher ethos, I am not sure. If we use the transition from f2f classrooms to electronic classrooms to interrogate our prac­ tices, perhaps we can resuture our "selves/selphs" into a dynamic teacher-ethos that takes us beyond the good sense, good moral character, and good will of the "Subject Supposed to Know" (Brooke 168). We can become open, unsta­ ble, energetic, flexible, non-authoritative, informed subjects that ITV makes a place for—if and when we wish to inhabit that place.

Mediated Ethos

121

Works Cited Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 6.1 (1999): 261-80. Baumlin, Tita French. "'A good (wo)man skilled in speaking': Ethos, Self-Fashioning, and Gender in Renaissance England." Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994. 229–63. Brooke, Robert. "Transference: Plato and the Problem of Rhetorical Method." Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994. 149-69. Dare, Lane. "The Cost of Technological Tensions: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog." Unpublished paper, April 2000. Feenberg, Andrew. "Distance Learning: Promise or Threat?" Feb. 16, 1999. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine, 1967. Hayden, Dawn. "Engagement in Distance Learning: Ruptures in the Established Order." Conference on College Composition and Communication. Atlanta, GA, March 25, 1999. Jarratt, Susan C., and Nedra Reynolds. "The Splitting Image." Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Crit­ ical Theory. Ed. James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1994. 37-57. Moran, Charles. "From a High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: 'You Can't Go Home Again.'" Computers and Composition 15(1) April 1998. 18 June 2000 . Neff, Joyce Magnotto. "From a Distance: Teaching Writing on Interactive Television." Research in the Teaching of English 33 (1998): 136-57. —. "Grounded Theory: A Critical Research Methodology." Under Construction: Working at the Intersec­ tions of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Ed. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 124-35. Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin. "Grounded Theory Methodology: An Overview." Handbook of Qualita­ tive Research. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and YvonnaS. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994.273–85. West, Temple. "Engagement in Distance Learning: Making Students Visible." Conference on College Composition and Communication. Atlanta, GA. March 25, 1999.

This page intentionally left blank

JUANITA RODGERS COMFORT West Chester University of Pennsylvania

The Essay Matters because the Essayist Matters: Personal Disclosures and the Enactment of Ethos in Essays by Black Feminist Writers

The tradition of black feminist essay writing resonates strongly with my own history. I was a teenage girl in the 1960s when writers like Frances Beale used es­ says to articulate an emergent black feminist perspective on womanhood. I was a young military woman in the 1970s when activists like Angela Davis used es­ says to push for recognition of our full enfranchisement in the nation's institu­ tions and social movements. I was a non-traditional college student and the mother of two young sons in the 1980s when advocates like Audre Lorde used essays to assert the integration of domestic experiences and public roles; and I emerged as a college professor in the 1990s when scholars like bell hooks used essays to redefine what it can mean for African American women to be academic intellectuals. Essays from these decades are personally significant because they tell the story of my life as an African American woman. I am painfully aware that black women historically have struggled mightily to claim a meaningful intellectual presence in many social and political spheres of in­ fluence. But it also fascinates me, as a rhetorician interested in the topic of ethos (which I define succinctly as personal power), that black feminist writers who have long sought ways of establishing a substantive presence in conversations about public issues have invested heavily in the essay form. They seem to recognizea fea­ ture that I believe marks the genre as distinctively rhetorical discourse: that the power ... the proof ... indeed, the truth of an essay derives principally from its readers' embrace of its author's vision—that the essay matters precisely because the essayist herself matters. It is a principle that writers like June Jordan, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde have used to great advantage. Whether appearing singly in magazines and newspapers or published in thematic collections, essays have been used successfully by black feminists to place items on the public agenda in ways that meaningfully touch both mind and spirit. Scholarship in African American studies dating from the 1970s and 1980s forward has established the existence of a world view which suggests that being 123

124

Professing Rhetoric

"black" (in terms of belief system rather than color) encompasses a valuation of an independent, long-standing Afrocentric consciousness, along with a shared experience of white domination. Through the lens of this world view, Black fem­ inist thought addresses the complicated relationships among biological classifi­ cation, the social construction of race and gender, the material conditions accompanying these social constructions, and black women's awareness of those intersecting dimensions. Carl Klaus makes the observation that "... essayists seem to conceive of the essay as a place of intellectual refuge, a domain sacred to the freedom of the mind itself" (164). For essayists who are black women, that freedom is counterbal­ anced by an ever-present burden—a legacy of slavery, misogyny, and many other kinds of oppression—that compels them as socially marginalized individ­ uals to forego much of the characteristic detachment privileged by essayists and critics who participate in the (white) European belletristic tradition. Often, black women infuse their essay-writing with rhetorical strategies intended to ac­ commodate this intense relationship among their statuses as writers, their di­ versely positioned audiences, their preferred subject matter, and their own social agenda. My reading of black feminist essays suggests that in significant ways, their authors exert considerable control—ownership, if you will—of the lan­ guage that shapes them as well as their readers. Much more valuable than the ostensible freedom to express themselves that essay-writing affords, ownership of their discursive "selves" made possible by the essay form allows these essayists to invest themselves with the kind of rhetorical power—or ethos—that white male essayists seem to have enjoyed for so long. This perspective has helped me to understand the subjectivities of African American women in a sociological sense, that is, as "human lived experience, along with the physical, political, and historical contexts of that experience" (Ellis and Flaherty 1). It is important to my readings of black feminist essays to acknowledge the relation of the essayist's self-concept to the world around her, and to understand how she integrates cognition, emotion, and the experiences of her lived body in order to develop her work. The sociologists whose work I have reviewed emphasize that subjectivity is situated such that the voices in our heads and the feelings in our bodies are linked to cultural, political, and historical contexts. I extend that general think­ ing to black women, for whom these contexts, importantly, include the positive aspects of community and spirituality threaded through the racism, sexism, poverty, age-discrimination, and class-oppressions. All of these, in their particu­ lar manifestations and interactions, shape the black feminist writer's capacity to articulate the nuances of her subjective processes. I think it is useful to view an essayist's ability to project a sense of herself as be­ ing ultimately tied to her ability to sustain a personal relationship between her­ self and her readers. Wendell Harris acknowledges that while all essays are by definition "personal" to a degree, the voice readers hear acutely in texts that are characterized as "personal essays" would best be described as, in his words, "a

The Essay Matters because the Essayist Matters

125

strong, clear sense of the author's presence" that expresses ... '"here I stand, this is where my honestly described thoughts lead me'" (197). The essay, as a mode of rhetorical discourse, allows the strategic enactment of social agenda because it is flexible enough to accommodate the full range of dis­ cursive options that these writers wish to employ—whether autobiographical or expository, whether understated or strident. Within the territory of the essay, these writers can exert multiple identities, speak in several voices, and engage numerous kinds of battles. They can use the form to show readers possibilities for negotiating their own self-identity, given the multiple locations from which the essayists speak as black women. Black feminist essayists have always aimed to purposefully interpret their own experiences, and those of other black women, by bringing their entire be­ ings to bear in important ways. They have grasped for themselves, and assert to others, the vital connection between what one does and how one thinks. This connection between experience and consciousness that shapes the everyday lives of black women pervades the work of black feminist essayists and shapes their sensibilities as writers. I propose that this subject position, or "self," is built into the text in order to be construed by readers as revelations of the writer's "true," if only momentarily sta­ ble, identity. This "self" speaks and is heard on the basis of what Patricia Hill Col­ lins (217—19) calls an "ethic of personal accountability" for the essay-writer's claims to knowledge. A dynamic of establishing credibility and trustworthiness (which we recognize as the classical notion of ethos) is significantly conditioned by readers' characterizations of writers—characterizations which are in turn condi­ tioned by markers of a speaking "self" that are strategically placed on the page. As a rhetorical discourse, the essay includes special features designed to make it more persuasive to readers and to the writer herself. Among these are what I call personal disclosures. These are bits of information about the writer that she en­ dows with salience, places in specific locations in the essay, packages with other images, flags as revelatory, and connects to the essay's central message. I propose that personal disclosures are rhetorical constructs that work to lay a foundation for readers to accept the essayist's message because they figure vitally in the ne­ gotiation of her ethos. The use of self-disclosures in essay-writing involves providing information about one's physical attributes, attitudes, values, and experiences in a manner that suggests that whatever is being disclosed by the writer may not be widely known, and that the information has significance for both the giver and the re­ cipient of that information. The essayist as rhetor may hope these self-revealing details will demystify her character in the eyes of readers and establish solidarity with them. She will often challenge stereotypes that may stand between her and her audience. She will also work at highlighting experiences, relationships, and values that she anticipates are shared across the cultures represented in her audi­ ence. A disclosure can be considered a "revelation" in that it appears to readers as a vehicle for insight, an idea that should lead them somewhere in their own

126

Professing Rhetoric

thinking. The reader's act of classifying information as disclosure directs him/her to construe whatever message is being delivered in light of what has been disclosed. From the standpoint of ethos, the essayist can create an image of herself which she can deploy strategically as a warrant, authorizing her to make sense of her ideas in particular ways. Just as references to others are often invoked in texts to warrant a given set of facts, so too the essayist's self is called upon in her work to warrant a given range of ideas and opinions. In this way, the essayist can position herself between her subject matter and her readers, and her disclosures, in effect, say to those readers, I want you to seethis through my eyes, but to do so you have to know what has shaped my vision. An essayist can use the tactic of sharing something private with another per­ son, in order to generate a certain level of intimacy, and even a sense of caring, in readers. We put our trust in people we know, in people who identify themselves with us in certain ways. Yet, at the same time, of course, readers are not totally united with the writer; the sum total of her disclosures also highlight where she is different from them. For reasons that become most meaningful within the framework of each text, the essayist as rhetor invites readers to understand con­ currently both the ways they can connect with each other and the ways in which they must remain distinct from one another. An essay-writer typically makes numerous decisions about whether to in­ vest her text with self-disclosures, what to disclose, and where to place them. For example: • Will they be physical descriptions, references to relationships, details of her education, faith traditions, political affiliations, community statuses and roles, interpretations of or reflections on of past life events? • Should they be presented as straightforward declarations, or woven into narrative passages, or merely suggested—hinted at, for example, by adopt­ ing some linguistic features of a group she wishes to be associated with? • Will they come mainly at the beginning or end of the piece, or inter­ spersed throughout? The essay-writer's answers to all these questions, and many more, work to­ ward particular ends designed, among other things, to win readers' authoriza­ tion of the essay-writer to speak on the matter under discussion—in other words, to gain their acknowledgment of her right to speak to them. What follows are some excerpts which illustrate personal disclosures in sev­ eral of the essays I have been studying. To fully appreciate their impact, however, you should read them as they unfold in the original essays. I hope you will read the essays with this question in mind: how does this writer use her self to influ­ ence your reaction to her message? The first set of excerpts are from Audre Lorde's essay "Turning the Beat Around, Lesbian Parenting 1986." They illustrate how disclosures serve to es­

The Essay Matters because the Essayist Matters

127

tablish a critically significant identity. Lorde uses a range of status markers to identify herself in genderized terms and to emphasize her existence within a par­ ticular kinship and broader social context. Her words evoke images and sugges­ tions that many readers can elaborate on from their own experiences, and this elaboration completes connections that facilitate their interpretation of her mes­ sage about the social texture of families headed by Gays and Lesbians: ... when I talk about mothering, I do so with an urgency born of my consciousness as a Lesbian and a Black African Caribbean american woman staked out in white racist sexist homophobic america. (42) I gave birth to two children. I have a daughter and a son two children together with my lover, Frances .... (42)

Raising

We are a Black and a white Lesbian in our forties, raising two Black children. (43) The next passage marries broader, more interpretive ideas to concretely de­ scribed experience: We were an interracial Lesbian family with radical parents in the most conservative borough of New York City. Exploring the mean­ ing of those differences kept us all stretching and learning, and we used that exploration to get us from Friday to Thursday, from tooth­ ache through homework to who was going to babysit when we both worked late and did Frances go to PTA meetings (45). In addition to suggesting something physical and experiential about the essay­ ist, this passage connects that physicality and experience to strong emotions: Jonathan, at seventeen, asking, "Hey Ma, how come you never hit us until we were bigger 'n you?" At that moment realizing I guess I never hit my kids when they were little for the same reason my fa­ ther never hit me: because we were afraid that our rage at the world in which we lived might leak out to contaminate and destroy some­ one we loved. (44) The following set of excerpts are from essays by Alice Walker and June Jordan. These passages illustrate another function of personal disclosures. In each case, these sophisticated, intellectually gifted, and widely respected writers place themselves between their readers and the people they write about. In Walker's essay, "Nobody Was Supposed to Survive," it's the members of Philadelphia's MOVE group. In Jordan's essay, "Requiem for the Champ," it's Mike Tyson. The very mention of these two subjects almost automatically brings to many minds intense images of radicalism, violence, and misogyny. Although Jordan's

128

Professing Rhetoric

prose is perhaps a little more forceful than Walker's, both writers insist that readers view them and their subjects together—and, as explicitly raced beings. Walker's essay reasons through the question of whether the MOVE members deserved "the harassment, abuse, and ... deaths" that were ultimately a conse­ quence of their lifestyle. She establishes a personal, intimate connection with the MOVE members by identifying herself with their physical characteristics such as their dreadlocks hair style: There we stood on a street corner in Paris, reading between the lines. It seems MOVE people never combed their hair, but wore it in long "ropes" that people assumed was unclean. Since this is how we wear our hair, we had recognized this "weird" style: dreadlocks. The style of the ancients: Ethiopians and Egyptians. Easily washed, quickly dried—a true wash-and-wear style for black people (and adventuresome whites) and painless, which is no doubt why MOVE people chose it for their children. And for themselves: "Why suffer for cosmetic reasons?" they must have asked. (156) In "Requiem," Jordan outlines the horrific conditions of poverty and oppres­ sion under which Tyson learned the life-rules that have governed his personal be­ havior as an adult. She indicts those who might share responsibility for maintaining the kind of social order that could dehumanize the former boxer. Like Walker, she strives for the effect of personal connection: Mike Tyson comes from Brooklyn. And so do I. In the big picture of America, I never had much going for me. And he had less. I only learned, last year, that I can stop whatever violence starts with me. I only learned, last year, that love is infinitely more interesting, and more exciting, and more powerful than really winning or really los­ ing a fight. I only learned, last year, that all war leads to death and that all love leads you away from death. (223) I am more than twice Mike Tyson's age. And I'm not stupid. Or slow. But I'm Black. And I come from Brooklyn. And I grew up fighting. And I grew up and I got out of Brooklyn because I got pretty good at fighting. And winning. Or else, intimidating my would-be adversar­ ies with my fists, my feet, and my mouth. And I never wanted to fight. I never wanted anybody to hit me. And I never wanted to hit anybody. But the bell would ring at the end of another dumb day in school and I'd head out with dread and a nervous sweat because I knew some jackass more or less my age and more or less my height would be waiting for me because she or he had nothing better to do than to wait for me and hope to kick my butt or tear up my books or break my pencils or pull hair out of my head. (223)

The Essay Matters because the Essayist Matters

129

These passages by Walker and Jordan show exceptionally well how personal disclosures operate as a persuasive element. As a matter of strategy, the essay-writers provide well-chosen personal information in order to place themselves directly—physically—between their readers and subjects of their essays. Such identification becomes a point of stasis: If Jordan and Walker have succeeded in getting readers to identify them with their subjects, then readers should dislike the writers as much a they dislike Tyson or the MOVE people, or—as I believe Jor­ dan and Walker are counting on—readers should accord the subjects greater value as human beings. The disclosures are calculated to work in conjunction with the essayists' respectability as "Alice Walker" and "June Jordan." Today, I've asked you to consider, specifically, that when an essayist makes personal disclosures in her work, she employs a key strategy in the construction of her ethos. Carefully selected self-revelations can induce readers to validate the authority of the person who "speaks" to them from the pages of the text. I would like to bring this presentation to a close by re-stating my view that the connec­ tions that an essayist makes with her readers by means of personal disclosures re­ lies on her ability to make parts of her being resonate with parts of theirs. Yet, at the same time, reader and writer are not totally united, because the sum total of these disclosures also highlight places where they are different. Ultimately, the essayist as rhetor asks us to understand how we can connect, and how we can be distinct, at the same time. That is the great thing about the essay form—its opens a space for continuity and discontinuity to coexist, in order to help us navi­ gate the territory that a writer claims to inhabit. Works Cited Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1990. Ellis, Carolyn, and Michael G. Flaherty, "An Agenda for the Interpretation of Lived Experience. Inves­ tigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience. Ed. Carolyn Ellis and Michael G. Flaherty. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. 1-13. Harris, Wendell V. "Reflections on the Peculiar Status of the Personal Essay." College English 58.8 (Dec. 1996). 934-53. Jordan, June. "Requiem for the Champ." Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union. New York: Vintage/Random, 1994. 221-26. Klaus, Carl H. "Essayists on the Essay." Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. Lorde, Audre. "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986." A Burst of Light. Ithaca: Fire­ brand, 1988. 39–48. Walker, Alice. "Nobody Was Supposed to Survive: the MOVE Massacre." Living By the Word. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1989. 153-62.

This page intentionally left blank

ELIzABETH HOWELLS Armstrong Atlantic State University

Apologizing for Authority: The Rhetoric of the Prefaces of Eliza Cook, Isabelle Bird, and Hannah More

This article examines how late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers used the apology form of the preface in order to carve a place for themselves in the literary market. This above statement of purpose introduces a series of key terms that we will be interrogating but also leaves a lot of questions. As opposed to apologizing here, as my topic would deem appropriate, for the lack and limitations of this presentation in not looking at the other strategies women might use or the larger issue of the preface as a rhetorical situation or the nature of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace generally, I want to in­ stead focus our attention on the topics at hand: the genre of the preface, the rhet­ oric of the apology, and the presentation of the woman writer. Amelia Opie's early nineteenth-century prefaces offer a rather extreme ex­ ample of the tendency to self-deprecate and apologize. Her preface to Detraction Displayed (1826) mourns her father's death and asks for understanding and sym­ pathy. She writes: "With more than usual self-distrust, I give this book to the world ..." (1). She expresses her diffidence and asks for generosity considering the circumstances. Her preface to Illustrations of Lying a few years later in 1829 blatantly avows her intentions to apologize: "I am aware that a preface must be short, if its author aspires to have it read. I shall therefore content myself with making a very few preliminary observations, which I wish to be considered as apologies ..." (v). So why and how did apology become a type of preface by women? How does Opie's example here illustrate a type of self-presentation common among women during the century? How does apology becoming a good strategy for situating oneself as an author, an authority? How does deflection of authority then go about asserting authority? Through an examination of the prefaces of three writers that span the century in chronology and genre, I want to discuss how women writers achieved their authority by deflecting it. From the pref­ aces of essayist and novelist Hannah More, to those by the poet Eliza Cook, and finally to travel writer Isabelle Bird's, we see these writers use particular strategies to ensure the public of their legitimate authority. Through present­ 131

132

Professing Rhetoric

ing the authors humbly, situating the project as communal, and characterizing the writer's efforts as un-artful, the apology form of the preface becomes a way for its author to gesture to key discursive codes, social or rhetorical, and argue the work's worth. A few significant points urge us to the preface as a site of authorial presenta­ tion. Looking back at the prefaces of Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Johnson, the early history of the preface demonstrates its use as an appeal to a patron or a proem for the author to present his real self. Then the nine­ teenth century enters as a kind of heyday for the preface, where the preface achieved a significant position beginning with the publication of Wordsworth's preface and ending with Hardy swearing off the novel in Jude. We might remember the prefaces across the pond as well known as the primary text's themselves: Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his article about Hawthorne's prefaces, Timothy Dow Adams quotes Christopher Morley's comment about the preface as "a bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is over." (89). The preface, by the nineteenth century, had become a place for the author to receive us into the text. The author could remove the mask of the narrator or the fiction of the narrative and speak to us man-to-man. The author can justify the project, give suggestions for readers, provide a declaration of intention, and finally legitimate his authority. What happens, however, if that author is a woman? How can a woman be publically "intimate" as Morley above suggests? The genre of the preface be­ comes a much more vexed rhetorical situation when, as a location for public self-representation, it demands a female display herself. While literary conven­ tion may beckon the writer to show herself, on no accounts does social conven­ tion allow the woman to strip for us and keep our respect. So what is a girl to do? First, she must apologize for the offense. We see More, Cook, and Bird doing just that. Often apology comes in the form of admission of diffidence. We will see that in Hannah More's preface to her Essays on Various Subjects where she apol­ ogizes to her readers: "It is with the utmost diffidence that the following pages are submitted to the inspection of the Public ..." (1). In her preface to her Poems of 1850 Eliza Cook admits: "I am well convinced that there is much that is faulty in my writing." (4). Isabelle Bird concurs in her preface to her 1856 volume chronicling her travels to America, The Englishwoman in America, by emphasiz­ ing her diffidence: "Where I have offered any opinions ... I have done so with ex­ treme diffidence, giving impressions rather than conclusion" (2). These apologies certainly ring as appropriately feminine, the apologies of a proper woman for being so presumptuous. This self-deprecatory position was a natural one for women writers considering their social place as women. A Victo­ rian middle class wife, the Victorian ideal, was selfless, as Coventry Patmore, Sa­ rah Stickney Ellis, and John Ruskin among others remind us in their descriptions of the Angel of the House. In 1858, writing to her recently married daughter, Queen Victoria herself writes: "There is great happiness ... in devot­ ing oneself to another ..." (104-05).

Apologizing for Authority

133

Certainly the prefaces we have here by More, Cook, and Bird further support this idea of woman as caretaker, as about community betterment rather than self-aggrandizement. Part of the apologetic form of their prefaces can be identified by the way these writers locate its purpose as communal rather than personal. The antithesis of the "cash nexus" system of the increasingly industrialized and capital­ ist Victorian England, community was the project of the woman and found a ha­ ven in her hearth, home, and garden. The woman writer then can apologize while justifying the project as community-driven and community-furthering: she can argue for her text fulfilling a feminine responsibility. The project is justified by the support of select friends or the public at large. Hannah More attributes her success as due to her friend's efforts as much as her own. She goes on to address her preface to "friends" thereby ensuring a readership community. For Cook, these friends are the public which have already welcomed her writing: they "afford indisputable proof of the good opinion I have gained" (3). This good opinion may appear in the form of the public reception, "the patronage already bestowed" she calls it, or just the encouragement of a few intimate friends but is an indispensable component in the justification of a project. All four of her prefaces excuse Bird's presumptions on the grounds that her works were pub­ lished at the urging of friends. Similar to her preface to her American travels, but accounting for her publication on Hawaii, Bird writes: "At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experi­ ences ..." (vii). Somehow part of the apology for authoring needs to involve mak­ ing it less an individual and more a communal project. Not only is the ideal woman about community, but this ideal woman did not desire either intellectually, emotionally, or physically. Throughout the century such ideal women proceed from the pages of great fiction and poetry from Austen's Elinor or Anne Elliott to Bronte's Helen Burns and Miss Temple, from Eliot's Dorothea to Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott." Volumes of Keepsakes recorded visions of the ideal woman: eyes demurely averred, waiting patiently and pas­ sively for lovers to return and make her complete. Women characters and writ­ ers struggled with this ideal, as elusive as any ideal. At century's end Virginia Woolf describes her: "She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the mind and wishes of others" (58-59). She continues: "Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer." This ideal was about sacrifice and selflessness, community and lack of desire. Apology then is a seemingly natural response considering the social restrictions in place. Rather than "Killing the Angel," though, perhaps women writers found they needed to just step on her: in that by standing on her hallowed ground they could step up to higher ground. Diffidence and apology for pre­ sumption proceeds from the discursive system in place and at the same time can

134

Professing Rhetoric

be used to create new discursive possibilities. At the same time that society placed limitations on women, these same restrictions were recuperated by women productively. Women writers were able to gesture to and concede to these appropriate behaviors in order to make their work marketable. The pref­ aces are places where they could signal these codes and use them as grounds for their work's value. Women writers achieved authority through their apologetic prefaces. By assuming their positions as women and assuring the public of their habituating the private sphere, by acknowledging their presumptuousness, women writers use the social codes in place to show how their project is still in al­ liance with ideals of femininity. So we can conclude there perhaps: women writers apologized in the prefaces in order to authorize themselves as good women. But that does not take us far enough. There is a history to the preface that runs parallel with the history of fe­ male humility that suggests the apology as otherwise appropriate for authoriza­ tion. We must turn now to the history of the preface in rhetoric and the proper forms it originally took. Historically, the second of the five canons of oratory, arrangement, takes up the issue of dividing a discourse into parts. In the fourth century Aristotle distin­ guished between four parts. Then Quintilian comes along and argues for five parts, not four. Finally, the well known discussion in Rhetorica ad Herennium sets down the six parts: exordium being the first. The role of the exordium was to predispose the audience to the speaker and topic, the term itself meaning "be­ ginning a web." Often the exordium included both an introduction of the topic, a direct address or pricipium, and an insinuatio or indirect address where a speaker might address the audience in an attempt to create a favorable impres­ sion of his personality. The insinuation portion of the preface or exordium is then tied to ethos as it is about the promotion of the author's good sense, good mor­ als, and good will. It establishes credit with the audience. According to Aristotle in his Rhetoric, ethos was essential for persuasion: "moral character, so to speak, constitutes the most effective source of persuasion" (1.2. 1356al3). Since at least the 4th century then, humility has been urged as the appropriate tone for the exordium as it is an essential virtue for establishing ethos. Repeatedly, here in Book I and later Book II of Of Oratory, Cicero makes this precise point: In my view, even the best orators, those who can speak with the ut­ most ease and elegance, unless they are diffident in approaching a discourse and diffident in beginning it, seem to border on the shameless ... For the better the orator the more profoundly is he frightened of the difficulty of speaking, and of the doubtful fate of a speech, and of the anticipation of an audience. (I xxvi 118—121 (85)) Later in his definition of the ideal orator in Institutes of Oratory as the "good man skilled in speaking," Quintilian reiterates Cicero's earlier point: "for the exor­ dium sometimes takes its complexion from the character of the pleader; and

Apologizing for Authority

135

though he speaks sparingly and modestly concerning himself, yet, if he be deemed a good man, much influence in reference to the whole cause, may de­ pend on that consideration" (Book 4: ch. 1–154). Repeating himself later, Quintilian again: "Very frequently, too, an exordium will be pleasing from a cer­ tain modesty in thoughts, style, tone, and look of the speaker ..." (Book XI ch. 15 (313)). By the nineteenth century, according to John F. Schell in his article, "Prose Prefaces and Romantic Poets: Insinuations and Ethos," through its ex­ tended history, the ethical appeal had become a common convention and cer­ tainly an important part of this appeal had to do with the rhetor's humility. What happens, though, when you are discussing not the "Good man skilled in speaking" but the "good woman." Tita Baumlin addresses just this problem as a good woman wasn't supposed to speak, period. Baumlin proceeds from showing all of the restrictions on a woman speaking in the Renaissance era to ad­ dressing the difficulty of establishing ethos for Elizabeth I as the very public queen of England She explores the rhetorical moves it was necessary for her to make in order to maintain her authority as a good speaker ergo good woman. I believe the preface allowed women writers a location and generic conventions for just that kind of maneuvering. In her examination of the strategies of legiti­ mation in French Renaissance women's prefaces, Anne Larsen defines the genre: "It seeks above all to solicit the reader's good will through the rhetorical device of captatio benevolentiae with its standard exordial topoi ... The less established the writer, the greater the use of exordial topoi.... (11-12). Based on this analy­ sis then the preface was indeed an important location for the woman writer as Larsen goes on to argue. Women writers could face the public as they were ex­ pected to as "un-established" writers by adapting the "apologetic topoi" of the genre to their own ends. By apologizing, women writers could behave as accept­ able women and could also engage the classical rhetorical convention of the ex­ ordium. The preface was originally a location for an orator to disarm the audience, and what better way to do that than to apologize. The woman rhetor was then establishing her ethos as a good woman and simultaneously demon­ strating her acknowledgment of the proper rhetorical device of humility in the exordium of her public speech. Part of the responsibility of the preface then was to establish the rhetor's ethos, to give the argument credibility through the rhetor's credibility. The ora­ tor had to present himself as the good man speaking well and we see here the good woman speaking well too. Part of being a good woman as we saw above was being humble and concerned with community. Part of being a good woman meant not being an author. Many times part of the apology form of the preface for a woman writer meant not only deflecting her own authority but denying her project all together. This meant situating her project as non-literary or re­ moving it from the realm of competition, indeed from the critic's arena, all to­ gether. Women writers were denying their facility with and access to the imagination. This dismissal of their work as the result and product of imagina­ tion, among other things, signals the way in which the faculty of the imagina­

136

Professing Rhetoric

tion had become gendered masculine in the Romantic era. It also integrates the classical associations of the apology with the more contemporary notion of apol­ ogy as defense or what speech act theorists today define the apology as, which is "appropriately offered when an individual has violated a social norm" (Scher and Darley 127). Paradoxically, women writers could defend themselves and their violation, their womanhood—their ethos—by denying themselves as writers. Hannah More will argue that the similarity to real life is the strength of her Essays and elevates their narrative. While exhorting its un-artfulness as its strength, More apologizes for the novel's unliterariness and sets it up as entirely spontaneous, the conception of a daydream on a roadtrip. The work arose out of conversation and discussion and was arranged because of "amusement" rather than literary aspiration. Cook writes that her work may not be literary enough in places as well. In her account of America and of Japan, Bird argues that she was engaged in an act of mimesis, not creation: she had not intended to publish and this account is haphazard and uncrafted. And in the Golden Chersonese, the same lament recurs: "I am quite aware that 'Letters' which have not received any liter­ ary dress are not altogether satisfactory either to author or reader, for the author sacrifices artistic arrangement and literary merit ..." (viii). While we can link the apology form of the preface to the history of the pref­ ace, we must also locate it in the history of the idea of the "apology." The earli­ est meaning of the term Apology from the Greek via Latin (apo + logos) is to defend, not necessarily to express regret or ask pardon. As a formal defense or justification invoking Socrates's Apology, it is not an asking for forgiveness at all but an arguing for a stay of execution. Later Sidney's An Apology for Poetry ar­ gues for literature's instructional—particularly moral—benefits. The term shifts in meaning from defending a person or event in legal courts to a concept or act of writing in society. As defense, the form falls within judicial or forensic discourse according to Aristotle's Rhetoric. In this context then, the apology takes on new meaning: not only is it a way to excuse the project of a woman but to argue for it. The Apology's assertive original history, then, when combined with its later "humble" connotations becomes a powerful rhetorical device for simultaneously deflecting and asserting one's authority. Women writers' use of this standard authorial position as defense allows them to be both women and writers. When considered in light of its original defensive purpose, the apology creates discursive possibilities for women writers. We can identify the ways these apologies yield to arguing for a stay of judgement or yield to an as­ sertion of a project's worth. Hannah More's voice is decidedly assertive despite the introductory diffi­ dence and deference. Again in Strictures More is explaining why she is looking at the defects in the female character as a result of the flawed system of education: "Is it not unreasonable and unjust, to express disappointment if our daughters should, in their subsequent lives, turn out precisely that very kind of character for which ... their instruction had been systematically preparing them?" (ix). The series of rhetorical questions that follows this initial question here, though

Apologizing for Authority

137

supposedly interrogative are decidedly assertive in outlining how she will prove this injustice. Cook, who knows she is a successful writer and whose suc­ cess alone recommends her, in the midst of her apology, reminds us of this suc­ cess in submitting: "... my sense of honesty will not allow me to indulge in the common style of prefatory language; yet if any accuse me of conceit or pre­ sumption, such accusation is most unfounded." (3—4). She wants to avoid both disgenuine deflection and immodest assertion yet still must, with confidence, assert her place. At the same time the project is apologized for, explained as co­ operative, and excused as non-literary, Bird also asserts a claim for its accep­ tance. She articulates her unique accomplishment and demonstrates how it deserves its own place in the market. She prefaces her record of her visit to America with an assurance of her research. Her prefaces to her Japanese book, as with her later Hawaiian account, establish her as traveling new frontiers, a kind of pioneer: "From Nikko northwards my route was altogether off the beaten track ..." (vii). Like the American account she has something new to say because she has seen things differently, and here she wants to argue that she has seen something that others have not. She has forged new paths as a traveler and as a woman. In conclusion, the apology becomes a way for women writers to gesture to appropriate feminine codes and to powerful rhetorical precedents in order to justify their projects. In their prefaces, women writers were using the ideolo­ gies in place to create new discursive possibilities: they were using established ideologies as "the available means of persuasion." Gerard Gennette describes the preface as a "paratext," a threshold between the inside and outside of a text. And social historians have discussed women's role as "hostesses," wel­ coming those from the public within. Given the presence of this common ter­ minology, we need to think of the preface's possibility as a threshold space that can reconcile the private and public, the woman and writer. Perhaps the woman writer is not anxious, alien, or antagonist in the authorial role of the preface writer but able to use the available means to authorize herself and her work. Indeed, perhaps in the preface, we should recognize her as already at home, welcoming the reader within. Works Cited Primary Texts: Prefaces Isabelle Bird. The Englishwoman in America. London: Murray, 1856. —. The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither. New York: Putnam, 1884. —. The Hawaiian Archepelago. 1875. —. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains. New York: Putnam, 1881. —. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels on Horseback in the Interior. New York: Putnam, 1881. Eliza Cook. The Poems of Eliza Cook. 1850. Hannah More. Coelebs in Search of a Wife: Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Re­ ligion and Morals. 2nd ed. London, 1809­ —. Essays on Various Subjects Principally Designed for Young Ladies. London: Wilkie, 1778.

138

Professing Rhetoric

—. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a View on the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Budd, 1800. —. The Lady's Pocket Library Containing Miss More's Essays ... etc. New York. 5th American Edition, 1818. Primary Sources: Rhetoric Anonymous. Rhetoric Ad Herennium. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1954. Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1960. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Of Oratory. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1942. Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory or, Education of an Orator in Twelve Books. 2 vols. London: Bell, 1910. Secondary Texts Adams, Timothy Dow. "To Prepare a Preface to Meet the Faces that you Meet: Autobiographical Rhetoric in Hawthorne's Prefaces." ESQ:Journal of the AmericanRenaissance. 23 (1977): 89-98. Baumlin, Tita French. "A good (wo)man skilled in speaking: Ethos, Self-Fashioning, and Gender in Renaissance England." Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: SMU, 1994. 229-64. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Pres­ ent. Boston: Bedford, 1990. Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. Gennette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Hibbert, Christopher, ed. Queen Victoria in herLetters and Journals. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. Jarratt, Susan C. and Nedra Reynolds. "The Splitting Image: Contemporary Feminisms and the Eth­ ics of Ethos."Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: SMU, 1994. 37-64. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Larsen, Anne R. "'Un Honneste Passetems': Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women's Prefaces." L'Esprit Createur. 30:4 (1990): 11-23May, James M. Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. Schell, John F. "Prose Prefaces and Romantic Poets: Insinuations and Ethos." The Journal of Narrative Technique. 13 (1983): 86-99. Scher, Steven J., and John M. Darley. "How Effective are the Things People Say to Apologize? Effects of the Realization of the Apology Speech Act?" Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 26:1 (1997): 127-40. Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for Women." Women and Writing. San Diego: Harcourt, 1979. 57-64.

STEPHEN A. KLIEN

Augustana College

Romantic Heroism and "Public Character": Ethical Criticism of Performative Traditions in Public Discourse

Scholars of political rhetoric and concerned citizens in a democratic commu­ nity must attend to two tendencies that threaten the very foundation of a demo­ cratic political culture: the tendency to substitute confrontational, exclusionary, and reactionary public argument for civil public discussion, and the seemingly contradictory tendency to reject the notion of "character" as a substantive issue worthy of public judgment. We might begin to improve this confused condition by attending to the mutually defining element linking the concepts of "charac­ ter" and "civil discourse": the constitution of political agency. All political rhe­ tors inherently offer, for public acceptance, a sense of how the political world works, what sorts of action are best within that world, and how political agents should conduct themselves and engage their fellow citizens. We can recognize the constitution of agency, for instance, in the performance of a ubiquitous American political tradition: the rhetorical construction of polit­ ical figures as "heroes": leaders with extraordinary abilities, enthusiastic cha­ risma, and a singular commitment not only to embody the values of the community but to defend such values in mortal combat with those who would oppose the community. Whenever politicians construct themselves as heroes, they offer for public acceptance specific norms and expectations for political action—not just for the hero himself, but also for the community championed by that hero. The performative tradition of "romantic heroism" in American political rhet­ oric constitutes a complex sense of public character that has the potential to both promote and degrade American civil society. This essay first reconceptualizes "public character" as the rhetorical constitution of political agency through the appropriation of performative traditions, and then examines "romantic hero­ ism" as a performative tradition in American political rhetoric of considerable ethical importance. This discussion is intended to illustrate not only the signifi­ cance of heroism in public discourse but also the larger utility of "public charac­ ter" as a critical mechanism for the ethical evaluation of political rhetoric. 139

140

Professing Rhetoric

"Public Character" and the Ethical Criticism of Public Argument One important goal for public argument is the promotion of a "civic culture, one based on communication and persuasion" (Denton 5). Walzer argues that "only a democratic civil society can sustain a democratic state," and "civil soci­ ety is tested by its capacity to produce citizens whose interests, at least some­ times, reach further than themselves and their comrades, who look after the political community" (104, 105). In order to maintain a functional democratic system capable of pursuing the good for its citizens, the citizens within that sys­ tem must possess "political agency" (104)—the capacity to act as "authoritative and responsible participants" (Walzer 105) in public life. The normative goal of civil society provides critics with a central criterion for evaluating political rhet­ oric: Does the rhetorical performance construct a "citizen" capable of demo­ cratic public discourse and efficacious action? Or does it restrain (or eliminate) the capacity of the political subject to participate in public life as a citizen? Redefining "Character" as "Public Character: "Enabling Civic Agency. "Character" is a politically significant issue because it provides a necessary focus on "acting well"—a normative focus essential to civil society, according to Walzer. One instance in which the intersection of ethics and politics through character is fundamentally important is in the election campaign. Contrary to those who draw a distinction between "substantive issues" (that "matter") and "character issues" (that do not), several critics (Bitzer 242—43; Jamieson vii—viii; McGee 53—54; cf. Johannesen 81—82) have identified character as the one issue that citizens can (and should) evaluate when making a voting decision. However, as Johannesen points out, the citizenry is apt to dismiss the signifi­ cance of the "character issue" to the extent it is understood merely as personal traits or moral principles exercised in private life. Such a dismissal allows a well-meaning citizenry to divorce the idea of character from public conduct. As a result, it is an unfortunate yet likely condition that American citizens learn and accept potentially unethical approaches to public life even as they pride them­ selves on attending to the "issues that matter." Citizens should, rather, ap­ proach character as descriptive of action; what one does and should do, as a more concrete account of who one is. I therefore define "public character" as the en­ actment of ethical conduct in public life through the performance of ideal politi­ cal agency. Evaluating "Public Character" as the Product of Public Discourse. Scholars with an interest in the rhetorical constitution of "character" have artic­ ulated the connection between rhetorical practice, the establishment of public relationships, and the constitution of ethical standards for public life (Antczak, Thought and Character, Differences; Benson; Booth; Garver; White). Public argu­ ment teaches the means by which humans existing in social communities can

Romantic Heroism and "Public Character"

141

(and should) interact discursively to think and act, both rationally and ethically. What makes democratic political participation possible is the constitution of an audience that both recognizes its political agency and is motivated to act virtu­ ously for the betterment of the community. As I have argued elsewhere (Klien, Rhetorical Constitution, Defining "Public Character"], "public character" is a normative argument regarding two con­ nected relationships. First, a construction of public character enacts an "ideolog­ ical worldview": a perspective of how the sociopolitical world works and a relationship of political agency between the individual human and the larger world (indicating the available, and best, ways to act in public). Second, a con­ struction of public character enacts a relationship of civic friendship between the rhetor and the audience (indicating a level of respect and identification with other persons within a public community). Ideally, these relationships will be composed of a reciprocal sharing of community values and the possibility for open, interactive ethical conduct through civil discourse and political action, both individual and collective. "Public Character" as an Appropriation of Performative Traditions. Jasinski's (Forms and Limits, Imtrumentalism; see also Murphy) conception of "performative traditions" reminds us that rhetorical invention is an innovative process of drawing from multiple sources of discursive context and interweav­ ing them into a coherent whole. This process is influenced by pre-existing norms and traditions such as ideology and genres of public communication, but not in a unitary, overly deterministic way. These norms are themselves an intertextual interweaving of multiple threads. The possibility of innovation al­ ways exists, since alternative possibilities for interpretation and action are avail­ able to draw from the contextual matrix. Such a connection between context (ideological as well as historical) and tex­ tual performance seems especially applicable to the construction of "character." Norms for character and ideal conduct are virtually never generated from thin air by an autonomous agent. "Public character" involves the negotiation be­ tween the choices of the individual rhetor and a matrix of ideological, intertextual influences which constrain those choices. Therefore, the identifica­ tion and examination of performative traditions in political rhetoric can help the critic recognize how contemporary performances of public character both grow out of and contribute to ongoing traditions of rhetorical performance (Klien, Rhetorical Constitution). Moreover, such an approach can aid the critic in locating contextual con­ straints on rhetorical performance, which can affect how ethical responsibility is allocated by the critic. The appropriation of an ethically suspect performative tradition does not always mean that an individual rhetor is "being unethical" by making such an appropriation; rather, the pattern itself (such as the construc­ tion of a mythic hero character in political campaigns) may inherently involve ethical concerns which can be attributed to the traditions of American political

142

Professing Rhetoric

practice more generally. By featuring the power of textual performance to an equal (if not larger) extent with the specific choices of rhetors as public agents, attention to performative traditions of public character may enable ethical eval­ uations of political practices, institutions and cultural demands on a larger scale. "Heroism" as a Performative Tradition in American Public Character The character of the "hero" is one that has been ubiquitous in public discourse for centuries, especially in politics. A recurring discussion of heroic rhetoric is found in analyses of conservative political rhetoric that utilize the formal concept of romantic myth (Conrad; Lewis; Solomon). According to Conrad, romantic myth creates a "symbolic universe" consisting of "idyllic" and "demonic" worlds that are clearly differentiated and described in ways consistent with the past expe­ riences of the audience. The romantic myth is the story of a heroic struggle of Good versus Evil, situated in a historic past and continuing as an ongoing quest. Romantic myth provides a narrative scheme in which people are justified in acting aggressively to promote positive change in society (a "crusade") even as they spiri­ tually transcend society in favor of the better world to come. Constitutive Elements of the Heroic Tradition. The character of the hero factors centrally into romantic myth. Hankins provides a helpful discussion of the heroic narrative, which he describes as a "monomyth" involving an individ­ ual journey through separation or departure, trials and victories of initiation, a mortal struggle between good and evil resulting in the hero's victory, and a return into and reintegration with society (35). Ronald Reagan appears often in this lit­ erature as an example of how conservative rhetors have appropriated the myth of the hero to construct norms for political agency (Fisher; Hankins; Lewis). Fisher also demonstrates how the character of the hero can be deployed dif­ ferently in order to promote different ideological worldviews and different modes of political agency. For instance, Reagan's brand of "Western heroism" was constructed conservatively, using language such as re- words (e.g., recapture, renew, and so on) and coded god terms (e.g.,family, neighborhood) that suggests a look back to America's past as the source for continued material prosperity (Fisher 305-06). By contrast, John F. Kennedy provided a much different "knight-errant" mode of heroism: one more future-oriented, more concerned with moral principles than with material comfort, more group-oriented than in­ dividualistic, and more prone to act as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary (Fisher 308—09). Whether the hero is a savior of tradition or a knight for prog­ ress, it is undoubtedly a fixture in the American political landscape, one that fac­ tors into the constitution of American public character. Illustration: Romantic Heroism in Presidential Campaign Rhetoric Presidential campaign rhetoric provides perhaps the best evidence of the cen­ trality of the romantic hero myth in American political rhetoric. Not only is the

Romantic Heroism and "Public Character"

143

American presidency the single most powerful position in American govern­ ment and in international affairs, but it is also a condensation symbol for over two centuries of American heritage, values and political philosophy. It is no sur­ prise that most presidential election campaigns invoke, at least in part, the nar­ rative of the romantic hero. What these candidates are competing for, after all, is the position of National Hero. While this essay is being written, Vice President Al Gore is currently con­ ducting his campaign as a demonstration of his heroic potential. In response to the unexpected early success of former Senator Bill Bradley in public opinion polls, as well as to early polls that showed his weakness against Republican chal­ lengers George W Bush and John McCain, Gore began to run not merely as a scrappy underdog candidate, but as a "fighter," one committed to defend those who could not defend themselves. Gore's moral universe is rather different from that of Reagan and the Moral Majority, but it is still defined as a "good guys versus bad guys" battle between vulnerable Americans and those powerful interests who threaten them. Gore's new "fighting spirit" is evidenced in two recent television advertisements run by his campaign. Announcer: He's taken on the worst polluters in America, and be­ come a leading voice for clean air, clean water, and the environment. Al Gore. He fought efforts to cut Medicare, and is the only candidate for president committed to protecting Medicare and preserving Medicaid. He's taken on the HMOs and big drug companies, fighting for a patient's bill of rights and more affordable prescription drugs. The expe­ rience to do the job. Al Gore: Fighting for us. (Gore 2000, "Fighter," emphasis added). Gore: I know one thing very clearly about the job of president. It's the only job mentioned in the Constitution where the individual who holds that job is charged with the responsibility offightingfor all of thepeople. Not one state, not one district, not the wealthy or the powerful or the special interests, but for all of the people. Including, especially, those who need a voice, who need a champion, who need somebody who will lift up those who have been left behind. (Gore 2000, "Champion," emphasis added). Al Gore is a man from and in touch with the community (especially as evidenced by his casual attire and rolled-up shirtsleeves), yet possesses extraordinary strength, stature, resolve and commitment to American values—health and safety, equal opportunity and freedom of choice. Gore defends the weak against the strong in order to uphold these values, and this defense is accomplished by fighting, by being a champion. Indeed, 'Al Gore: Fighting For Us" is a primary slogan for the campaign, voiced at the end of numerous advertisements and on the official campaign web site:

144

Professing Rhetoric

On every issue, Al Gore has been there—a champion of working fam­ ilies. He has worked hard to strengthen our economy while also pro­ tecting the environment. He has sought to help working parents balance the demands of both home and work, and improve the edu­ cational system for their children. He hasfought to increase commu­ nity policing, institute tougher punishment, and ensure smarter crime prevention in our neighborhoods. Every step of the way, Al Gore has been there, fighting for us, fighting for America's families. (Gore 2000 web site, emphasis added) Gore's heroic campaign rhetoric is by no means unique or special; rather, it il­ lustrates the ubiquity of the romantic hero myth in the constitution of American public character. The construction of a heroic character, a singular champion who defends the weak against the evil, serves the purpose of drawing together the inconsistent impulses towards individual freedom and social order through a coherent, familiar and satisfying mythic narrative. Discussion: The Implications of a Heroic Public Character for Civil Society Given the ubiquity and power of romantic heroism as a performative tradi­ tion, it is necessary to evaluate how appropriations of this tradition affect the possibilities for an active, engaged citizenry in a civil society. By engaging this broad tradition in terms of the two key dimensions of public character—ideological worldview and civic relationships—we can note some aspects of this tra­ dition that provide cause for ethical concern. Heroism as an Ideological Worldview. While the persuasive power of the heroic voice may be compelling for political candidates, the ethical implica­ tions of such a voice raise concerns for the prospects of a truly civic culture. To the extent that the candidate is capable of presenting a strong and inspirational performance of this voice, the hero has the potential to inspire and encourage ideal modes of conduct among those who share his commitment to a particular system of values. However, the heroic voice involves a constitution of the politi­ cal world that may actually discourage the development of an active and civil public culture due in part to two ideological tendencies: the vilification of oppo­ nents as mortal enemies to the community, and the preference of a combative approach to politics over a discursive approach of tolerance, negotiation and compromise. Since public life is constructed (through moral binaries and a martial meta­ phor) as a moral struggle between the forces of good and evil, since public issues are defined in terms of a reified set of morally definitive community values, and since the hero acts as a determined "fighter" who sacrifices himself for the bene­ fit of those community values, this character is reluctant to admit of the possible

Romantic Heroism and "Public Character"

145

need for negotiation and compromise as a legitimate component of public dis­ course and policy making. Heroism and Civic Relationships. Such an emphasis on moral combat encourages a confrontational and intolerant relationship with political oppo­ nents. Those who offer alternative worldviews or approaches to public policy are to be fought and defeated rather than respected and engaged with in polit­ ical dialogue. Perhaps more important than the competitive relationship of political oppo­ nents, though, is the civic relationship between the political hero and the pur­ ported beneficiary of heroism. The nature of the heroic narrative seems to promote public passivity and an inordinate reliance on extraordinary political actors. The relationship between the hero and the community is often (but not always) one of unique, individual champion and community of vulnerable vic­ tims. Because Americans are threatened by moral enemies and are ill equipped to defend themselves for material or philosophical reasons, they require the in­ tervention of an extraordinary figure to assume the bulk of responsibility for public action in order to protect themselves and their values. The ethical implications of political heroism include the continued weakening of the public's recognition of their own civic responsibilities. In order to construct a powerful vision and persona, heroic candidates do civil society a disservice by si­ multaneously downplaying the need for citizen involvement and raising unrealis­ tic expectations regarding what a political leader can and should accomplish. The negative results are twofold. First, Americans grow to depend on political heroes as they concern themselves primarily with private self-interest. Second, they set themselves up for disappointment when political leaders fail to live up to the ex­ traordinary expectations that are established by the political narrative of heroism. Alas, politicians invariably reveal themselves as mere mortals incapable of living up to their self-imposed hype; little wonder that American voters find themselves increasingly disillusioned, cynical and apathetic toward politicians who can't pos­ sibly deliver the heroic results they promise. Conclusion The heroic tradition in political rhetoric appears to be extremely attractive to American voters, as the legacies of "great presidents" such as Washington, Lin­ coln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan illustrate. In each case, greatness seems to be defined by the association between the hero, the mythic heritage and traditional values of the nation, and the defense of those val­ ues in the face of adversity and identifiable enemies. As a consequence, most of the candidates are compelled to construct themselves as similar extraordinary public champions. With each construction, the narrative of the romantic hero becomes more and more ingrained as a defining mainstay of American political discourse, and the negative aspects of this narrative continue to erode American civil society.

146

Professing Rhetoric

Works Cited Antczak, Frederick J. Thought and Character: The Rhetoric of Democratic Education. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1985. —. "Differences that Unite Us: John Kennedy's Speech to the Houston Ministerial Association and the Possibilities of Ethical Criticism." Rhetoric and Ethics: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives. Ed. Victoria Aarons and Willis A. Salomon. Lewiston: Mellen, 1991. 121–43. Benson, Thomas W. "Rhetoric as a Way of Being." American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism. Ed. Thomas W. Benson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 293-322. Bitzer, Lloyd F. "Political Rhetoric." Handbook of Political Communication. Ed. Dan D. Nimmo and Keith R. Sanders. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981. 225-48. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Conrad, Charles. "The Rhetoric of the Moral Majority: An Analysis of Romantic Form." Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 159-70. Denton, Robert E., Jr. "Political Communication Ethics: An Oxymoron?" Ethical Dimensions of Politi­ cal Communication. Ed. Robert E. Denton, Jr. New York: Praeger, 1991. 1–5. Fisher, Walter R. "Romantic Democracy, Ronald Reagan, and Presidential Heroes." Western Journal of Speech Communication 46 (1982): 299-310. Garver, Eugene. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Gore 2000, Inc. "Al Gore's Agenda For America in the 21st Century." Gore 2000 Official Campaign Site. May 2000. —. "Champion." Advertisement. Gore 2000 Official Campaign Site. May 2000. . —-. "Fighter." Advertisement. Gore 2000 Official Campaign Site. May 2000. . Hankins, S. R. "Archetypical Alloy: Reagan's Rhetorical Image." Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 33-43. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Jasinski, James. "The Forms and Limits of Prudence in Henry Clay's (1850) Defense of the 1840 Com­ promise Measures." Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 454-78. —. "Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism." Rhetorical Herme­ neutics. Ed. William Keith and Alan Gross. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. 195-224. Johannesen, Richard L. "Virtue Ethics, Character, and Political Communication." Ethical Dimensions of Political Communication. Ed. Robert E. Denton, Jr. New York: Praeger, 1991. 69-90. Klien, Stephen A. Rhetorical Constitution of Public Character and Conservative Ideology in the 1996 Republi­ can Presidential Primary Campaign. Diss. U Illinois, 1999­ —. "Defining 'Public Character': Agency and the Ethical Criticism of Public Argument." Argument at Century's End: Reflecting On the Past and Envisioning the Future. Ed. Thomas A. Hollihan. Annandale, VA: National Communication Association, 2000. Lewis, William F. "Telling America's Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency." Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 280-302. McGee, Michael C. "'Not Men, But Measures': The Origins and Import of an Ideological Principle." Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 (1978): 141-54. Murphy, John M. "Inventing Authority: Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Orchestration of Rhetorical Traditions." Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 71-89. Solomon, Martha. "The 'Positive Woman's' Journey: A Mythic Analysis of the Rhetoric of STOP ERA." Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 262-74. Walzer, Michael. "The Civil Society Argument." Theorizing Citizenship. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. 153-74. White, James Boyd. When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Char­ acter and Community. Chicago: Oxford UP, 1984.

LAWRENCE K. STANLEY Brown University

Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction

In the lengthy and unforward-moving conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty, before Humpty's proclamation that "When / use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean—nothing more or less," there transpires a verbal jockeying-around about choice, about who would choose what subject and at what apparently pointless turn in the conversation each might make that choice. Two things occur on either side of Humpty's attempt to be master of lan­ guage by declaring himself to be master: first, this jockeying-around, and then his complicating remark that some words are "like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed into one word" (Carroll 198). At stake, of course, for the text and its characters, for its author, and for its readers, is the condition of arbi­ tration which, when called upon as Humpty Dumpty calls upon it, effects a sense of the arbitrary, of an order chosen (perhaps whimsically) by speaker/author while (paradoxically) intimating language's own power by virtue of its portmanteau complexity. Just so, certain narrative structures—choices of order and organization not derived from traditional conventions and experimented with sometimes more freely in creative nonfktion than in other genres—appear arbitrary to readers and critics; yet within them are definitive acts of the mind that seek morphological structure, no less definitive and self-conscious than Humpty Dumpty's, although to somewhat more serious intent. Serious enough, if Addie Bundren speaking her lessons about human rela­ tions and language in the middle of As I Lay Dying has any weight here, asserting "that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at" (Faulkner 162), the final preposition pointing toward the void and refus­ ing closure even on this so assertive a statement. And she does keep on speaking her odd monologue, in spite of. First, a definition. Creative nonfiction, although a term in reasonably fre­ quent use, is an ambiguous genre. Teasing out possible definitions, Joselyn Bartkevicius observes that the lines between fiction—what is "made up"—and non-fiction—what is, then, "not made up"—are too easily crossed to separate one definitively from the other, and even non-fiction's usual aspiration to adhere to what-actually-happened marks off little ground to be claimed exclusively: 147

148

Professing Rhetoric

Hemingway bellicosely claiming all those stories not to be about him. Maybe, then, we've got to see the relation rather than the separation between the two, to which Bartkevicius posits: "When a piece of creative nonfiction resembles fic­ tion, the 'non' might suggest not so much 'not,' as something like 'kicking off from.' Why else insist that it is not fiction unless it is in danger of being mistaken for fiction?" (255). Its kinship with poetry—"lyric and image or a structure built on association and repetition rather than narrative" (255)—might reveal a more useful distinction, not fictional narrative but rather structural "layers of strange­ ness" that need "the act of writing ... to unearth" (253), so "[i]n creative nonfic­ tion, in order to tell the truth, I must let the incongruities be ... I must explore the gaps" (254). Whether Iserian blanks or the metaphoric gaps-between-meanings in a word's portmanteau-ness or just absences of conventional transitions, the gaps-to-be-explored open up something in actual experiences or perhaps simply resist our (conditioned) inclination to make a story all of a piece, even the stories about our experiences. But the gaps begin with actual experience—the strangenesses and the incongruities—which are then sustained in or by the text, tentatively or partially stabilized by words and their syntactical arrangements which "create the topography of our minds" (Bartkevicius 256) and "one brain's own idiosyncratic topography" (Dillard 270). Typography—"natural and artifi­ cial features of a district; knowledge or description of these"—is etymologically dependent upon topos or place seeking location. And by mere shift of vowel, to­ pography becomes typography—"the style, arrangement, or appearance of typeset matter"—so the features of the mind and the text of the mind merge in the mingling of words as mind seeks location in words. "We tell ourselves stories," Joan Didion reminds us in her prefacing remarks to The White Album, "in order to live.... We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writ­ ers, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasma­ goria which is our actual experience" (11). Chafing against the imposition of traditional narrative linearity and sensing with unsettledness its "adequate enough performance" (12), since "the production [of it] was never meant to be improvised," led Didion to realize: "to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as more electrical than ethical" (13). No surprise that, articulating her motives for writing, she would assert that "the arrangement of words matters." And here, to be wordsprung from the unreal of the literal, she segmented her narrative into fifteen numbered and nonsequential bits, "disparate images." Nonfiction "Kicking Off From" Even definition needs location or instances-of: creative nonfiction is memoir, autobiography, and biography; history; travel writing, nature writing, and sci­ ence writing; essays; literary journalism; all narrative structures of relative fa­

Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction

149

miliarity. Nor perhaps is it entirely banal to point out that not all writers of these chafe at imposed conventional narrative lines. Of those who do, however, one finds contemporary instances-of rather easily enough: at one end is Jonathan Raban's accessible Passage to Juneau layering as it does Raban's experiences with Vancouver's historical explorations and surveying of the stretch of water be­ tween Seattle and Juneau; at the other are Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, far from inaccessible but without overt section-to-section rhetorical links, and Wal­ ter Benjamin's Arcades Projects with its 925 pages of disparate yet correlating notes, and E. L. Doctorow's City of God, a fictional instance of this type of narra­ tive structure. Traditionally, then, these discourses—memoir and travel writing and so forth—replicate actual chronological order or at least stick to the time sequence of what-happened and so form-wise are prestructured (apparently) by the events themselves into formed-before-writing personal anecdotes. Here, how­ ever, my concern is with those who assume that nonfiction's main objective (or potential) might be more than the replication of something that precedes the writing (recognizing, of course, the necessity of being-before, without which nothing could be written) and liberation from enslavement to an overly defini­ tive literalism, not then expecting the words to match closely something not-words: "words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at." The forms which the not-fitting words take when arranged together—if that form is not spatially or temporally or causally (pre)figured—lack conventional markers of coherence. What those forms might be, if not mere hotchpotch, has been discussed, argued, and written about, and even the title of Robert Root's es­ say ("Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment") suggests that the naming itself might go on and on. Carl Klaus traces back his experience with the form to reading E. B. White's and George Orwell's essays and then keeps going back to find a tradition to avoid such labels as newjournalism orpostmodernism, goes back via the terms paratactic and disjunctive to Montaigne and Bacon and to the possibility "that disjunctive form often seems to be occasioned, at least in part, by an impulse to evoke a sense of the rich array (one might even say, the disarray) of images, observations, recollections, and reflections that may have come to mind during the process of exploring or thinking about a particular subject, experience, or aspect of existence" (46). Montage-parataxis, inclusionary in form, approxi­ mates the movement of thinking rather than the stasis of the already-thought: "the segmented form and shifting focus of disjunctive essays tend to suggest the wide-ranging movement of a mind in theprocess of recollection and reflection, as well as the associative leaps and intuitive connections that the mind often makes in the process of pondering a particular subject or experience" (46 italics added). The comprehension of fragments or segments, in reading such texts, gets complicated by reading further segments and experiencing a constant back-and-forth move­ ment of thought unlike the more traditional accumulative effect of a linear text, "almost as if I were experiencing some of the very same associative leaps that might have provoked the essayist to write a piece in disjunctive form" (46).

150

Professing Rhetoric

"Associative leaps," attaining to "in the process of," reflect the realization that life, the experiences of it and the being in it, is not narratively coherent but rather is fragments of consciousness, momentary sensations of the sensual and sensuous; the writer, then, seeks a cognitive and aesthetic textual complexity that does not express but morphologically is a peculiar constructed conscious­ ness. So Orwell, ruminating on his schoolboy days at Crossgates, concludes "Such such were the joys" with a string of sense-bound memories: "And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting a scene of childhood: how small everything has grown, and how terrible the de­ terioration in myself" (55). Or what I sense picking up this old Doubleday An­ chor paperback and smelling that peculiar odor of paperback pulp paper and reading the first sentence of "Marrakech"—"As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few min­ utes later"—and the sensations and thoughts of that first reading come back paratactically as more than can be summarized or paraphrased. On my desk and on the floor around me are books and photocopied sheets of paper, the Nonesuch Library edition of Lewis Carroll's complete words with Tenniel's drawings and Annie Dillard's Encounters with Chinese Writers and a first edition signed copy of William Gass's Habitations of the Word and T. E. Hulme's posthumous Speculations, second edition, and Hulme's translation of Henri Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics and Roland Barthes's Image Music Text with its coming-apart Perfect binding and a photocopy of Barthes's "Literature and Dis­ continuity" and three Nicolas Freeling novels and a scattering of notes on yellow lined paper. Out of this chaotically juxtaposed mess of already-written texts I am trying paratactically to let something emerge, first stringing out ands. And tenta­ tive and tenuously holds together the thing trying to (in)form itself, for and "desig­ nates only external and unnecessary relations" (Gass 167) and and is "almost essential for excess ... enumerates things and conditions ... and helps to fork them into heaps" (170), and and effects "ghostly forms, whiffs, sibilant sugges­ tions, vague intimations," but mostly and creates lists which "are juxtapositions"—William Gass reminds us in his essay "And"—which "often employ some of the techniques of collage. Collage, of course, brings strangers together, uses its 'ands' to suggest an affinity without specifying what it is, and produces, thereby, a low-level but general nervousness" (176). Such nervousness, aroused subtly by the potential sublimity of the list's unendingness (after all, nothing stops the possibil­ ity of yet another and) in both writer and reader (will this never end?), marks the crucial nature of montage-paratactic morphology. The writer is not merely amassing material in a shaken pot but rather ex­ plores the potential of form formulating itself out of the way one perceives, re­ flects, reads, of form formulating as in the sound of notes brought together into music, of form formulating its own morphology.

Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction

151

"The lasting effect [of music]," Susanne Langer tells us, "is, like the first effect of speech on the development of the mind, to make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions" (244). And so she offers the notion of the "unconsum­ matedsymbol" wherein "the assignment of one rather than another possible mean­ ing to each form is never explicitly made" (240). Here again is the portmanteau of words, the irreducible and hence unconsummated meaning, now played out with improvisational gesture like Didion breaking from the linearity of conven­ tional narrative . When Donald Davie picks up Langer's philosophical making-things-conceivable, he remarks that "the central act, of poetry as of music, is the creation of syntax, of meaningful arrangement" (16) that makes possible through/in "the structure, the morphology of feeling," the presentation, the feeling of '"what it feels like to feel'" (19). And so quotation layered upon quotation. This articula­ tion of layering, then, is not prose syntax or traditional forms of prose syntax, but "dislocated syntax," as Davie terms it, describing Pound's Cantos: "a syntax that is musical, not linguistic ... understood ... to mean not only the rhythm that rides through tempo and metre in the verse-paragraph, but also in the rhythmical recurrence of ideas hinted at in one canto, picked up in another much later, suspended for many more, and so on" (20). What suspends "propositional sense" (21) in poetry helps identify the creative nonfiction experiment in locating sense and meaning in a paratactic morphology. Creative nonfiction's paratactic morphology is without or beyond conven­ tional markers of coherence, and it refuses too the conventions of closure, in turn resisting certain "commodifications"—if you will—that are possible with the easily paraphrased text whose closure offers with closure the very proposition it­ self. And you have to love words for this, not narcissistic or uncritical love but rather their terms of engagement, because they resist the capriciousness of sheer arbitrariness and demand the performative, akin to the improvisation of jazz but with words rather than notes, to fulfill in some particular way Joan Didion's claim that "the arrangement of words matters." An image, rather than conceptual definitions or instances-of, might bring all this into tangibility. The flâneur is handy enough, that peripatetic wan­ derer, without singular character, moving along "felt knowledge" (417), handy too because Walter Benjamin found him useful as an image of the con­ sciousness of the paratactic, navigating between where streets allowed him to go and where he whimsically might want to go: "The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him every street is precipitous. It leads downward—if not to the mythical Mother, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private" (416). '"His eyes open,'" Benjamin later on notes, this time quoting Larousse, '"his ear ready, searching for something entirely different from what the crowd gathers to see. A word dropped by chance will reveal to him "' (453). Even in this layering of quo­ tations, one sees the move away from personal expression, to the not-private,

152

Professing Rhetoric

toward a sensibility that walks with open senses, "usually a little vague and al­ ways humble before the thing" (Percy 61). But the flâneur's reputation as an idler, a layabout, a whimsical sightseer, even if intensely observant, risks Humpty Dumptyness and needs philosophical rigor if its morphology is to achieve aesthetic-cognitive significance. In his Intro­ duction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson states that "our interest is often complex. This is why it happens that our knowledge of the same object may face several successive directions and may be taken from various points of view" (35—36). Written inquiry, then, must parallel the multi-perspective perceptions of curios­ ity: "to seek to penetrate with them ['ready-made concepts'] into the inmost na­ ture of things, is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it" (27). A paratactic morphology, then, to catch this mobility, must pick up and posit the fragments of details, must "[m]erely show," as Benjamin claims (460), and therein "to discover in the anal­ ysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalness" (461). Akin to the splitting of at­ oms, montage-parataxis "liberates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the 'once upon a time' of classical historiography" (463). Rhetoric, Roland Barthes has pointed out, "must construct a work in large masses and let the details take care of themselves." "Paraphrase," on the one hand, "is therefore the rational operation of a criticism which demands of the book, above all, that it be continuous" (174) and to that end must be preposi­ tional. Parataxis, on the other hand, values details over the schema or over tradi­ tional notions of development and inverts or redefines the rhetorical. Thus paranarrative—not metanarrative, which emulates paraphrase and resembles the rhetorically overreaching structure of the Aristotelian beginning-middle-end (and thereby propositionally "explains" a text)—is a morphology whose construction-of is evident like "the mobility of the real," including the real of the writer writing and the reader reading, in the act of. Hence the surprise of discov­ ery, the flâneur coming-across. While "discontinuity is the fundamental status of all communication: signs never exist unless they are discreet" (181), in tradi­ tional coherence such discreteness is minimized by conventional forms and markers; in montage-paratactic texts, the part-whole relation of traditional texts is disturbed, because these are texts "without rhetorical transcendence" (178). Barthes arrives at the notion of marquette, a "preliminary model or sketch," from the French/Italian macchia or "spot," "not, strictly speaking, a ready-made structure which the work must transform into an event; rather it is a structure to be realized starting from pieces of events." Bergson and Benjamin and Barthes: a gathering of names from the begin­ ning of the alphabet in an effort to begin a paranarrative. In montage-parataxis, flâneur is text and writer and reader, so the conventional and triangularly-represented distinctions made among these begin to dissolve, in film-like montage, and the act of reading comes close to the act of writing and the act of the text comes close to the act of the mind—a performance of meaning within which the

Paranarrative and the Performance of Creative Nonfiction

153

"mobility of the real" is possible as piece is placed along side piece, the parataxis of the writer and the reader and the text, strangers brought together within a suspension of the propositional. Such "work calls for a uniquely attentive reader, capable of following all the 'leaps and gambols,' all the 'sallies and variations' of a mind in action" (Klaus 45). Therein is the potential of performance whose po­ tential is realized in the acts of writing and reading, acts that might even invoke "the power of incantation or prayer" (Root 360) as writer assembles words to­ ward form and reader, working within the arbitrage of words, approaches an ac­ tive performance perhaps akin to singing the significance of a text. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972. Bartkevicius, Joselyn. "The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction." The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg. Boston: Allyn, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA, & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. T. E. Hulme. London: Macmillan, 1913. Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. 1896; London: Nonesuch Press, n.d. Davie, Donald. Articulate Energy: An Enquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry. London: Routledge, 1955. Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Dillard, Annie. "To Fashion a Text." The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg . Boston: Allyn, 1999. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Cape, 1930. Gass, William. Habitations of the Word. New York: Simon, 1985. Klaus, Carl H. "Excursions of the Mind." What Do I Know: Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Essay. Ed. Janis Forman. Portsmouth: Heinemann, about 1996. Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. 3rd ed. 1957; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971 Orwell, George. Collected Essays. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954. Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, 1992. Root, Robert, Jr. "Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment." The Fourth Genre: Contem­ porary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Ed. Robert L. Root, Jr. and Michael Steinberg. Boston: Allyn, 1999.

This page intentionally left blank

JAMI CARLACIO and ALICE GILLAM Ball State University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Preparing Ethical Citizens for the Twenty-First Century

"Rhetoric is a study that—in addition to imparting an art and guid­ ing good practice—encourages critical and substantive reflection about the situated relations of discourse to reason, character, and community in human action." —David Fleming, "Rhetoric as a Course of Study"

The development of undergraduate courses with a specific focus on rheto­ ric has traditionally been the province of communications departments. In recent years, however, some composition and rhetoric programs, including ours, have begun to develop undergraduate rhetoric courses beyond first-year composition, sometimes in collaboration with communications departments, sometimes not. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, we have participated in a unique partnership with our communications col­ leagues for the past year or two on a proposal for a certificate program in rhe­ torical studies. At the center of this proposal are three core curricular areas, each informed by a concern for ethics: rhetorical foundations, rhetorical in­ quiry, and rhetorical action. In working on this proposal, we have been confronted with many challeng­ ing theoretical and practical questions, two of which we address in this paper: 1) How do we offer our students a historical perspective on rhetoric that both challenges the dominant Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition and incorporates the rhetorics of previously silenced groups? 2) How do we answer the question of ends? That is, how do we answer the ancient rhetorical question posed by Plato's Socrates, "Is it not the responsibility of the teacher of rhetoric to also teach virtue?" In the first part of our essay, we discuss the theoretical and prac­ tical implications of a curriculum that investigates the contested nature of rhe­ torical history and argue for the value of including heretofore silenced or unacknowledged rhetorical traditions in a rhetorical studies course. We then take up the issue of ethics and its place in our curriculum. 155

156

Professing Rhetoric

Mining for Gold in the Gaps and Fissures of the Rhetorical Tradition We propose an undergraduate curricular model of rhetorical studies that is not limited to the ancient Greek and Latin traditions that promote the idea of speaking well in both a practical and moral sense. We believe our students will be better served by introducing them to a more richly defined tradition that in­ cludes the textual and oral practices of those rhetors who have remained behind the curtain of the dominant discursive tradition. We are not advocating that we jettison a rhetorical history that has already written us, but we are advocating one that highlights, alongside Plato, Aristotle, the sophists, Quintilian, and Cicero, those from whom we have heard so little: Diotima and Aspasia; Chris­ tine de Pizan; Maria Stewart; bell hooks; and Henry Louis Gates. A fruitful way of studying rhetorical history and criticism, in our mind, is to place competing ideas and discourses side by side so that they can engage dialec­ tically. What we hope emerges is a classroom, a miniature polis, where ideas are traded and debated in a spirit of democratic exchange, where ideas from com­ peting discourses and traditions are discussed, making possible a democratic community and a citizenry whose aims are ethical. We are schooled in a tradition where vocabularies—discourses—wield a certain power; we must, therefore, give our students the tools both to acknowledge the power of such vocabularies that have named our world for so many centuries and to question their relevance for our world today. In a sense, what we are asking our students to do is engage in a rhetorical critique of all discourses, all narratives; we are asking them to recog­ nize knowledge differences as well as interrogate the conditions that made some of them dominant in the first place. In order to do this intellectual work, we must interrogate the concept of a democratic community, one that allows for the opportunity for all—not a select few—to debate, accept, or reject a range of ideas and truths that are based on differently lived material realities. In other words, we must question the useful­ ness of a narrowly defined Greek democracy that privileged Athenian men and consider instead one that allows for a plurality of multicultural voices that tra­ verse class, gender, race and ethnic boundaries. We are guided here by the work of political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, whose conception of radical democracy corresponds roughly to the kind of rhetorical studies classroom we envision. In The Return of the Political, Mouffe explains that "since there will always be com­ peting interpretations of the democratic principles of equality and liberty, there will therefore be competing interpretations of democratic citizenship" (66). It might sound as if Mouffe is suggesting a poststructuralist relativism here. She is, in fact, arguing for the necessity of a community's *shared* ethico-politico val­ ues, of a shared identification with the values of liberty and equality that do not compromise the differences associated with race, class, gender, ethnicity, and so on (69–71). Put another way, this anti-foundational approach to studying the rhe­ torical tradition leads to the critical interrogation of all discourses and provides a hermeneutic structure that considers the social, economic, racialized, and

Preparing Ethical Citizens for the Twenty-First Century

157

gendered perspectives of a multicultural community. Opening up the notion of a democratic community makes space for a broader rhetorical history populated—both then and now—with the heretofore suppressed or ignored rhetorics whose hermeneutic and epistemological practices necessarily call into question the validity of received histories. As rhetorical theorists, we engage in the critical act of inquiry, paying atten­ tion to the way that knowledge is made and valued as well as positioning our­ selves to hear the varied nuances of different ways of knowing. Jane Sutton's clever tropological analysis of the origins of rhetoric suggests that the rhetorical tradition already entails instability and slippage which compromises its patriar­ chal authority. Sutton calls into question the universal narrative logic of Tradi­ tional (Big T) rhetoric that cannot keep separate its conventional taxonomy of ordered thought—reason—from its mythic nature whose eloquence give rise to its opposite, style (see "Taming"). By comparing the originary myth of rhetoric (female) with its traditional logical authority (male), Sutton ably turns rhetoric on itself. That is, by reworking of rhetoric through metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony she subverts the authority of rhetoric/logic/male and foregrounds its opposite, rhetoric/style/woman/whore. Sutton's recasting of rhetoric's history with the subversive mythic rhetoric-as-woman illustrates that history is a contested and slippery concept, and it invites the possibility for (re)defining rhetoric and for hearing its many voices. We offer two examples to illustrate this point. First, Jami is working on a project wherein she is researching the rhetorical practices of two antebellum nineteenth-century women, one of whom is African American. Very little has been written on Maria Stewart, and only within the last few years has any scholarship been produced that situates her within a rhetorical tradition—an African Amer­ ican one conducted by African American women. As she focuses on Stewart's speeches and written texts in order to derive from them rhetorical principles, Jami considers Stewart's contributions to African American rhetorical traditions as well as to cross-cultural rhetorical traditions generally. Arguably, Stewart played a major role in the early feminist movement as well as the abolitionist and to some extent the black nationalist movement, but her voice has been largely excluded from rhetorical history. Despite Stewart's efforts to galvanize a rela­ tively small, free black community in Boston, being neither white nor male made it virtually impossible for her to construct an ethos that would effectively appeal to her mixed audience. As a result of these difficulties, her oratorical pur­ suits were short-lived, but her presence at the podium and in print allows us to resurrect her presence and place it historically within a larger community of women, of African Americans, and of rhetors in general. Just as Stewart attempted an alternative rhetorical approach to invoking a community, Henry Louis Gates has identified a rhetorical style that differs from traditional (white) discourse; specifically, he argues that Signifyin[g] is the pri­ mary trope in African American discourse. Citing it as a "profound disruption at the level of the signifier" (1195), Gates explains that African American

158

Professing Rhetoric

Signifyin[g] is a direct critique of white meaning. In its linguistic misdirection, such Signifyin[g] destabilizes standard discourse and at the same time functions as a trope of community for African Americans. More than this, however, Signifyin[g] has become a survival technique in so far as it allows this commu­ nity to create their own knowledge practices, to exist within yet apart from the dominant discursive tradition, simultaneously. That is, while Signifyin[g] de­ parts from the structural or explanatory power of the Saussurian system, its pur­ poseful misdirection nevertheless allows for a strategic autonomy with the African American community whose unique rhetorical style begets cultural specificity. If we introduce Gates's Signifyin[g] to our students in rhetorical studies, we are offering them insight into the ways existing power structures might be po­ tentially undermined with the introduction of alternative rhetorical practices. By doing so, we necessarily set up a dialectical relationship in which competing rhetorical systems that implicitly call into question the privileged status of one versus the marginalized status of the other. Analyzing competing rhetorics al­ lows us and our students to consider the ways in which rhetorical practices shape our material realities, and ultimately sheds more light on the ways we have all been constructed by rhetorical history. Both Sutton and Gates illustrate for us the possibility of a curriculum that hopes to prepare its students for ethical, democratic citizenship. By structuring a rhetorical studies curriculum whose discourses are set in dialectic motion, we are preparing our students to interro­ gate the power relations inherent in the competition for epistemic priority. Fur­ thermore, Stewart's experience allows us to put theory into practice. By enabling students to find meaningful ways to converse with and within different discourse communities, they stand poised to secure the possibility of a demo­ cratic social structure. Grappling with the Q Question As we have just argued, a critical and multicultural approach to rhetorical history and theory is necessary if we are to prepare students to engage effectively and ethically in civic discourse. We turn now to what Richard Lanham has called the Q question: Can virtue be taught? Or more pointedly, is it the responsibility of the teacher of rhetoric to teach virtue? In Western rhetorical traditions, the desire to connect ethics with eloquence (or "discoursing well") goes back at least as far as Protagoras, who democratized the notion of arete, civic virtue, and argued for its teachability (Schiappa 168—71). Al­ though most ancient rhetoricians were unwilling to claim, as Protagoras did, that they taught virtue, none could really avoid addressing the question in some fash­ ion or other. Plato's Gorgias bluntly says "no," teaching virtue is not the teacher of rhetoric's responsibility, although Gorgias's own performance and instruction suggest an ethical concern for ensuring that the most probable version of truth at a given time prevail. Isocrates says in the Antidosis that while virtue cannot be di­

Preparing Ethical Citizens for the Twenty-First Century

159

rectly taught, it can be learned through exposure to models of virtuous speech; and, of course, Quintilian answers the question by begging it, that is, by simply asserting that by definition the rhetor is "A good [person] speaking well." It is in Quintilian's honor, that Lanham dubs the question of teaching virtue the "Q" question, after "its most famous nonanswerer" (155). In a curriculum aimed at preparing ethical citizens for the twenty-first cen­ tury, we can hardly avoid the Q question nor can we afford to dodge it as Quintilian does. However, facing up to this question from a postmodern, multi­ cultural perspective raises very difficult questions: Given the absence of founda­ tional truth for many of us, on what basis do we derive ethical principles? How might our notion of ethics reflect and mediate cross-cultural differences in ethi­ cal ideals? What is the relationship between private moral beliefs and a negoti­ ated sense of public morality? How do we go about connecting ethics and eloquence in the curriculum and in our teaching? While it is surely impossible to address any of these questions adequately in such a short paper, we'd like to ad­ dress a few of them briefly. As Robert Scott argued in his seminal essay "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," those who eschew foundational notions about truth face a greater not a lesser responsibility for ethical action, symbolic and otherwise: "One who acts without certainty must embrace the responsibility for making his [or her] acts the best possible" (137). While Scott suggests three "ethical guidelines" for indi­ vidual ethical action—tolerance, will and responsibility—Celeste Michelle Condit offers a theoretical framework for ethical community action. In "Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construction of Morality," Condit suggests that although private moral beliefs may be irreconcilable, the need to act as a community offers the possibility for a publically negotiated, rhetorically con­ structed concept of morality. Briefly, we'd like to summarize three of Condit's arguments, for we believe they offer us a place to begin conceptualizing a teach­ able kind of "virtue." First, Condit argues, "public rhetoric requires that an individual speak a pub­ lic language that includes linguistic commitments shared by all who are constitu­ ents of a community.... More fundamentally, these terms are moral because the public arena, by its very nature, requires the use of terms that match the essen­ tial requirements of morality—the sacrifice of self interest for larger goods" (309). In other words, the act of engaging in public discourse forces individuals, if they are to be persuasive, to articulate their concerns in more tolerant, less self-interested, more responsible terms. Second, she argues that while there are no universal moral codes that cross all cultures, there are certain boundary con­ ditions such as the killing of humans or "lying in cooperative communication sit­ uations" which are cross-culturally considered to be morally problematic (311). But just as the moral prohibition against killing humans gets set aside in the par­ ticular situation of war or capital punishment, so, too, other general notions of the "good" become radically redefined when applied to given situations: "[T]he [moral] 'goods' themselves are created and defined within these contests, be­

160

Professing Rhetoric

cause agonistic attempts to apply general concepts of 'goodness' to particular is­ sues require the definition, challenge, and transformation of 'general goods' themselves ... Consequently, general principles do not preexist particular moral quandaries but are produced from them" (309). Third, Condit argues that only through "equality in communication," that is, inclusive participation of diverse members of the community can we insure that "dominant elites" will not "hi-jack" public discourse and definitions of morality for "partisan ends" (310). The metaphor Condit uses for this work of rhetorically and communally con­ structing morality is "craft" for its suggestion of collectivity: "[M]orality is con­ structed by collectivities through their public discourse in a process ... that utilizes the capacity of discourse simultaneously to create, extend, and apply moral concepts" (320-21). Clearly, one reason that Condit's notion of morality as a "craft" appeals to us is that we see such a craft as teachable. We'd like to con­ clude by suggesting two approaches to teaching the craft of virtue. One approach is Krista Ratcliffe's notion of rhetorical listening. Ratcliffe de­ fines rhetorical listening as "a trope for interpretive invention" (196—97). As such, "rhetorical listening turns hearing (reception) into invention (production)" (220). Elaborating further, she says, "The rhetorical listening that I am promoting is a performance that occurs when listeners invoke both their capacity and their will­ ingness (1) to promote an understanding of self and other that informs our culture's politics and ethics, (2) to proceed from within a responsibility logic, not from within a defensive guilt/blame one, (3) to locate identification in discursive spaces of both commonalities and differences, and (4) to accentuate commonalities and differences not only in claims but in cultural logics within which those claims function" (204). Although related to the concept of "active listening" in communications studies and "critical reading" in English studies, it differs significantly from both. Unlike the notion of active listening, rhetorical listening "means more than simply listen­ ing for a speaker/writer's intent " in order to paraphrase the discourse back to speaker/writer to confirm that intention (205). And unlike literal and metaphori­ cal notions of reading, rhetorical listening means more than reading critically in order to "master" the text. Rather it means "letting discourses wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics" (205). It means listening for voice as well as silence, for emotion as well as reason; it means listening paratactically, suspending judgment and rational management of meaning, letting the discourse steep in one's consciousness. As Ratcliffe suggests, sometimes "we can hear what we cannot see" (207). Particularly useful for our project is Ratcliffe's notion teaching rhetorical listening as a "code of cross-cultural conduct," a phrase she takes from a talk by Jacqueline Jones Royster. For if public morality requires "equality in communication," then surely we need not only to include the many heretofore excluded others but also we need to learn how to lis­ ten differently. Another approach to teaching virtue as craft involves turning the process of stasis inquiry on its head. Rather than seeking to arrive at a shared point of stasis, this strategy involves teasing out all of the questions at issue and identifying as

Preparing Ethical Citizens for the Twenty-First Century

161

many conflicting interests and values as possible. This approach is one advanced by practical ethicist Anthony Weston in Toward Better Problems. Although Weston never refers to stasis theory, or to rhetoric for that matter, his line of thinking paral­ lels this ancient inventional strategy. Arguing against the tradition in practical ethics of seeing ethical problems as puzzles to be solved or as episodic events to which one discovers and applies a particular moral principle, Weston argues for conceptualizing ethical problems as complex problematic situations which often yield no simple answer and which often involve conflicting moral principles. Drawing on Dewey, he recommends two general strategies. First, he suggests that rather than viewing ethical dilemmas as episodic, discrete problems we reconceptualize them as complex, contextualized ethical situations. This process of redefinition enables the discovery of what Weston calls "better problems"—that is, a more fully defined sense of the problematic situation. Embedded in these "better problems" are often new issues and considerations as well as new kinds of solutions. Following from this complication of the ethical dilemma is the second strategy recommended by Weston—integrative decision-making in which patterns or connections are made among competing principles and values and decisions are made with the full realization of their trade-offs and compro­ mises (5—7). As heuristics or inventional practices, rhetorical listening and better problematizing are closely related and can be combined pedagogically. For exam­ ple, in a freshman seminar that Alice taught, "Ancient Rhetorics and the Modern Arts of Persuasion," she used the Oakland School Board debate over Ebonics to il­ lustrate the complex and competing issues and discourses involved in public pol­ icy decisions. The class read the original Oakland School Board resolution, its revision, editorials for and against the proposal, including Jesse Jackson's initial condemnation of the proposal and his later retraction of his objections. The class grappled with various questions at issue: questions of definition, value, conse­ quence, and procedure. For example, we considered such questions as the follow­ ing: Should Ebonics be defined as a dialect and thus a variation of English or as a distinct, African-influenced language? And what consequences follow from either definition? Should we privilege the value of self-esteem that comes from the study of one's home language or risk the loss of self-esteem that might come from privi­ leging dominant language practices in order to enable students to succeed in the educational and professional mainstream? The class also read excerpts from Zora Neal Hurston's and Alice Walker's fiction written in Ebonics as well as the mixed discourse in more academic essays by Geneva Smitherman and Keith Gilyard and discussed our emotional as well as our rational responses to Ebonics, noting the differences in our responses according to race, class, age, regional background. And while students did not end up agreeing on the issue of bilingual education or the place of Ebonics in the language arts curriculum, they did end up seeing the is­ sue in much more complex terms and appreciating more fully other points of view. In short, the salutary effects of Condit's notion of rhetorically crafted moral­ ity were evident in these class discussions on Ebonics—students saw how vari­

162

Professing Rhetoric

ous constituencies articulated their views in terms that accommodated the concerns of larger or opposing constituencies; they saw at work the dialectic be­ tween general notions of the "good" (say, equal education for all) and particular and contested definitions of the "good" in the case of this educational policy in this particular school district; and they could not help but recognize the benefits of "equality in communication," that is, the inclusion of many diverse voices, in arriving at a just public policy decision. While we would concur with Isocrates that virtue cannot be taught directly and with Gorgias that the teacher of rhetoric cannot guarantee that her students will be virtuous, we would argue, nonetheless, that we can teach virtue as a craft—by making students aware of the ethical implications and responsibilities entailed in their communicative acts and by designing curricula which fore­ ground the virtues which Protagoras named as central to democracy over 2500 years ago: respect, tolerance, and justice. Conclusion As we begin to imagine new paradigms for rhetorical studies generally and for dealing with the questions of history and ethics specifically, we must keep in mind that such a project needs to engage ethics indirectly and directly—indirectly by the values it communicates through curricular choices and directly by its willingness to grapple with the subject of ethics explicitly. A rhetorical studies curriculum that dialectically engages multiple rhetorical traditions provides students with a broader and more inclusive concept of rhetoric, and a curriculum that acknowledges cross-cultural differences in ethical ideals enables students to respect and negotiate such differences. What we are proposing, in short, is an undergraduate program in rhetorical studies whose curricular aims are ethical and whose goals include preparing ethical citizens. Works Cited Condit, Celeste Michelle. "Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construction of Public Morality." Contem­ porary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 306–25. Fleming, David. "Rhetoric as a Course of Study." College English 61.2 (1998): 169-91. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin[g]: Rhetorical Differ­ ence and the Orders of Meaning." The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford, 1990. 1185-1223Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 1993. Ratcliffe, Krista. "Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct."1 CCC 51.2 (1999): 195-224. Schiappa, Edward. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Scott, Robert L. "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic." Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 131-39Sutton, Jane. "The Taming of Polos/Polis: Rhetoric as an Achievement without Woman." Contempo­ rary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 101-26. Weston, Anthony. Toward Better Problems. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992.

RICHARD GLEJZER

North Central College

Rhetoric and Ethics: Is "How Should We Proceed?" the Wrong Question?

But isn't the body real?—the body "proper" is a name for the family of idiolects. It is, moreover, the referent of phrases obeying various regimens. My teeth hurt: this is a descriptive, paired with a co-presented request: Relieve meof this. The dentist turns your suffering into a case that verifies a cognitive phrase ... In relation to this case, and by way of an answer to your request, the dentist prescribes certain ac­ tions proper to re-establishing your health (health being itself the ob­ ject of an Idea). The same goes for other professions of the "body" mutatis mutandis: for the sports coach, for the sex therapist, for the cu­ linary artist, for the dance or singing teacher, for the military instruc­ tor, the body is a set of symptoms read and treated on the basis of an Idea of the good body.—But the toothache is painful, it's a lived expe­ rience, etc.!—How can you verify that it is a lived experience? You are the exclusive addressee of this pain. It is like the voice of God: "You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed ... Wittgenstien adds: "That is a grammatical re­ mark." It circumscribes what an idiolect is: "I" am alone in hearing it. The idiolect easily falls beneath the blows of the dilemma: if your lived experience is not communicable, you cannot testify that it ex­ ists; if it is communicable, you cannot say that you are the only one able to testify that it exists. (Lyotard, 83-84) The movement between speaking and knowing is a movement from rhetoric to ethics. What makes speaking an act to be adjudicated is the ethical end or ob­ ject that the spoken's trajectory necessarily posits. The joining of the two, how­ ever, the actual movement itself, its vector through language, is neither a question of rhetoric nor of ethics; to assess such a move rhetorically or ethically invariably reinforces the very movement itself, the knowledge that apparently grounds speaking and knowing, the adjudication of how well one had spoken. Similarly, the "How should we proceed?" question that is the focus of today's session is not something that can be answered either by rhetorical or ethical in­ 163

164

Professing Rhetoric

quiry, although what motivates the question and its possible answers might be addressed: we can investigate the way an utterance points towards knowledge or we can analyze the implications of knowledge, but our methods ultimately fail to offer an examination of the causality that the proceeding from rhetoric to ethics entails. Put into more practical terms, we systematically encounter a break between speaking and knowing whenever we are forced to identify some­ thing about a subject of an utterance. As Lyotard so carefully shows us, we en­ counter a very real question of causality whenever an utterance or its effects are in doubt, whenever we must consider the speaking of what one "knows" to be true, what one has in fact experienced, what one remembers. Lyotard privileges the radical particularity of a subject's speech in such way that the very idea of a "we" that "proceeds" in ethical terms becomes impossible. More importantly, Lyotard accentuates the particular experience or memory that a particular sub­ ject places within phrases. Such renderings of a subject's movement into mem­ ory or into the fictions of existence (which are one and the same) offer us a trace of the question of a proceeding, of how we are to move within/among/between the impasse(s) or differends that the ethical/rhetorical elision covers over. Put another way, memory and its traumatic underside offer up the very form of the dilemma of action in the face of impossibility, where the question "How do we proceed?" seemingly resolves itself by focusing back on how we've been. This question of proceeding is the very foundation of current examinations of sexual identity. From Foucault to Butler, and their most recent redactors, we see important examples of how current elisions between the rhetorical and the ethi­ cal lead to a dismissal of the question of causality in favor of a fictionalized, linear subject. By dismissing causality in favor of knowledge, one can only at best point towards a "constructed" self that makes the rhetorical and ethical cohere, a unity that still must be posited solely in terms of a future. The turn towards, and the persistence of, Foucault over the last ten years shows the power of conceiving knowledge in terms of a pre-established rhetorical position, where we use an ethos founded on the spoken as the precondition of a speaking subject that pos­ its a self, what allows for a rhetorical ethics/ethical rhetoric that is fundamentally performative. In this paper, I want to suggest that contemporary considerations of sexuality as performance rely upon a foundational cohesion between rhetoric and ethics within performance itself, specifically in the work of Judith Butler. More importantly, I would like to consider how we might (re)turn to the origins of the "How should we proceed?" question as a way of considering sexual iden­ tity within the interstices of rhetoric and ethics, as the very demand for a future in the face of an irreconcilable past. In her provocative extension of Foucault, Judith Butler establishes a sexuality that offers one answer to "How should we proceed?" First in Gender Trouble and then in Bodies that Matter, Butler struggles with constructing an ethics of sexual identity in the face of what she sees as a clearly rhetorical performance. This be­ comes the grounding of her notion of the heterosexual matrix, the system through which "bodies" perform:

Rhetoric and Ethics

165

I use the term heterosexual matrix throughout the text to designate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig's notion of the "heterosexual contract" and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich's notion of "compulsory heterosexuality" to charac­ terize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligi­ bility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of het­ erosexuality. (151) In this note and throughout her text, Butler deconstructs the law that portrays gender as only heterosexually intelligible, where the very knowledge of a body relies upon a heterosexually defined coherence: a body is only a body within a heterosexual pairing. At issue here for Butler is how such a limit placed on the body reduces it to some form of alien(ating) knowledge or ethics that contextualizes the body as body only within such a pairing. Butler argues against such knowing of bodies in favor of presenting an alterna­ tive system that would allow us to know them in their multiplicity and in their be­ coming, where agency is rendered through constructedness. In Gender Trouble, she concludes that "Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intel­ ligible" (147). By pairing construction and agency, Butler then calls for theorizing of bodies in terms of a repetition carried out in the future: The critical task is ... to locate strategies of subversive repetition en­ abled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of in­ tervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the im­ manent possibility of contesting them.... The task is not whether to repeat but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself. (147-48) The important turn for Butler occurs in the immanence of repetition and its possi­ ble subversion. Such an immanence requires that the ethical already be wholly realized within the initial utterance, that the rhetorical and the ethical are al­ ways already coherent within any "repeated" gender act. Butler ultimately leaves the model of discourse in place that allows for sexual relations to be intelligible, that we still have a knowledge that stems from speak­ ing or performing. In her very criticism of those theories that define sexual rela­ tions as intelligible through a heterosexual imperative, Butler buys into the same epistemological model that allows bodies to enunciate what might now

166

Professing Rhetoric

appear to be more "natural" behavior. In other words, she deconstructs an ethics/knowledge of bodies in order to replace it with a more ethical/knowledgeable model that allows for greater variation in knowledge. In this sense, epistemologically, Butler's performativity does not offer up anything more about knowledge—about ethics itself—than much of what she sees in either Kristeva or Lacan. More importantly, she does not recognize the ways in which the very bodies she posits matter, something she attempts to rectify in her subse­ quent work. But even here Butler avoids the very problem of particular bodies, where the very term "body" presupposes some material whose substance is the same as an other. At the outset of Bodies that Matter, she maintains a stable notion of a set of bodies within her ethics: In other words, 'Sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly material­ ized through time. It is not a simple form or a static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materializa­ tion is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. (Bodies that Matter 1-2) The problem here begins with Butler's own grouping of bodies into a performative collective. On the one hand, there should be a plurality of bodily possibility, while on the other all bodies must work the same in order to con­ struct such an ethics of performance. This is precisely her argument against the­ ories of sexuality that seemingly privilege heterosexuality—that they assume all bodies to be the same and that bodies can only be intelligible within such contextualizing. Similarly, Butler's earlier critique of compulsory heterosexuality defining gender relations into a unified field, applies to her own constructing of bodies within—and at odds with—context. From this position, Butler concludes that all sexual relations, straight and gay, are performative representations. The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories. The repli­ cation of heterosexual constructs in non heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosex­ ual original. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. (Gender Trouble 31) For Butler there is no copy of a copy, no fake of a fake, no real gap between bod­ ies and language, between an ethics and a rhetoric. In other words, Butler dis­

Rhetoric and Ethics

167

misses metaphor, taking representation to be the thing itself. What makes bodies ultimately unified is performance. What makes bodies discernable in the first place is performance. But at the same time, there must be agency there within the context, within the very categorizing that any matrix imprints. But­ ler sees the inherent discrepancies within each category as evidence for a relation that is defined through performance, a knowledge of how bodies may in fact speak. Such a blurring of the spoken and the known in the end confuses having with being, placing a subject's being in the position of having a relation to a group, where a being in knowledge is equated with a being of language. This returns us to Lyotard's concern with how we establish such cohesion be­ tween knowing and speaking. The earlier quote from Lyotard directly addresses this: "the body proper is a name of a family of idiolects." However, no one idio­ lect represents such a family. In fact, it is just this impossibility of eliding the par­ ticular and the universal that leads Lyotard to his problematizing of ethics in terms of discrepancies within knowledge: "if your lived experience is not com­ municable, you cannot testify that it exists; if it is communicable, you cannot say that you are the only one able to testify that it exists" (84). As his dentist exam­ ple illustrates, the pain of a body is particular; it speaks only in terms of the sub­ ject of that body. Lyotard teaches us that what's at stake in a given utterance or performance, what such an utterance or performance might in fact represent as knowledge, is fraught with the very subjective field that Butler and Foucault find restrictive. By insisting on a sexuality as a future performativity, they rely on an ethics of futurity separate from any previous utterance, separate from what a body might in fact speak to its subject. The only move accessible to such a de-particularized subjectivity is to consider subjectivity in terms of a question like "How should we proceed?," where a body can then be placed in a forever un­ furling sexuality, where one's sexual positioning is unstable yet completely con­ stituted within some temporal movement. As a way of perhaps avoiding the ethical and rhetorical constraints of a "we" that "proceeds," I would like to consider how sexuality as remembering places the instability in the inability to remember trauma, in the fictionalization of one's past relative to one's body, one's body relative to one's past. This is not to suggest, as Butler might have us believe, that investigating the body is tanta­ mount to placing it in the position of cause. What if the body itself were rhetori­ cal, a trope that demands some form of jouissance, some kind of pleasure? In this sense, the body becomes a demand for ethics rather than functioning solely in terms of ethics. This would mean that a body could be instrumental to a signify­ ing system, an ethics, but neither its cause nor its effect; a body would be a "real" locus onto which and through which a subject's position in language is tran­ scribed. This would place causality not in the rhetorical or the ethical but rather in the way in which both body and language elide, a space that neither the rhe­ torical nor the ethical can consider. It is this discrepancy that Foucault's notion of power confuses since it demands the body and the law to be one and the same, that the body is always a body only in terms of law. This formulation would be

168

Professing Rhetoric

correct if we acknowledged that the first body and the second body were not the same, that there is a "real" body that is lost or vacated when the second body, the body of law, presumably takes its place. Now this is not to suggest that this pseudo first body is some sort of essentialized, controlling self, or some form of true sexuality. Rather, the first body—the body that matters—is one whose lim­ its are not, whose rims and orifices are only later inscribed with meaning, what Blanchot in Writing the Disaster would term the first death that is irrecoverable. But of course, such rims and orifices are there whether we name them or not, whether we localize them within some matrix of power or not. The very material of this first body becomes the locus for the second. In this sense, sexuality be­ comes a form of Baudriallardian hyper-reality, a process of simulation that at­ tempts to approximate what is presumed to be first, presumed to be real. This is what Lacan means when he says there's no sexual relationship, that there is nothing in any way natural or "real" about sexual relations and that to transcribe any form of knowledge onto such an irreconcilable absence—even in the future—would be to predetermine our utterance by suggesting that its punctua­ tion is known. I realize that even this critique of the "How should we proceed?" question doesn't really help us to think about speaking or knowing without some sort of extra discursive positioning, some sort of metalanguage that can hold rhetoric and ethics together in the face of real disruptions/disruptions of the real. Put in terms of Lyotard's notion of the differend, we can say that the body, the first body that is, occupies a disturbance within a phrase regimen, marks the place/time of a differend that haunts discourse such that the second body is not adequate to cover over the first. In this sense, sexual identity—one's epistemological inhabiting of a body—functions not as a performance, but rather as an encounter with memory, a stumbling over of something before that intrudes, as an experience or trauma that we attempt to recall in the present. The differend that is sexual identity although having its origins in the past is for­ ever played out as memory in the present, even as we hope for a future. A subject recalls or recollects a body of which remains little or no evidence. It is an experi­ ence or trauma both in terms of one's history but also, and more importantly, as a differend in the present. The disjunction between rhetoric and ethics, between speaking and know­ ing, demands a circuit that itself constitutes an ethical act in that what remains from the said, an ethos, constitutes a knowledge now impossibly separate from the original point of enunciation. This closure of the spoken and its retroactive re-insertion within the symbolic register marks the very structure that places both ends of an utterance outside the domain of rhetoric and ethics. Although the chain of an utterance has rhetorical force and an ethical object, the structure of the chain—its rhythmic dives through language—cannot be pursued. By naming language as contingent, Rorty has already told us this. Of course, this doesn't stop any of us from following after ethics and rhetoric into the field of causality. In fact, the pull of causality is itself much too strong for either rhetoric

Rhetoric and Ethics

169

or ethics to resists. And, more importantly, since rhetoric and ethics cover over such a primordially lost cause, to borrow Metzger's so apt title, any pull by cau­ sality threatens to tear apart the smooth system of speaking and knowing on which so much seems to depend. In the end, by disrupting the elision between ethics and rhetoric we are simply left with no "we" from which, or even to which, to proceed. And it is in that space, or rather that moment, that we encounter what I would argue should be the real object of rhetoric and ethics, the particu­ larity of a speaker's position relative to some lost memory, a speaker's position within forgetfulness. Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Blanchot, Maurice. Writing the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. —. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973- Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapo­ lis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Metzger, David. The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.

This page intentionally left blank

MELODY BOWDON University of Central Florida

Public Schools, Private Ethics: Rhetoric of Service in Composition

In 1999, twenty of my honors first year composition students at the Univer­ sity of Central Florida participated in a pilot course called "Writing and Reading in the Community." The students served as tutors, readers, listeners, mentors, extra hands, researchers, observers, and, most importantly in the case of this course and for the argument of this paper, writers at a local Orlando school, Hillcrest Elementary. This school, the only foreign language magnet in central Florida, is an amazing model of public education as a democratizing enterprise, which I describe in more detail in a later section of this chapter. In 1998, Presi­ dent Clinton visited the campus, and the many public suggestions he made late in his term about the integration of foreign language into elementary education are significantly shaped by what's going on at Hillcrest and other schools like it. I ground the major argument for this essay—that scholars in composition and rhetoric need to refigure their notion of service—in the Hillcrest example. I situate the argument within a major controversy in the field and then offer some background information about service-learning in composition studies, an area where I believe we might find some hope of reimagining this notion. My over­ arching goal is to encourage thought about ways in which rhetoricians can use our skills and resources to improve local public education, our own intellectual and political positions, and our work as teachers. The key to the model I present is our struggle with this troubling notion of service. In the final essay of Composition in the University, and in many other places, Sharon Crowley argues against the universal requirement of composition in uni­ versity curricula. Referring to Nancy Fraser's work, she attacks the "needs dis­ course" that undergirds this requirement—the line of thought that suggests that required freshman composition courses are justified because students "need" them to learn to write. Crowley argues that this attitude and the curric­ ula that have emerged from it deny student subjectivity, support the exploita­ tion of teachers, and limit the potential of composition both in terms of class instruction and the development of the field. She explains that as the universal requirement necessarily relegates English departments to a role of "service" pro­ viders, it diminishes their power and intellectual reputation. Though it causes 171

172

Professing Rhetoric

her to be called troublemaker in many venues, Crowley argues, in short, that this requirement should be done away with. I have heard Crowley present this argument in many professional conversa­ tions both formal and casual, and in most cases there seems to be at least an ini­ tial communication breakdown with some members of her audience: apparently the universal requirement is understood as an endemic part of composition. In other words, when people imagine doing away with the requirement, they imagine doing away with the courses altogether. This is not what Crowley advo­ cates; rather she suggests that composition studies should offer something that students would themselves identify as valuable—that the demand for the courses should emerge from student interests rather than from institutional pol­ itics or unquestioned tradition. The punchline is: Composition should get out of the service business. This tricky term service has resonance beyond institutional geography, how­ ever. I believe that one way to move away from the negative notion of service is to offer our students and colleagues in other fields a positive sense of service, reclaiming that term in a way that valorizes action beyond the classroom and challenges students to see themselves as involved citizens. At the end of her es­ say, Crowley suggests that the classical model for rhetorical instruction, based on situated civic discourse, offers some good ideas for reimagining a composi­ tion studies field that values student goals and responsibilities (264). I submit that involving students in service-learning, particularly in connection with public education, is one promising specific strategy for accomplishing the goal of reinvigorating our commitment to educating for civic responsibility even as we continue to struggle with questions about issues like the fate of the univer­ sal requirement. For about the last ten years, service-learning approaches to teaching in higher education have been on the rise. From our vantage point in composition and rhetoric studies, we can see that the beginning of this trend coincided roughly with what we identify as the "social turn" in our own history, a moment also closely connected with the emergence of cultural studies, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), and other social pedagogies. At this point we began en masse to focus away from requiring students to express their true selves or to pour their thoughts into portable paper molds/modes. As we claimed solid ground as a field, developing more prestige in graduate studies and perhaps be­ ginning to feel the guilt pangs associated with becoming a comfortable part of "the establishment," we began to imagine that the work our students produced in the classroom might be appropriate for some other audiences besides their peers and us. Rather than just running the paper factory, then, some leaders in the field wanted to connect the work that students do in the classroom with what lay beyond it. The tradition of a certain activist spirit—perhaps the same one that has inspired leaders in our field to look for ways to be inclusive, to meet the needs of a wide range of students, to embrace the personal and the individ­ ual, in theory, to accomplish many of the objectives Crowley argues are derailed

Public Schools, Private Ethics

173

by the universal requirement—led this service-learning movement that has gained momentum over the last ten years. A 1997 American Association for Higher Education volume, Writing the Com­ munity: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Composition, traces the develop­ ment of the movement from Stanford to universities such as the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, and Michigan State University through­ out the 1990s. This monograph is part of a series of texts on service-learning in eighteen academic disciplines including social sciences, natural sciences, busi­ ness, and the humanities. The contributors to the composition book identify a number of motivations and justifications for bringing service-learning to the composition classroom. Writing for the community gives students "real" audiences to work with and for. This may help to prepare them for the world of work. It may also persuade them to see themselves as activists, as better citizens, as people who can effect change. Service-learning brings the university into more productive connection with the community around it. Both benefit from this association, and entire communi­ ties can be helped by the work that students and teachers do in connection with their service. Teachers have opportunities to influence their students to see alter­ native views of the world, opportunities that rhetoricians like Patricia Bizzell, Ed Schiappa, and Thomas Miller encourage us to take on responsibly. These writers also identify the downside of service-learning. It is administra­ tively complicated and time-consuming. It involves potential liability problems. Sometimes projects fail: students get frustrated, agencies are disappointed. As­ signments have to be more carefully designed, and evaluation can be more com­ plicated than in traditional writing courses. There may be an ethical problem with "requiring" students to "volunteer." Writing for the community doesn't always change students' perspectives—sometimes students who come in with closed minds leave with minds closed even tighter. And some students don't appear to be affected by their experiences at all. Despite these concerns, however, the nineteen writing scholars, teachers, and administrators who contributed to this book advocate service-learning peda­ gogy strongly. What concerns them most, overall, is that programs and courses be designed thoughtfully, with careful focus on clear goals, and with sensitivity to student, teacher, and community needs. What seems to inspire them most is the democratizing potential of this movement. These teachers value democratic thinking and action, and consider service-learning to be an excellent tool for ad­ vancing their students' appreciation of it. Most of the programs outlined in the Adler-Kassner volume have adopted the Stanford model for service-learning. The defining characteristic of this model is its focus on writing as service, not just writing about service. Many of the other service-learning programs and initiatives that have emerged around the nation have a different focus. They include courses that contain a service component, but the writing for the course is typically expressive, consisting of journals and personal experience essays. In his article, "On Reflection: The Role

174

Professing Rhetoric

of Logs and Journals in Service-Learning Courses," Chris Anson recommends that instructors pay careful attention to their pedagogical objectives when as­ signing reflective writing. According to Anson, a course that focuses exclusively on reflective writing will produce unsophisticated writing and will fail to foster critical thinking. This is related to critiques of process and other pedagogies. Bruce Herzberg makes a similar warning in his "Community Service and Critical Teaching," a 1994 College Composition and Communication article that is re­ printed in the Adler-Kassner volume. He describes a tutoring project in which upper division writing students in his class at Bentley College, a small and elite institution with a major service-learning program, participated. Students helped people at prisons, homeless shelters and other sites to improve their read­ ing and writing. Herzberg recounts his disappointment that students weren't able to see beyond their emotional personal reactions to the situations their cli­ ents were in to understand the cultural and political contexts that put them there. From this article it is clear that Herzberg wanted students to imagine ways in which they might change the circumstances that created the difficulties these people faced. Instead, he claims, their initial reactions were personalized—they felt pity or judgment or affection for individuals in these agencies. They did not envision themselves as agents for change there or see this work as part of a system. Ultimately, Herzberg says, his students did experience a certain shift. He claims that their final papers for the course show "a sense of life as a communal project, an understanding of the way that social institutions affect our lives, and a sense that our responsibility for social justice includes but also carries beyond personal acts of charity" (Adler-Kassner 66). It's important to note that Herzberg's students did not write for their community; their service was tutoring, a very personal and potentially emotional act. Though this work was obviously designed to help students to see the power of language through teaching literacy, it did not focus on what their own words, their own rhetorical acts, could mean to their community as the Stanford model recommends. Aaron Schutz and Anne Ruggles Gere draw heavily on Herzberg's argument and experience in their 1998 College English piece, "Service-Learning and English Studies: Rethinking 'Public' Service." These authors renegotiate the definition of the term public to account for spaces within students' worlds. They suggest that service-learning should be understood to include work that students do on campus to advance the interests of their peers and themselves. They argue that this focus might help us to avoid the overly personalized emphasis Herzberg complains about in his experience, and help us to train students to recognize their ability to have an impact in their communities. In making this argument, they critique the concept of "volunteerism" that so many associate with service-learning, arguing that the key to service is a sense of connection among par­ ties, rather than a romantic notion of rescuing the underprivileged. Participants have to maintain a sense of the learning that is being accomplished through this work in order for it to be worthwhile. These authors discuss the associated trou­ bling feminine ethic of thinkers such as Nel Noddings, who focus on the

Public Schools, Private Ethics

175

one-to-one care and nurture models of service. They suggest that redefining and carefully shaping service-learning projects can help students to develop both compassion and commitment to action. In this spirit I now locate my exploration of the possibilities of service-learning in a short discussion of the example I referred to earlier, that is, my students' work at Hillcrest Elementary School. Over 45% of the children at Hillcrest do not speak English as a first lan­ guage. The two most common native languages in this group are Spanish and Vietnamese. Other students speak French, German, Chinese, and Japanese. The school's goal is to equip all students to be bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural by the time they leave the school at the end of the fifth grade. The faculty has designed an innovative model to accomplish this. Students spend most of their days in groups determined by their native languages; they spend one portion of their days learning language arts and social studies in their na­ tive language and one portion studying language arts and science in a second language. In the case of native English speakers, the second language is French or Spanish, though occasionally intriguing corporate partnerships make other languages available. Students whose native language is not English spend this second part of their days learning English. In the middle of the day students come together for community time when they have lunch, take "specials" such as art, physical education, and music, and study math. In my many years as a student and teacher, few classroom sights have amazed me more than, for ex­ ample, the kindergarten French class I attended several times. I was sur­ rounded by five-year-old children of various genders and ethnicities who spoke to me with impeccable French accents and shifted, seemingly effortlessly, be­ tween English and French as was necessary for working with a non-Francophone like myself. By making second language acquisition a challenge and requirement for all students, the Hillcrest plan helps everyone involved to share this intellectual challenge. This common ground is significant, but the children at Hillcrest also have differences. Because it is a magnet school, Hillcrest is affected by class is­ sues in major ways. Many children from affluent areas in the city attend the school because their parents believe in the potential benefits of learning a second language during elementary school. The neighborhood in which Hillcrest is lo­ cated is near downtown Orlando and is categorized as inner city, but is in the heart of a district that is constantly being considered for controversial historic district status, which naturally affects property values and neighborhood popu­ lations. To make the mix even more complex, the children from a nearby home­ less shelter also attend Hillcrest while they are in the area. These factors were particularly interesting to the group of my students who were enrolled in a linked Introduction to Sociology course that focused on class issues and social difference. The school's emphasis on diversity and other policies, such as re­ quired school uniforms, help to decrease the potential troubling effects of this situation, but unfortunately Florida education politics exacerbate them.

176

Professing Rhetoric

The governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, has a strong commitment to what he calls education reform. (This is the same governor, by the way, whose "Talented Twenty" program essentially did away with affirmative action policies in Florida college admissions.) Unfortunately, he demonstrates that commitment through what many consider to be tremendously shortsighted assessment strategies such as the A + program, which "grades" each public school annually based on stu­ dent grades, performance on a standardized test administered to fourth graders, and other standardized criteria. This assessment does not accommodate such problems as the low English proficiency of some students or the high mobility rate at schools like Hillcrest, nor does it reward innovation. For this reason, Hillcrest, a school in which students are learning, community is being devel­ oped, and educational innovations are taking place every day, receives low grades ranging from Cs to Ds. According to the plan as Bush proposed it, par­ ents of students in schools that receive consistently low scores have the right to request vouchers to pay for their tuition at private schools. This portion of the policy is hung up in the courts and may or may not ultimately be implemented, like many voucher programs around the nation. This plan clearly is prejudiced against a school like Hillcrest, which cannot compete with other kinds of schools while maintaining its priorities. Before the 20 eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students in my composition class began their service-learning work, they had discussed this policy and its implications for Hillcrest along with other hot topics in state and national edu­ cation. Many of the students, approximately evenly divided along gender lines, fairly ethnically homogenous, and claiming a wide range of majors including en­ gineering, public relations, and education, believed in this policy when they started the course. Fresh out of their own public school experiences, they said that it made sense for schools to be held accountable and for people to be able to make choices about their kids' educations. Though I made my own opinion about the policy clear, I didn't actively attempt to sway theirs. Virtually all of them saw educational politics differently after working at Hillcrest. As nineteen-year-old Simon, a mechanical engineering major and self-proclaimed con­ servative Republican, put it in a letter he sent to Governor Bush via e-mail, "When I read about the Bush-Brogan A+ Plan for Education, I thought it was generally a positive step to improve our public schools. The goal of the program is for all students in Florida to receive the best possible education each and every year." Later in the letter he adds, however, "Working at Hillcrest Elementary has opened up my eyes to a new type of education in Florida. I admire the fact that Hillcrest is promoting cultural development through education, and be­ lieve this should continue unimpeded by a testing system which seriously diverts this effort." Other students expressed similar positions in a variety of documents (bro­ chures, web pages, etc.) they wrote and designed to influence and call to action their fellow citizens, community leaders, educational experts, and others in the name of equitable and high quality education. I do not mean to suggest here

Public Schools, Private Ethics

111

that a few professions of new visions from students justify a shift in our pedagogies. In some ways, what I am saying here could be interpreted as good old-fashioned romantic composition conversion experience pedagogy, the stuff parents warn their kids about before they send them off to college. What I am suggesting is that as students reexamine their own educational experiences from a position of service, they can begin to understand their world differently; they can begin to feel an investment in their communities and to value the kind of work that, for example, inner city teachers do every day. Idealistically, I hope that this will encourage them to become citizens who care about public educa­ tion and who take action to bring about real reform in it in the future. Practi­ cally, this kind of work gives students "real audiences" to write for and from whom they can receive useful feedback. This kind of pedagogy has the power to transform students' views of service courses as they see themselves involved in the process of learning from several subject positions. Students aren't the only ones who begin to see things differently when they participate in public education service. I am part of a coalition of faculty mem­ bers who are connecting their college classrooms with elementary and secondary classes. What we find as we do so is that the basics of education, the things we take for granted, like reading, writing, and mathematics, are much more fasci­ nating and complicated than we most often understand them to be from our vantage point as members of higher education. As we make interdisciplinary links, the category of service shifts, shared pri­ orities emerge, and the stigma of service can be converted to a source of power and pride. We can take the resources we have as educators and citizens and bring them to our local public schools, modeling the notion that active engagement in and commitment to community literacy is not a remedial endeavor nor a tan­ gent of nor prequel to higher education, but is a critical social concern for which we are all responsible. This is a kind of service I believe our field could be proud to be part of. Works Cited Adler-Kassner, Linda, Robert Crooks and Ann Watters, eds. Writing in the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition. Washington, DC: American Association of Higher Edu­ cation, 1997. Anson, Chris. "On Reflection: The Role of Logs and Journals in Service-Learning Courses." In Writing in the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition. Washington, DC: Ameri­ can Association of Higher Education, 1997. Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Herzberg, Bruce. "Community Service and Critical Teaching." College Composition and Communication 45.3 (1994): 307-19. Schutz, Aaron, and Anne Ruggles Gere. "Service Learning and English Studies." College English 60 (1998): 129-49.

This page intentionally left blank

CATHERINE CHAPUT University of Arizona

The Rhetoric of Globalization, Graduate Student Labor, and Practices of Resistance

Michel Foucault once declared, "where there is power, there is resistance" (History of Sexuality 95). Alternatively, we could say that where there is resis­ tance, there is power. However, this does not mean that from the point of resis­ tance, we can easily backtrack to a single source of power. According to Foucault, power is not centrally located, but dispersed into multifaceted power-effects that operate differentially within localized sites. Thus, to under­ stand the relationship between individuals and power, he advocates the study of local practices to determine how individuals are systemically created as particu­ lar kinds of subjects. Specifically, he identifies four "technologies" by which indi­ viduals come to understand themselves and their place in society: 1) one's relationship to the means of production, 2) language use, 3) practices of power and discipline, and 4) practices of the self ("Technologies of the Self"). Because these technologies rarely, if ever, work in isolation, they need to be studied in conjunction with one another in order to fully understand the complexity of power relations. In other words, a close analysis of the relationship between local texts (practices of power and discipline that set limitations upon individuals and the practices of self-defining and/or resisting those predetermined roles) and global texts (one's relationship to the means of production as well as one's lan­ guage use), reveals that what goes by the name of resistance is often merely the adjustment of local conditions to the needs of a global system. Take graduate student labor, for instance. Diverse and widespread forms of graduate student resistance, varying from departmental complaints to union­ ization efforts, point to complex mechanisms of power attempting to maintain the graduate student labor force as it currently exists. While graduate student resistance provides alternatives to traditional graduate student roles, it also works to enforce a properly transgressive role. Graduate student complaint, even in the form of unionization, does not fundamentally change the structure of labor within the university; and while these various forms of graduate stu­ dent resistance are all viable options, they do not exhaust the possibilities for constructing the graduate student role. In an effort to arrive at potentially new possibilities, I will use the first part of this paper to demonstrate how our tradi­ 179

180

Professing Rhetoric

tional forms of resistance—demanding that universities make the current sys­ tem accommodate and include our needs—function to amend, rather than subvert, the problematics of university labor structures. I will use the second part of this paper to discuss how working with university administrations, as well as placing demands on our departments and professional organizations, indicate that graduate student resistance can be read as a symptom of the synecdochic relationship between the university economy and the global po­ litical economy. I will end by arguing that in order to construct new solutions to the problem of graduate student labor, we must conduct Foucauldian anal­ yses by placing our local context in dialectical relationship to the global con­ text of advanced capitalist exploitation. By way of exemplifying how traditional forms of resistance are delimited to the adaptation of the system in which they operate, I turn to a particular situa­ tion at the University of Arizona (UA). Although not itself a unionizing effort, this resistance occurs concurrently with a burgeoning union drive and its partici­ pants have worked to change English department conditions just as often as they have worked to organize all graduate students. I use this example because as a graduate student I am familiar with it and because I think it is representative of the way local contexts simultaneously resist and adapt to global changes. Spe­ cifically, I will examine a series of letters exchanged between the English Gradu­ ate Union (EGU) and the Dean of the Graduate College. This exchange is one part of an ongoing graduate student effort to pressure the central administra­ tion for new funds to alleviate the egregious working conditions in the English department. Typically, graduate students teach two courses per semester, each with a capacity of twenty-five students, and, on average, work more than 30 hours to complete the duties expected of their 20-hour appointment. In other words, these students work more than 10 free hours each week. The first letter in this exchange, sent from the graduate students to the Dean, briefly provides the history of information gathering and recommendations that have already been made on our campus concerning graduate student workers in general and the English department in particular. While aware that poor working conditions "are not limited to the English department, but are indicative of larger, more wide-spread systemic problems with graduate student education and with the state of higher education in general," the letter nevertheless references numer­ ous and varied data pointing to the English department as an especially onerous site of labor exploitation (March 30). Outlining three concrete suggestions for ac­ tion, the letter requests an immediate response to these conditions: the elimina­ tion of registration fees for all graduate students (amounting to between 10% and 20% of a student's annual salary); the reduction of maximum course size from 25 to 20 students; and the reduction of workload from a 2-2 to a 2-1 course appoint­ ment for first- and last-year graduate students. What I believe to be strategic about this letter is both its attempt to position the working conditions of English graduate students within a larger context of the university and its attempt to re­ main in solidarity with other graduate students by foregrounding the recommen­

The Rhetoric of Globalization, Graduate Student Labor, and Practices of Resistance

181

dation to eliminate fees for all students. These rhetorical moves strive to avoid isolating the English department as the single "trouble spot" whose improvement will prevent larger unionizing from taking place. This strategy, however, did not entirely succeed. Against these attempts to position the English department within a larger context, the Dean not only at­ tempts to isolate the situation to the English department, but also uses this let­ ter against the department. While the students contextualize the situation globally, the Dean's response reasserts the administration's power by exclusively focusing on the local context. For instance, he asks for evidence that our time to degree is too long, that we are poor teachers because we are overworked, that we cannot find jobs after we graduate, and that the department cannot attract other, better students because of these working conditions. In a separate letter, one not shared with us by the Dean, he asks our department head for even more specific evidence: GRE scores, GPAs, placement records, and teaching evalua­ tions. We read this response, regardless of its intentions, as more than a request for additional information; we read it as an intimidation tactic that attributes the difficulty of balancing unreasonable teaching and scholarly requests to our individual inadequacies rather than to any larger local-global dialectic at work. Moreover, in both of his letters and subsequent conversations, the Dean criti­ cized our language as too strong—even histrionic. The policing of our language, as Foucault might suggest, is intimately related to the policing of our coopera­ tion and the reinscription of hegemonic relations between graduate students and the university for which they work. In this way, the administration dictated to us the appropriate avenues for and goals of graduate student resistance. They suggested that we might temper our language, apparently to appear more ame­ nable to and understanding of university constraints, and redirect our attention from the central administration to the official graduate student organization, the Graduate and Professional Student Council (GPSC). The university recog­ nized GPSC is not only politically conservative, it is also a forum for continu­ ously appearing to address graduate student issues while never actually addressing any of them—partially because it has no authority to do so and par­ tially because the paid council positions come with the requisite that the council will not disrupt university or administrative business. Such an avenue for change, in other words, is a dead end. In a letter of response to the Dean, the EGU repeated that the administration had sufficient evidence of our workload and that we would not provide him with the specific information he requested because "we believe [he] misread both the meaning and the spirit of our letter" (Apr. 28). In order to clarify our intentions, we held a face-to-face meeting with the Dean during which three members of the President of the University's staff remained outside the office waiting with other graduate students to hear its results. As I have mentioned, it is widely known within our university that graduate students are in the beginning pro­ cesses of unionization; it is further believed that these efforts originate primarily from the English department. The small group of administrators awaiting re­

182

Professing Rhetoric

suits of this meeting, then, suggests that the university is threatened by the pos­ sibility of a graduate student union drive. A unionized graduate student population would both require redefining our work from "professionalizing op­ portunities" to employment and hold the university accountable to improved working conditions. Perhaps such fears are the reason that the central adminis­ tration eventually engaged our concerns and invited us to collaborate with them on solutions. The administration made a choice to work with us and thereby en­ sure that our resistance followed a path that would not disrupt the larger opera­ tions of graduate student labor. Given our letter writing campaigns, press releases, and protests in front of the administration building, we clearly were not going to make use of the proper graduate student channels. In other words, the administration was more willing to negotiate with us because they believe im­ proving conditions in the English department will significantly minimize inter­ est in unionizing. Indeed, the President specifically asked another English graduate student in a meeting on graduate student workloads exactly how much it would take to stop this—to reference "this," he pointed to the flyer on graduate student organizing that had just been sent to every graduate student employed by the university. While the university's central administration may wish to prevent the possi­ bility of a unionized graduate student workforce, it is just such a possibility that is being advocated by our professional organizations. Recalling Foucault, we need to remember that the university is not a unified whole, but functions through multiple, sometimes disparate pockets of power. Because of an ongoing struggle over the mission and future of a university, these disparate power sources will sometimes function at odds with one another and sometimes in communion. Thus, if we are to take the local-global dialectic encouraged by a Foucauldian reading seriously, we need to think about how this threat of union­ izing is received by those outside the university administration, but still in ser­ vice to the university—those organizations whose power-effect sustain university structures. First, in order to understand the complexity of these dis­ parate power sources, we need to understand how the global economy is cur­ rently reshaping the university structure. The influence of globalization on the university has contributed to an increas­ ingly involved relationship between the corporate and the academic worlds, with significant implications for the graduate student population. Key university shifts toward the increasing use and rapid replacement of new information technology, the heightened interest in distance-learning, the proliferation and exploitation of graduate student and part-time labor, the increasingly sophisticated strategies for marketing students, and the decreasing federal and state funding for higher edu­ cation all work to reproduce the global corporate model of down-sizing in effort to increase profits. Corporations no longer merely advertise within universities and market toward the expanding student population. They are increasingly teaching our students indirectly through corporate-created classroom software and more directly through corporate-owned and -taught courses. To point to one example

The Rhetoric of Globalization, Graduate Student Labor, and Practices of Resistance

183

among many, several universities currently contract with Kaplan Educational Centers or Sylvan Learning Centers for the teaching of first-year composition and mathematics courses (Gose). These corporations then become responsible for hir­ ing instructors and designing curriculum. Such university practices make clear that graduate student funding opportunities are not based on the apprentice model, but rather the employee model. I mention the apprenticeship model not as a nostalgic harbinger to the past nor to suggest that typical practices are apprentice-based, but only to reinforce that graduate student labor in its most wide­ spread configuration is exploited employment and not apprenticeship. Perhaps more disturbing than the loss of the mythic apprenticeship model, these new prac­ tices threaten to replace the teaching of theoretical knowledge with the basic skills emphasized by these testing centers. Such a replacement renders the need for spe­ cialized professors obsolete and further justifies the shrinking tenure-track job market. Given these conditions, it is little wonder that graduate students consider unionizing. What might be surprising, though, is the professional encouragement that unionizing receives. Many professional organizations have publicly stated the need for more ethi­ cal graduate student labor practices. For instance, the American Studies Associ­ ation (ASA) recently passed a resolution in favor of graduate student unionizing and the Modern Language Association (MLA) just voted on three resolutions concerning labor practices in general and graduate student labor in particular. According to the MLA ballot, the first resolution opposes "the use of sweatshop, prison, and nonunion labor throughout the academic world," while the second resolution asserts that "whereas the 'apprenticeship' model no longer obtains in a job system that fails to guarantee employment in the fields for which graduate students train ... be it resolved that the MLA asserts that graduate students ... are employees." The final resolution simply states that "the MLA endorses the right of all academic employees ... to engage in collective bargaining" (MLA Ballot). What is particularly significant about these resolutions is that they sig­ nify the official recognition of various local resistances. Unionization does not occur because the ASA or the MLA endorses it; rather, professional organizations tend to condone these practices because they are al­ ready occurring and because support quells rather than fuels further resis­ tance. I believe it is for just such reasons that the MLA, recognizing the urgency of graduate student labor issues, began taking steps to alleviate the pressure of a poor academic job market by introducing an alternative job fair for those students earning PhDs but not finding academic positions. According to the 1997 "Final Report" from the MLA Committee on Professional Employ­ ment, more than half of the PhDs graduating in English between 1990 and 1995 "failed in the year the degree was awarded tofind the kind of employment for which they had presumably been trained' (7). While a job fair could hardly be said to pose a threat to students on the job market, the emphasis on alternative jobs seems particularly sus­ picious given the new university economy. Rather than pressuring universities to re­ new and create new lines of funding for full-time, tenure-track positions, the MLA

184

Professing Rhetoric

alternative job market helps ease PhDs out of the academy once they have com­ pleted their function as cheap graduate labor. In addition to the changing job placement expectations of our professional organizations, private foundations have begun to follow a similar path. Because private foundations currently pro­ vide a significant portion of the funding that was previously picked up by the state, they are integral to the maintenance of current university structures and also need to be taken into consideration. Using the same logic as the MLA alternative job fair, many national founda­ tions are attempting to facilitate the transition of humanities PhDs outside their chosen academic profession. For instance, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellow­ ship Foundation recently created what it calls a practicum grant. The foundation will award 30 grants of up to $ 1500 to PhD students "for internships that engage their academic discipline in a context outside of college teaching and research" (Woodrow Wilson Press Release). This grant as well as the MLA alternative job fair encourage graduate students in the humanities to seek careers outside of the university and thereby alleviate departmental responsibility to their so-called "ap­ prentices." If PhDs seek employment outside of the university, the university's de­ cision to reduce the number of full-time tenure-track positions, for which graduate students are supposedly being trained, becomes significantly more toler­ able. While some argue that such alternatives "provide graduate students with an understanding of the deeper nature of their own skills and of their versatile appli­ cation," that too must be seen in a broader context (Woodrow Wilson Press Re­ lease). Versatility, for instance, is a rhetorically benign term for signifying the necessity of broadly applicable skills within the unregulated, insecure, and part-time labor-force of the global political economy. Making use of the economic practices and language of globalization, these professional resolutions along with alternative placement options allow for and contain graduate student resistance by normalizing both its discourse and its practice. No doubt these practices make good sense given the current state of higher education. The configuration of graduate student employment as the cheap, flexible labor of aspiring experts without the associated responsibility of placing graduates in professorship positions provides an apparently sound solution to the chronic underfunding of the humanities. However, it is the mimicry of the global corporate structure within this solution that needs to be called into ques­ tion. University, professional, and private responses to the graduate student la­ bor force—although varied—follow a predictable pattern established by the neoliberal politics of the new global economy. Primarily, these responses mark the shift in decision-making power from the state or university to the market or corporate world. What students and/or corporations want, the university will provide. Within this model, graduate student labor offers a convenient method for universities to quickly alter the number of its employees based on fluctuating student populations with few attendant risks. In other words, universities are applying the logic of globalization, precipitated by the neoliberal tenants of de­ regulated labor and privatization, to the graduate student labor force. The uni­

The Rhetoric of Globalization, Graduate Student Labor, and Practices of Resistance

185

versity administration as well as professional and private organizations adapt and accommodate graduate student resistance, whether by appeasing spots of unrest, providing empty avenues for voicing such complaint, or creating alter­ native jobs. Such accommodation paves the way for continued exploitation of a graduate student population that teaches, on average, 63% of all first-year Eng­ lish courses for a fraction of the cost of full-time instructors ("Final Report" 7). Certainly tele-courses and other educational technologies—the often heralded tropes of globalization—might allow universities to teach even more students without the expense and inconvenience of accommodating graduate student re­ sistance. However, universities often favor graduate student labor over technol­ ogy for entry-level and general education courses because it allows undergraduate students to have the unique opportunity of small classes and discussion sections which reinforce many universities' student-centered claims. Further, because graduate students' future success often relies on letters of support and evaluations stemming from their work, the university is able to increase graduate student workload beyond their economic compensation with minimal threat of com­ plaint. Put simply, the greater the need for work, the greater the employer's ability to extract surplus value (profit) by paying for only a portion of the work per­ formed. Just as Karl Marx argued in the mid-nineteenth century that the factory worker "gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would in­ crease the cost of production" (Capital 517), I believe that a wholesale replacement of human instructors with educational technology will be indefinitely deferred as long as universities desire to market themselves as student-centered and graduate student labor remains proportionally inexpensive. While Marx made this com­ ment during the transitional stage of the industrial revolution, it is not surprising that such a phenomena reappears as we transition into the new global economy—what some call the third industrial revolution. The basic logic of capital re­ mains the same within globalism as it did during industrialism even though the specific machinations of that logic alter according to historical developments and local practices. Just as machines did not replace human labor in the industrial rev­ olution, they will not do so in the technological revolution. Neither, however, can we expect this technology to disappear. To be sure, technology-based instruction will continue to increase since it fulfills a function that graduate student labor cannot—it increases the student population without placing strain on the physical configuration of the cam­ pus. This function, however, can only be accomplished through the exploita­ tion of a cheap labor force to design, implement, and administer new instructional technology. Such a cheap labor force can readily be found in the graduate student population, giving the university one more area of special­ ized labor to exploit from graduate students under the guise of "professional development." In other words, the technological turn in some areas of instruc­ tion works parasitically with the conditions of graduate student labor. The in­ creasing use of technology will, then, only continue to exacerbate graduate student working conditions.

186

Professing Rhetoric

I want to end by making some brief connections between the situation at the University of Arizona and the political economy in which it operates—an econ­ omy I briefly attempted to map. First, I believe that graduate student actions like the UA letter-writing exchange and meetings with administrators are im­ portant and necessary. They beget results. In subsequent meetings with other Deans and with the President of the University, several indications were given that the English department will see at least a partial workload reduction this fall and a substantial reduction for the following fall. Of course, this was sug­ gested verbally and with significant qualifications. Regardless of what level of success we achieved, it is important to note that the kind of tactics performed by these English graduate students cannot be performed in isolation. As I men­ tioned earlier, one of the reasons we might see departmental results is the visible, campus-wide unionizing effort that is strongly associated with the English de­ partment. Even though I fully support unionizing graduate students, I think it is also important to remember that such efforts are not sufficient to the subver­ sion or transformation of the current university economy. An economy that re­ lies on corporate rather than public funds, that invests in technology and part-time labor rather than permanent faculty, and that seriously underfunds the humanities and other supposedly nonpractical intellectual pursuits needs to be attacked at its root causes, and that requires analysis of its local-global dialec­ tics. In order to substantially affect this current university economy, we need to begin locating it within the global political economy, lodging critiques against that economy, and providing concrete alternatives to its hegemonic effects. I end this paper by urging all of us to carefully examine our departmental, profes­ sional, and university rhetorical practices for their complicity in proliferating the effects of a global political economy and then to invent new constructions of graduate student education that more adequately resist such economic abuses. Works Cited English Graduate Union. Letter to Dean of Graduate College at The University of Arizona. 31 Mar. 2000. —. Letter to Dean of Graduate College at The University of Arizona. 28 Apr. 2000. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vin­ tage, 1990. —. "Technologies of the Self." Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Mar­ tin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. 16-49. Gose, Ben. "Tutoring Companies Take Over Remedial Teaching at Some Colleges."Chronicle of Higher Education 19 Sept. 1997: A44-45. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990. MLA Committee on Professional Employment. "Final Report." Dec. 1997. Pivo, Gary. Dean of the Graduate College at The University of Arizona. Letter to Cathy Chaput and Bill DeGenaro, English Graduate Union Co-chairs. 10 Apr. 2000. Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. "Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Announces First Practicum Grant Winners—Integral Part of The Humanities at Work.'"

CHRISTOPHER SCHROEDER Long Island University

Rereading the Literacy Crisis of American Colleges and Universities

In their introduction to Contending with Words, Patricia Harkin and John Schilb argue that the literacy crisis in America during the 1970s was defined by critics as a failure on the part of American colleges and universities to teach writ­ ing and reading in ways that were consistent with conventional values (3). The mere existence of a literacy crisis is nothing new, for critics have been identifying literacy crises since 1870, and the coupling of literacy crises and American edu­ cational institutions is not surprising; in fact, some have argued that the most recent literacy crisis is more the result of the appropriation of literacy by educa­ tional institutions and a meritocratic social order and less an actual decline, whatever that may look like, in the literacy practices of Americans (Ohmann, "Literacy" 217; Trimbur 294). What might be more interesting is what social and historical contexts for lit­ eracy and education suggest about both educational institutions and the condi­ tion of literacy in the America today. In a recent survey of first-year students, researchers at UCLA discovered that students increasingly view education as a means to higher income rather than a way of expanding their experiences and perspectives. More specifically, 74.9% of first-year students identified their pri­ mary goal in college as attaining a financial security while 40.8% indicated that it was developing a personal philosophy, as opposed to their peers twenty years ago, for whom the numbers were almost exactly reversed. According to the di­ rector of the survey, the trend is more significant in light of the size of the survey and the "unprecedented levels of academic and political disengagement" (Bonner). This disillusionment with higher education is also apparent in drop­ out and graduation rates in America. According to ACT, Inc., the national college-dropout rate for first-year students increased "slightly but steadily" from 1983 until 1996 (though it decreased slightly in 1997), and the graduation rate had reached a new all-time low in 1997 (ACT, Inc.). Mark Edmundson seems to have it right when, in an effort to explain the seem­ ingly contradictory mix of boredom and ambition in contemporary students, he suggests that the problem lies with the educational system itself, and specifically with its increased emphasis on training, and entertaining, and not on transforma­ 187

188

Professing Rhetoric

tion (Bonner 14; Edmundson, "Lite"). In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings ar­ gues that students (and their parents) have become consumers in contemporary academic institutions, which are busy transforming themselves into "bureaucrati­ cally organized and relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation[s]" (11). The social implications are significant, as many have argued. For example, bell hooks suggests in Talking Back that not only has education in American col­ leges and universities become immersed in a "crisis of engagement," a condition in which knowledge has been "commoditized" and "authentic learning" has ceased, but that it is also in the midst of "a crisis in meaning" that affects students and teachers alike, both of whom are uncertain about the purpose of education, as well as "unsure about what has value in life" (51). Others, such as Jean François Lyotard, have criticized this mercantilization of meaning, and still others, such as Neil Postman, have gone so far as to argue that if the crises of meaning in Ameri­ can classrooms continue, the end of education will be forthcoming. This lack of engagement in education becomes more interesting within the context of literacy instruction. Though statistics about literacy conditions can be misleading, the sheer magnitude of studies, such as the one conducted by the National Institute of Literacy that claims that forty million adults in America have "significant literacy needs," makes them difficult to dismiss easily. His­ torically, literacy instruction has undergone three distinct transformations from "part of an apprenticeship in certain forms of complex social activities" to "part of a routinized form of social practice (religious observance)" and finally had been "routinized and embedded in a hermitic context: the public school" (Nespor 176). Instead of being "grounded in everyday contexts of use," instruc­ tion in literacy practices were situated within "particular institutional contexts whose sole function was to impart 'skills' abstracted from contexts of use," and instead of learning how to use reading and writing rhetorically, or to achieve cer­ tain ends within contexts, students learned "to 'read' and 'write' in courses de­ signed to teach nothing but reading and writing" (176—77). What is key, here, is the way that literacy, society, and education become immersed within a particu­ lar institutional culture. As definitions of literacy shifted from context-specific practices and functions to universalized skills situated within classrooms, the cultural values that these versions of literacy represented shifted from community-specific definitions, not unlike sophistic nomos, towards increasingly institu­ tionalized cultures, first of the church and then the state, which became the purview of experts (see Habermas, "Modernity" 9). In light of these contexts, my rereading of the crisis goes something like this: particular versions of culture have been institutionalized within American col­ leges and universities as the standards for certification. As such, these cultural values have formed the basis for full-fledged admission into social and economic credibility and authority through the institutionalization of naturalized literacy standards as natural ways of writing and reading. In other words, particular ver­ sions of what it means to write and read have been situated within American col­ leges and universities, specifically, as Susan Miller has documented (51 ff),

Rereading the Literacy Crisis of American Colleges and Universities

189

within English departments, as a way of ensuring the currency of particular cul­ tural capital and exerting social control. In doing so, sanctioned versions of literacy—not only certain ways of writing and reading but also, through these practices, versions of who to be and how to see the world—serve as the cultural capital of the academy and, by extension, of American society at large. After all, academic writing, according to a best-selling composition textbook, "has wide-ranging implications for the way we think and learn as well as for our chances of success, our personal development, and our relationships with other people" (St. Martins 2). What I am trying to suggest is that what has been called a literacy crisis might actually be a crisis in meaning and legitimacy. From this perspective, the crisis reflects the increasing lack of legitimacy in the institution­ alized versions of literacy and cultural capital within American colleges and uni­ versities for students and society they serve. So what are these literacies and the cultures that make them meaningful? A cursory analysis of the best-selling composition textbooks suggests that these literacies are centered upon the critical, as in critical writing, critical reading, and critical thinking, which, though presented as absolute, is thoroughly rhe­ torical. According to composition textbooks, the critical serves as the most fun­ damental standard for literate performance and a universal basis for communication. Critical writing, reading, and thinking are necessary, according to The Simon and Schuester Handbook for Writers, in order "to participate actively in the ongoing exchange of ideas and opinions that you [i.e., students] encounter in college and beyond" (101). In the ways that the critical is defined, however, the links among education, society, literacies, and cultural capital are explicitly clear. Engaging in critical reading and critical thinking, Harbrace College Hand­ book explains, enables students "to distinguish between ideas that are credible and those that are less so" (392), a distinction that, it is implied, is based upon some universal standards, such as the difference between fact and opinion, which, once again, is contingent and rhetorical. To a greater or lesser degree, all of the best-selling composition textbooks (except for The Elements of Style] define critical writing in terms of rhetorical modes, which, according to The Macmillan Reader, are description, narration, a variety of expositions (i.e., exemplification, division-classification, process analysis, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, and definition), and argumentation-persuasion (vi–xv). In spite of their contingen­ cies, these ways of writing, or what Harbrace calls "[s]trategies for develop­ ment," are defined as "natural thinking processes that are especially useful for shaping ideas about a subject" (342), thereby proffering versions of who stu­ dents should be and how the world is. According to the best-selling composition textbooks, the sanctioned version of literacy is comprised of universal(ized) practices of critical reading, writing, and thinking, which give rise to natural(ized) versions of the ideal writer and reader as a rational consciousness and of a foundational world based upon the primacy of Western reason and the search for Truth. As defined by these text­ books, academic literaci(es) privilege elaborate syntactical and sequential rela­

190

Professing Rhetoric

tions, large amounts of new information, and truth values, as opposed to rhetorical and social conditions, as Scollon and Scollon, Faigley, and others argue of all essayist literacies. Through these practices, the sanctioned literacies of American academies endorse fictionalized and essentialized subject positions of rational minds communicating with other rational minds and objective, tran­ scendent versions of the world in which the complete accessibility to reality cor­ responds to its complete expressibility in texts. As it turns out, the sanctioned literacies of the academy represent the culture of a white American middle class, and yet these literacies are fraught with problems, as many critics have pointed out, and not only, I would add, for those who do not come from the idealized middle class. In the ways that they have been institutionalized in American col­ leges and universities, the sanctioned literacies hide textual and curricular biases by naturalizing and legitimizing aspects of the middle class literate tradition as natural and legitimate indicators of skills and abilities (Collins). At the same time, they ignore the cultural biases of standard American English and depoliticize the dissonance between the primary and popular discourses of stu­ dents and the secondary discourses of the academy (Lu). In addition, they can in­ crease the powerlessness of writers (Ohmann, "Use"), and they privilege particular students (Gee) and certain experiences (Bizzell 147) and can lead to epistemological alienation (Chiseri-Strater). For students whose histories are not those of the American middle class, there are obvious problems. And increas­ ingly for students who, like myself, come out of a white, European-American middle class, the cultural capital of sanctioned academic literacies has less and less relevance and legitimacy to their cultures. If so, then the contemporary crises in literacy and education are crises of meaning and legitimacy, as I have already suggested. As part of larger social crises of educa­ tion and meaning in American society, what critics are calling the contemporary cri­ ses in literacy cannot be resolved by the responses from American colleges and universities, which have been new conferences, journals, books, and other institu­ tional formations designed to address increasingly specialized aspects of literacy and education (Harkin and Schilb 3), for not only has this tendency failed to address the conditions of literacy in American society, but it has also contributed to larger crises of meaning and education in postmodern America. According to Readings, contemporary academic institutions have three op­ tions: reaffirming a national cultural identity, reinventing cultural identities that are relevant to American society, and abandoning the "social mission" of ac­ ademic institutions (90). It is the second option that interests me the most. If we are to escape these crises in meaning and education in America, then I believe that we must generate alternative understandings of literacy, not the universal­ ized versions of literacy that seem to have less and less relevance to students' lives but context-specific versions of literacy that, in the increasingly multicultural classroom, respond to the literacy needs of specific students and particular class­ rooms. If we can offer students context-specific literacies, then I believe we can go a long way to restoring the social and intellectual legitimacy not only to Eng­

Rereading the Literacy Crisis of American Colleges and Universities

191

lish classes but also, I dare to suggest, to education in America. To this end, one useful term that I have used to talk about context-specific literacies is Mary Louis Pratt's contact zone. The literacies of contact zones shift the focus from functional literacies, or the minimal ability to read and write in mechanical ways, and from cultural literacies, or the mastery of particular canons and commonplaces, to the ability to mediate and negotiate competing discursive practices. In doing so, these context-specific literacies foreground the ways that classrooms are sites of compet­ ing versions of cultural capital. Within contact zones, being literate amounts to controlling the discourses that mediate and that emerge from cultural clashes. As such, the classroom itself becomes a contact zone, or a place where the cultural capital of the academy comes into conflict with the versions of cultural capital that students bring with them into the classroom. Before I close, I want to comment on the issues of standards, legitimacy, and the literacies of contact zones. As such, the literacies of contact zones can re­ spond directly to the conditions that have been called the contemporary crises in literacy and education in America by generating context-specific standards that reflect the literacy histories and literacy needs of particular students and teachers within specific classrooms. As alternatives to the universalized standards of con­ ventional academic literaci(es), the literacies of contact zones are predicated upon difference. In classrooms, contact zones bring together historical and insti­ tutional traditions with the literacy needs of students and teachers. Together, the students and the teacher, as co-teachers, select the languages that are used, the content that is addressed, the knowledge that is produced, and the actions that are taken, features that, as Nan Elasser and Patricia Irvine (1992) explain, are necessary to constructing new discourse communities. Given the ways that the literacies of contact zones foreground difference, they require new standards for assessing and authorizing literate performances, context-specific standards that emerge from the contact zones of each class­ room. Such context-specific standards are legitimized not by an absolute author­ ity, as are conventional academic literacies, but by the provisional authorities within contact zones, provisional authorities that also authorize students' dis­ courses and their abilities to assess their own and other literate performances. In the absence of foundational standards, the provisional authorities of contact zones are generated through what Pat Bizzell calls "collective discursive ex­ change" (263). In classrooms, provisional authorities challenge conventional practices of evaluation, as well as traditional subject positions of teachers and narratives of education in English departments and, by extension, the academy at large. In these alternative narratives of education, becoming literate amounts to investigating the privileged discursive practices of the academy and integrat­ ing them with competing practices in ways that legitimize alternative standards and competing cultures. In these conversations, institutional and disciplinary voices of teachers engage in a dialogue with the voices of students, as representa­ tive of alternative discourses and versions of cultural capital, in the process of constructing the boundaries of context-specific definitions of literacy in a way

192

Professing Rhetoric

that offer a Gramscian challenge to the conventional literacies of the academy. As such, these literacies of contact zones can serve, I hope, as one of the many voices in the ongoing conversations of what it means to be literate in America. Works Cited ACT, Inc. Trend of Increases in ACT College-Entrance Scores Continues. Iowa City. 13 Aug. 1997. ACT, Inc. New Low for College Graduation Rate, But Dropout Picture Brighter. Iowa City. 1 Apr. 1998. Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. Bonner, Ethan. "College Freshman Aiming For High Marks in Income." The New York Times 12 Jan. 1998, late ed.:A14 + . Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth. Academic Literacies: The Public and Private Discourses of University Students. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1991. Collins, James. "Hegemonic Practice: Literacy and Standard Language in Public Education." Re­ writing Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other. Ed. Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler. Westport: Bergin, 1991. 229-54. Edmundson, Mark. "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students." Harper's Magazine Sept. 1997: 39-49Elsasser, Nan, & Irvine, Patricia. "Literacy as Commodity: Redistributing the Goods."Journal of Edu­ cation 174(1992): 26-41. Faigley, Lester. "Going Electronic: Creating Multiple Sites for Innovation in a Writing Program." Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs. Ed. Joseph Janagelo and Kristine Hansen. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1995. 46-58. Gee, James Paul. The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice. New York: Bergin, 1992. —. Social Linguistics and Literacies. Bristol: Falmer, 1996. Habermas, Jürgen. "Modernism—An Incomplete Project." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. New York: New Press, 1999. 3-15. Harbrace College Handbook. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Harkin, Patricia & Schilb, John. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. 1—10. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End, 1989­ Lu, Min-zhan. "Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence." The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. Ed. Gary Tate, Edward P. J. Corbett, and Nancy Meyers. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 327-37. Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. The Macmillian Reader. Boston: Allyn, 1999. Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. National Institute for Literacy. Fast Facts on Literacy. 22 July 2000. Nespor, Jan. "The Construction of School Knowledge: A Case Study." Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other. Ed. Candace Mitchell and Kathleen Weiler. Westport: Bergin, 1991. 169-88. Ohmann, Richard. "Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital." Politics of Letters. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1987. 215-29. —. "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language." The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. Ed. Gary Tate, Ed­ ward P. J. Corbett, and Nancy Meyers. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 310-18. Postman, Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Random, 1995. Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact zone." Profession 91 (1991): 33-40. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 1999­ Scollon, Ron, & Scollon, Suzanne B. K. Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication. Norwood: Ablex, 1981. Trimbur, John. "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis." The Politics of Writing: Postsecondary. Ed. Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1991. 277-95.

BRADFORD VIVIAN Vanderbilt University

Sophistic Masks and Rhetorical Nomads

Newton Garver has commented that the philosophical study of language in the twentieth century has been shaped by what he calls "two distinct flurries." "The first movement," he writes, "was naturally a reinforcement of the philoso­ phy of language based on logic; but the subsequent movement has been an over­ throw of that long tradition, the overthrow which Derrida speaks of as the closure of metaphysics."1 To understand the predominant philosophical concep­ tion of language in the twentieth century, then, is to understand language rhe­ torically. To conceive of language as such, moreover, is to behold an unprecedented revolution in the nature of Western philosophy, for "the philoso­ phy of language," Garver adds, "has almost invariably been based on logic rather than rhetoric."2 The occasionally hesitant, somewhat uneven, though nevertheless steadily growing interest in the Sophists during the modern era is thus coextensive with a larger rhetorical movement in Western thought.3 Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that during the so-called closure of metaphysics many in rhetorical studies have found in the image of the Sophists a particularly attractive form of discourse and knowledge, of citizenship and pedagogy, whose perceived kinship with the exi­ gencies of contemporary rhetorical thought has proved too appealing to ignore. Indeed, the current fascination with the Sophists in rhetorical studies might be likened to the relief of a courteous host whose duty to the prescriptions of hospi­ tality has long distracted him or her from family and loved ones while attending to the wishes of a demanding houseguest—one who has overstayed his welcome by nearly two-and-a-half millennia. One might even say that these loved ones, our Sophistic ancestors, appear now like forgotten kin, whose memory had been repressed by Platonic slander and the ellipses of fragmentary documents, but to whose image we now return as if to reclaim our disciplinary roots, our long-deferred authentic origins. Like most memories of distant kin, however, the ques­ tion is less one of authenticity and more of the sense and value such memories acquire in the present, of the ways in which such images organize our current and future desires. In this essay I explore the contemporary image of the Sophists in rhetorical studies, an image whose features have acquired an undeniable clarity—a palpa­ ble sense and value, a tangible currency—in present considerations regarding 193

194

Professing Rhetoric

the promise and vitality of rhetorical studies as a whole. I argue that by ques­ tioning this modern image of the Sophists we may effect not so much a recovery of the past, but perceive within it, rather, a conception of the being of rhetoric peculiar to the apparent closure of metaphysics in the present. In the language of much contemporary scholarship on the subject, I propose to refigure the current refiguration of the Sophists. The notion of sophistry in the disciplinary lore of rhetorical studies remains largely synonymous with the idea of cunning and artful performance. To the extent that their virtuosity is presumed to have been rooted in a Protagorean relativism, the livelihood of the Sophists apparently depended upon an ability to present a fitting ethos for one audience rather than another. The Sophists were adept in the wearing of masks, in other words, for the quintessential Pla­ tonic suspicion of the Sophists was, of course, always that their appearances were mere illusions, obscuring some fundamental and contradictory reality. Contemporary re-valuations of the Sophists have affirmed and celebrated these sophistic masks as a way of questioning the metaphysical priority of transcendent truth, the autonomous subject, and the sovereignty of reason. Victor Vitanza's recent work, for instance, seeks to liberate the virtuosity of the Sophists from the metaphysical sign of the negative, under which it has been placed so often in the history of Western thought, while Susan Jarratt finds in the Sophists a consummate model of liberal pluralism, whose "playful tones," to use her term, bespeak an ability to instruct all manner of subjects in healthy democratic participation.4 In the midst of what Vitanza calls "the Third Sophistic,"5 then, a revel in the many masks of the Sophists is assumed to consti­ tute a fundamental refusal of the metaphysical tradition's alleged obsession with the transcendent subject and its faultless identity. The celebrated mutability of the Sophists was naturally a product of their itinerant nature, for which they are also well remembered today. John Poulakos describes sophistic itinerancy as "nomadic," according to the sense in which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define the term: as a form of thought and practice produced by a particular spatio-temporal movement—a smooth and fluid movement distinctly other than that of well-ordered citizens who populate the stratified, hierarchical space of the city-state.6 Of course, particular modes of thought and divergent ways of perceiving reality attend these forms of move­ ment and their corresponding spatial arrangements. The peculiarphronesis of the Sophists, then—their sense of prudence concerning the choice of public personae—was, according to disciplinary lore, an effect of nomadic thought and practice—a skill in the ability to move deftly from one local identity to the next. By this account, the masks of regional identities might be said to have formed the very territory the Sophists nomadically traversed. The correspondence between sophistic masks and the nomadic being of the Sophists lies at the heart of a familiar list of polarities. We have, for example, the Platonic and the sophistic; the mask and the genuine; the citizen and the no­ mad; the state and the steppe; essence and appearance; metaphysics and rheto­

Sophistic Masks and Rhetorical Nomads

195

ric. These familiar polarities, of course, have long represented a Platonic effort to distinguish between the true and the false in order to elevate the manifestations of the ideal forms over and above the perversities of mere simulacra. The con­ temporary reconsideration of the Sophists in rhetorical studies has consisted largely of an inversion of this asymmetry, elevating and affirming the sophistic pole so as to argue, in patently postmodern fashion, that all is artificial, all is rela­ tive, all is appearance or performance. Does this affirmation, however, effectively hasten the closure of metaphysics? If these polarities were established according to patently metaphysical values of truth and falsehood, of appearance and illusion, does the inversion of their origi­ nal hierarchy effectively undermine those metaphysical values? To the contrary, merely amplifying the terms of the sophistic pole leaves the original metaphysi­ cal criteria to which they owe their existence unquestioned. To the extent that this is so, and insofar as this image of the Sophists is used to authorize the current proliferation of rhetoric's domain in the present, we may yet retain a conception of rhetoric animated, however distantly, by the unseen hands of metaphysics. An unfortunate entailment follows from these Platonic and sophistic polari­ ties: namely, the assumption that, when confronted by this condition of stasis, we must choose one pole or the other. We are compelled to choose, in other words, between the Platonic vision of the true rhetor, a bureaucratic dialectician suited for the maintenance of the ideal republic, or the sophistic master of the simulacrum, whose visible mask obscures no true face but begets, rather, as Nietzsche might have said, an entire series of masks, each one more ingenious than the one before. What if, however, the true being of rhetoric resided not in any one pole of this antithesis, but in the very movement between them? What if the self-professed authenticity of the city-dwelling philosopher was in fact a sophistic performance all its own? And what if, under certain conditions, the mask of the nomadic Sophist was as much a bureaucratic instrument as any other? What if, in other words, the truths of the Platonic and the sophistic were not discrete, but instead formed what John Sallis might call a "double truth," and irreducibly so?7 Like every double truth, that of the relations between the Platonic and the so­ phistic must be a paradoxical truth. What, then, might be its defining features? On the one hand, the time of the Sophists featured a remarkable pan-Hellenism, where previously fixed social hierarchies based on wealth and birth were becom­ ing fluid. During the swelling humanism of the fifth century BCE, and particu­ larly in Athens, even the institution of slavery came under at least some question. In short, this was a time characterized by the experience of a dramatic transformation in conceptions of physis and nomos, an unprecedented equivoca­ tion between the bonds of divine, immutable law and the mandates of contin­ gent, human convention.8 While the Sophists were indeed regarded with suspicion by conservative elements of Greek society, they nevertheless fulfilled important functions within the city-state. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that, as for­ eigners, "they had no chance of becoming political figures themselves, so they

196

Professing Rhetoric

used their talents to teach others."9 Guthrie describes such instruction according to the economic vocabulary of supply and demand: as democracy spread in Ath­ ens and elsewhere, so sophistic instruction became more valuable.10 Far from be­ ing parasitic elements simply extracting their goods from a pure and insulated city-state, the very "foreignness" of the Sophists was a resource literally embod­ ied by the institutions of that city-state, for the students of the sophists—those who populated the social and political hierarchy of the city—owed their station in life both to the privileges of birth and to their status as the pedagogical prog­ eny of the Sophists. The Sophists, therefore, were truly liminal figures—at once alien to and incorporated within the machinery of Hellenistic bureaucracy. And yet, on the other hand, Platonic philosophy hardly emerged at a com­ plete remove from the influence of the Sophists, but within a temporal develop­ ment wherein the Platonic actually followed from the sophistic. Guthrie, for one, repeatedly describes the sophistic age as a "transitional" period and argues that "with the Sophists Greek thought entered not on its decline but on its early manhood."11 Indeed, Socrates and Plato inherited elaborate and well-rehearsed philosophical discourses on questions intimately related to the influence and in­ struction of the Sophists.12 The profundity of Socrates and Plato's philosophy de­ rived not so much from the originality of their inquiries, but more from the manner in which they transformed the polyvocal flux of existing social, political, and intellectual debates into a particularly coherent and rigorous system of thought. In this context, the pristine clarity of the metaphysical ideals inscribed by Socrates and Plato owe their peculiar luminosity to, and may not even have come into being without, the shadowy gradations of sophistic thought and practice—a notion suggested by Richard Marback's argument that "the current dis­ tinction between Platonic philosophy and sophistic rhetoric provides a misleading framework for reading the Western rhetorical tradition."13 Like all transitional periods, the age of the Sophists was thus one of jointure, wherein competing and irreducibly different systems of thought were at once held to­ gether, though in tension—simultaneously joined and separated in a doubling movement: the very portrait of a double truth. Unlike the currently fashionable and patently postmodern image of the Sophists, then, the double truths of their existence reveal those internal condi­ tions of metaphysical thought that ensure the inevitable transformation of metaphysics in general—what Derrida describes as its "closure."14 For the dou­ ble truth of the Platonic and sophistic poles does not depend upon or even yearn for a dialectical synthesis. Instead of a completely liberated nomad, we find in the Sophist one who is quite at home in the domicile of a republic. Conversely, in the genesis of Platonic thought we perceive not a transcendent origin, but one sullied by its encounters with and inheritances from the contested career of sophistry. Far from establishing a dialectic, then, a further doubling occurs within each of the Platonic and sophistic poles of this double truth, leading not to a dialectical resolution, but to the proliferation of difference and multiplicity, of yet more masks and different truths: an irreducibly doubling truth, that is,

Sophistic Masks and Rhetorical Nomads

197

doubly redoubled. John Sallis notes that Plato's Timaeus, in his discourse on the cosmos, describes "the possibility of the second, the possibility of being other than one"—the image of the double, in other words—as "Xayehov: severe, difficult, troublesome, dangerous."15 Whereas the metaphysician would seek to domesticate this doubling movement—that is, to resolve its irreducible differ­ ence into a choice between supposedly knowable identities—an apprehension of its fundamental otherness preserves the severity and danger, the expression of pure difference, worn on the many masks of the Sophists—an apprehension which undermines any recourse to metaphysical explanations. "The double is XayeHov," Sallis writes, "because it never simply remains the double but, un­ doing the definiteness that the article would ascribe to it, always broaches re­ doubling, doubling the double."16 Our task, therefore, is not to choose the Sophist over the Platonist, as if a fundamental essence, continuity, or similitude ensured that either of these terms actually referred to some knowable and uni­ fied identity.17 Our task, rather, is to find the Platonic within the mask of the so­ phistic, as well as the sophistic behind the mask of the Platonic—to transform these previously fixed and knowable identities, in other words, as well as the dis­ ciplinary politics that attend them, by making manifest their inherent other­ ness, by transforming their likenesses into the sheer difference of hitherto unimagined forms of knowledge and discourse. Before offering a final provocation, I should make clear that I do not wish to characterize the history of metaphysics in terms of any fundamental continuity, nor would I willingly suggest that the time of the Sophists and our own should be likened according to a symmetrical or circular logic. Nevertheless, much like the spirit in which Derrida claims that "There is no sense in doing without the con­ cepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics"18—and in a temptingly suggestive counterpoint to the ways in which Plato required sophistry for the opening of metaphysics—so too may we conclude that the remnants of Platonic thought will be necessary for its closure, and that the otherness of these rem­ nants still might live within the modern image of the Sophists. Notes 1. Newton Garver, "Preface," Speech and Phenomena by Jacques Derrida (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973): xii. 2. Garver xi. 3. For major works that have contributed to this modern interest in the Sophists, see W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971); Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (New York: Universal Library, 1967); G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy 3 vols, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lin­ coln: U of Nebraska P, 1995); G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); MarioUntersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954). For in­ fluential or noteworthy scholarship on the Sophists in rhetorical studies, see Susan C. Jarratt, Re­ reading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991); Richard Marback, Plato's Dream of Sophistry (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999); John Poulakos, Sophisti­ cal Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbus: U of South Carolina P, 1995); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997).

198

Professing Rhetoric

4. See Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997) and Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: South­ ern Illinois UP, 1991). 5. See Vitanza, Negation. 6. See John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbus: U of South Carolina P, 1995) and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987). 7. John Sallis, Double Truth (State U of New York P, 1995). 8. See especially W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971): 55-163 and G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981): 111-30. 9. Guthrie 40. 10. Guthrie 40–41. 11. Guthrie 50. 12. See especially Guthrie, The Sophists 176-225, 250-60 and G. B. Kerferd, "The Future Direction of Sophistic Studies," Ed. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophists and Their Legacy (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981): 1-6. 13. Richard Marback, Plato's Dream of Sophistry (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999): 13. 14. See Jacques Derrida, "Differance," Speech and Phenomena, 1967, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973): 129-60. 15. Sallis xi. 16. Sallis xi. 17. Edward Schiappa and John Poulakas have debated the possibility of fixing either the historical or conceptual identity of rhetoric and sophistry according to our available disciplinary vocabulary. See John Poulakos, "Towards a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (1983): 35—48; "Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible," Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 215–26; and "Interpreting Sophistical Rhetoric: A Response to Schiappa," Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 218–28; Edward Schiappa, "History and Neo-Sophistic Criticism: A Reply to Poulakos," Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 307-15; "Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism or the Historical Reconstruction of Sophistic Doctrines?" Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 192–217; and "Rhetorike: What's in a Name? Toward a Revised History of Early Greek Rhetorical Theory," Quar­ terly Journal of Speech 78 (Feb. 1992): 1-15. 18. Derrida 250.

EKATERINA V. HASKINS Boston College

Paideia versus Techne: Isocrates's Performative Conception of Rhetorical Education

Although the classical Platonic question whether "rhetoric" is an art (techne) seems to have been settled by Aristotle in rhetoric's favor, the existential doubt continues to animate many a discussion in both rhetorical historiography and contemporary rhetorical theory. The debate has now moved beyond the "foun­ dational and totalizing question 'What is rhetoric?"' to the more inclusive and proactive question 'What can a rhetoric be?'" (Lucaites, Condit, and Caudil 19). In the spirit of anti-foundationalism, this paper seeks to revisit the question of techne from a perspective of Isocrates, the rival of Plato and Aristotle. Isocrates gives an ambivalent response to the question "do you possess a techne"often pos­ ited in Platonic dialogues to poets and rhetoricians alike. Answering "yes" or "no" would mean to yield to the assumptions of Plato's epistemology. Instead, Isocrates ushers in a notion of a discursive education (logon paideia) that is grounded in the pre-Platonic performance culture. Rather than objectify the subject matter of a "rhetoric,"paideia fosters self-reflexive performance (mimesis) of civic excellence. Isocrates's language game is worth the attention of today's rhetorical educators as he argues for an inclusive and politically responsible dis­ cursive training (logon paideia) over and against the disembodied mastery of a techne. However, logon paideia would stand in sharper relief if we first consider the implications of the techne question in Plato and Aristotle. The Techne Question in Plato and Aristotle Isocrates's reluctance to identify his profession as a techne and his expansive con­ ception of paideia can be understood as tactical maneuvers in an ongoing rivalry with Plato. Plato's Socrates uses the techne question to refute his interlocutors' claim to le­ gitimate knowledge. This knowledge, for Socrates, must be about a definitive sub­ ject matter, otherwise no techne can be claimed. Hence, the ubiquity in many Platonic dialogues of the "peri ti" probe ("what is X about?"), which Socrates uses to determine the "aboutness" of a particular sphere of human activity. Platonic criticism of performers of poetry and rhetoricians highlights the same putative deficiency in regard to "subject matter": their subject matter is logoi, 199

200

Professing Rhetoric

rather than the knowledge of shipbuilding, medicine, or mathematics. The dia­ logue Ion, for instance, pictures Socrates failing to pin down the rhapsode's knowl­ edge: "You are exactly like Proteus, twisting back and forth, assuming every shape ... in order not to display how skilled you are in wisdom about Homer (peri Homerou sophiari)" (542 a). Ion's knowledge, however, unlike the expertise of the doctor, the fisherman, or the charioteer, does not attach itself to a specific group of objects. In fact, it is not attached to objects at all: the rhapsode knows "the kind of thing ... that a man would say, and a woman would say, and a slave and a free man, a subject and a ruler—the suitable thing for each" (540 b). Ion imitates only Homeric words, but does not possess an expertise in a distinct craft. This charge of epistemological deficiency, however, is tied to Plato's negative conception of performance, according to which verbal or bodily imitation (mime­ sis] is always inferior to the "original." Plato apparently invented the pejorative sense of mimesis as a "bad copy." According to Havelock, pre-Platonic usage "refers to 'sympathetic behavior,' not to abstract copying or imitation, and in great many cases this behavior is physical, a matter of speech, gesture, gait, pose, dress and the like" (Preface toPlato 58 n22). Havelock points out that Greek edu­ cation was based on a performative union of speech and action: What you 'did' were the thousand acts and thoughts, battles, speeches, journeys, lives, and deaths that you were reciting in rhyth­ mic verse, or hearing, or repeating. The poetic performance ... had itself to be a continual re-enactment of the tribal folkways, laws and procedures, and the listener had to become engaged in this re-enactment to the point of total emotional involvement. (159) Socrates forgives Ion his epistemological failure in exchange for an admission that the rhapsode's skill is not an art, but a product of divine inspiration (Ion 542a). Plato does not offer this plea bargain to rhetoricians. Like the Ion, the Gorgias employs the techne question, only in this dialogue rhetoricians are charged with moral deficiency as well. Because rhetoricians ingratiate their au­ dience without having a clearly circumscribed expertise in a particular subject, and do so shamelessly, they are deliberate impostors. Socrates summarizes this twin indictment in his conversation with Polus: Flattery, however, is what I call it, and I say that this sort of thing is a disgrace ... because it aims at the pleasant and ignores the best; and I say it is not an art [techne], but a habitude [empereia], since it has no account [logos] to give of the real nature of things it applies, and so cannot tell the cause [aitiari] of any of them. I refuse the name of art to anything that is irrational [alogon]. (465a) Plato wrote Gorgias around the same time as Isocrates composed Against the Sophists. While exact dates of these texts are contested (see Roochnik 182), the techne question is pivotal in both. Isocrates refuses to equate his teaching with a

Paideia versus Techne

201

tetagmene techne, a "fixed art," and negates a possibility of a techne that "can im­ plant sobriety and justice in depraved natures" (Against the Sophists 12, 21). Not that Isocrates denies that he professes a teachable knowledge (why open a school and charge tuition, then?); rather, his dancing around techne suggests that affir­ mation would render Isocrates vulnerable to Plato's epistemological criteria. As Roochnik points out, Plato sets up an elaborate trap for Socrates's opponents: All of these arguments hinge on granting the goodness of techne. Should the interlocutor agree to this, he is committed to the notion that knowledge is good and not equivalent, either in kind or value, to opinion. It further implies that he thinks determinacy, clarity, precision, and arithmetic stability, the hallmarks of techne, are de­ sirable. Should the interlocutor agree to these assertions, he will be refuted by Socrates, for his own views cannot measure up to these standards. Once refuted, he becomes open to the exhortation to seek moral knowledge, that is, to become philosophical. (204) Roochnik argues that Socrates resorts to techne analogy only for purposes of refutation and exhortation, while never claiming a techne of moral knowledge himself (227–31). If this is so, Isocrates's eschewing of techne and his expansive claims to paideia and philosophia make more sense, since the supposed value of techne is but a bait designed to marginalize rhetoric and endow philosophy with a higher intellectual and moral status. Not only status is at stake, however. As will be discussed later, Isocrates presents a contesting version of philosophy, the one thoroughly based in performance culture and political discourse (logos politikos), in explicit contrast with Platonic flight from the traditional performative paideia. By the time Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric is written, the meaning of techne and the value of rhetoric have evolved. If Plato consistently divides knowledge be­ tween theoretical and productive types, Aristotle offers a tripartite classification of knowledge into theoretical, practical, and productive. Unlike Plato, Aristotle reserves the term techne only for productive arts (such as poetics and rhetoric). Also, Aristotle considers rhetoric as a systematic techne rather than as a "knack" (Rhetoric 1254a2). Finally, Aristotle pronounces rhetoric "useful" (khresimos) (1355al2). Aristotle, then, seems to have exculpated rhetoric from the twin charge of epistemological and ethical deficiency and thereby established rhetoric as a legitimate discipline. Such is the prevailing opinion in contemporary rhetor­ ical historiography. Yet legitimacy is purchased at a price of rhetoric's subordination to practical arts of ethics and politics, and separation between propositional content and performative power of discourse. Comparing rhetoric with other areas of in­ quiry, Aristotle states: "Thus it appears that Rhetoric is as it were an offshoot of Dialectic and of the science of Ethics, which may be reasonably called Politics. That is why Rhetoric assumes the character [hupoduetai hupo toschema, "slips un­

202

Professing Rhetoric

der the appearance"] of Politics, and those who claim to possess it, partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses, do the same" (1356a7). In this veiled attack on Isocrates's logospolitikos, Aristotle indicates that rhetoric gives expression to political subject matter, but must not be confused with it. Here, subordination is a matter of distinguishing between substantive knowledge furnished by extra-rhetorical disciplines of ethics and politics and potential public statements. Rhetoric's function is "to observe (to idein) in each case the existing means of persuasion" (1355bl4); it is merely a "faculty [dunamis] of furnishing arguments" (1356a7). Furthermore, this "fac­ ulty" is a mark of already fully habituated ethical agents. "The Rhetoric" as Poster contends, "is provided as a manual for the student trained in dialectic who needs, particularly for purposes of self-defense or defense of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, to sway the ignorant or corrupt audience or to understand the functioning of rhetoric within a badly ordered state" (244). Another related legitimacy condition pertains to the relationship between po­ litical agents and received opinions (endoxa) from which rhetorical syllogisms are formed. According to Aristotle, to gain mastery of rhetorical argument (to be­ come enthumematikos), one must be able to discern the true (alethes) from that which resembles it is. Such is the requirement for the capacity to "divine well in re­ gard to endoxa" (1355all). Grimaldi thinks this passage implies that the rhetor simply aims at what is true in each particular case (1:23), but there is a good reason to disagree with him. I have argued elsewhere that Aristotle remains consistent throughout his corpus in his treatment of endoxa. Because of his belief in the cycli­ cal nature of knowledge, he approaches them as manifestations of universal truths about cosmos and human nature, rather than as culturally and situationally spe­ cific utterances (Haskins 168-73). Indeed, even before deploying endoxa in an ar­ gument, the rhetor must reconstitute the propositional content of endoxa in terms of commonplaces (topof) (Rhetoric l403bl). Consequently, the linguistic form is separated from its extralinguistic content and performative elements of discourse are relegated to style (lexis), treated in the Rhetoric's third book apart from the dis­ cussion of proofs, genres and emotions. So, while Aristotle gives a positive answer to the Platonic probe "is rhetoric a techne?" he also significantly limits the scope and function of rhetorical practice and education. If Plato "had developed the metaphysical justification for an epistemology that rendered rhetoric irrelevant to the central problem of con­ necting ideas with words, objects, and actions" (Ober, Political Dissent 251), Ar­ istotle took a different route. He redefined rhetoric as a neutral capacity (dunamis) in the hands of a rational agent. It may well be that Aristotle's re­ sponse to the techne question was a "correction" not of Plato, but of Isocrates. Isocratean Logon Paideia as Performance In none of his extant texts does Isocrates directly name his profession a techne. Translators of the Loeb edition in many instances have offered phrases

Paideia versus Techne

203

"art of discourse" or "art of words" where no such terms exist in the original Greek (Roochnik 283–88). Roochnik sees Isocrates vacillating between reject­ ing techne and associating with it. For despite his negative view of a "fixed art," Isocrates still wishes to "hang a shingle," or advertise his knowledge as some­ thing worth paying for: "[Isocrates] studiously avoids actually using 'techne' to speak about what it is he teaches, while at the same time trying to associate what he teaches with the arts" (287). Isocrates's ambivalence on the techne question is important for at least two reasons. First, it reminds us of the mutability of the terms we have embraced to explain our profession to insiders and outsiders alike, as well as of the role these terms play in a convoluted dynamic of status and marginality in the history of rhetoric (Hariman). On the other hand, this ambivalence points to a conception of education that does not sit easy with a demand for a discreet body of principles which could be viewed apart from performance (as Aristotle would imply by the phrase to idein, to observe). Isocrates challenges our deep presumption of the goodness of a systematic rhetorical methodology, rooted as it is in Aristotle's ac­ count of the art of rhetoric. For example, Solmsen's landmark essay "The Aristo­ telian Tradition in Ancient Rhetoric" bemoans the fact that in Isocrates "we lack a starting point of the same solidity and authenticity as Aristotle's three books on rhetoric" (36). On the other hand, a few scholars have attempted to recon­ struct Isocrates's "theory" on the basis of ancient testimonia's assumption that Isocrates had produced a handbook. They typically proceed by extracting from Isocrates's extant writings a set of principles or criteria that can qualify as theory. For instance, Gaines interprets Isocrates's putative emphasis on the parts of speech as a valid rhetorical theory. Rummel seeks to find the conceptual ground­ ing of Isocrates's "ideal of rhetoric" in his reliance on opinion (doxa). However, if we keep reading Aristotle back into Isocrates, we are likely to dis­ cover mostly those elements that are congenial to Aristotle's epistemology and politics. I suggest that Isocrates's compositions do not aspire to an atemporal status of theory. Several scholars have questioned the desire to ascribe a techne to Isocrates. Michael Cahn focuses on kairos ("opportune moment") as a key notion explaining Isocrates's radical indeterminacy and Yun Lee Too depicts Isocrates as a hegemonic rhetor who ensures the pedagogical and political relevance of his writings by accenting his role as an agent of knowledge. I would like to add to these insights another perspective—the one derived from Isocrates's own de­ scriptions of the performative dimension of his paideia. While "performance" has certainly become an academic buzzword, I do not imply that we need to im­ port it into our readings of ancient texts. In Isocrates, the notion of performative education is readily apparent. Unlike Plato, whose relationship with the oral performance culture is marked by antagonism, Isocrates builds upon the tradi­ tional Greek link between speech and action, common in pre-Platonic under­ standing of mimesis (Havelock 57–60). Isocrates explicitly affirms his debt to the poetic tradition. In his monumental Antidosis (itself a "mimesis" of Plato's Apology) he substitutes the term philosophia

204

Professing Rhetoric

for mousike in a description of the two disciplines "bequeathed to us by our ances­ tors": "physical training for the body, of which gymnastics is a part, and, for the mind, philosophy" (181). In Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE mousike denoted the educational practice of memorization and recitation of the poetic tra­ dition; while at the time of publication of Antidosis (354–353 BCE) philosophy was precisely the term contested by Plato and Isocrates (Timmerman 149). How, then, does philosophia work as the mental counterpart of gymnastics? Isocrates pictures a progression from imitation to self-conscious performance. First, "those concerned with philosophy impart to their pupils all the forms which speech (logos) happens to use," then follows a period of intense exercise and habituation, and finally, the pupils are set to test if they can "bring their opinions (doxais) into closer touch with the occasions for applying them" (Antidosis 184). This picture of Isocrates's logonpaideia appears almost too simple, unless we rec­ ognize the striking strategy of usingphilosophia in place of mousike, as well as the insistence on doxa as a pinnacle of an apparently long and arduous learning pro­ cess. Indeed, Isocrates accents doxa in what seems like a deliberate gesture against Plato's conception of philosophy as an ascent away from "mere opinion." As Takis Poulakos comments, "the kind of learning Isocrates promotes, then, has to do with the ability to make experienced judgments in those affairs that present themselves full of uncertainty and ambiguity but which nevertheless must be addressed" (97). The ability to address unforeseen contingencies does not exhaust the performative thrust of Isocrates's paideia. If this were the only Isocratean contri­ bution to the classical rhetorical lore, it could be easily assimilated into Aristotle's conception of techne (sans the proud label of philosophy, of course). Rather, it is the notion of political identity as a product of discursive training and recurrent political performance that seems to fly in the face of the Academy and the Lyceum. Performance is not just a way of knowing, it is a way of doing and being. Isocrates promotes discursive education (logon paideia) as training in social ac­ tion. Students arriving at Isocrates's doorstep should expect not only to memo­ rize and practice poetry and prose for the sake of acquiring facility in oratory, but also gradually to grow into public persons whose actions are worthy of poetic and political praise. We should keep in mind that another meaning of the term doxa is "reputation." For Isocrates, "An honorable reputation [to dokein einai kalon kagathon] not only lends greater persuasiveness to the words of a man who possesses it, but also adds luster to his deeds, and is therefore to be sought after more zealously by men of intelligence than anything else in the world" (Antidosis 280). If Aristotle's "ethos" constitutes an intrinsic proof, a means to an external end, Isocrates stresses "good reputation" as both a means and an end of public performance. An ancient aristocratic ideal of goodness and nobility, kalokagathia by Isocrates's time had become transformed "into the inborn nobility of the citizen body as a whole" (Ober, Mass and Elite 263). Its aesthetic and political aspects

Paideia versus Techne

205

are no doubt linked for Isocrates, as he imagines kalokagathia as a kind of mi­ metic magnet for those who embark on the study of philosophy. But he adds an ethical dimension to this "god term" by stipulating that mimesis of worthy dis­ courses requires contemplation and appraisal (theorem kai dokimazein) of models of civic excellence, not unreflective mimicry (Antidosis 277). Thus, to Aristotle's subsequent displeasure, Isocrates is able to claim ethics as a province of a discur­ sive paideia. But there is more. Isocrates argues that a good reputation is ultimately be­ stowed on an agent by a political community: "the stronger a man's desire to per­ suade (peitheiri) his listeners, the more zealously will he strive to be honorable (kalos kagathos) and to have the esteem of his fellow citizens" (Antidosis 278). Whereas Aristotle prefers to bracket the consequences of performance for a speaking sub­ ject by stressing rhetoric as a capacity rather than activity, Isocrates considers the audience's response essential to one's political agency. Aristotle would find such a life, dependent as it is on vicissitudes of audiences and situations, burdensome and even vulgar. Unless speakers stay within a circle of like-minded friends or disciples ("the ideal speech situation") possibilities of failure abound. In Isocrates's view, those who do not seek approval of their political community, like his former stu­ dent Timotheus, find themselves in disrepute. As is evident from Antidosis and Panathenaicus, Isocrates puts himself in a position of constantly proving his profes­ sional and political worth to his audience. To claim a techne, then, whether in Plato's or Aristotle's sense of the term, may not be the best course for defending our profession. As Isocrates's case sug­ gests, we cannot—indeed, we shouldn't aspire to—settle the question "What can a rhetoric be?" once and for all. By the same token, the indeterminacy of a performative paideia entails not less but more responsibility on the part of rhe­ torical educators. Rather than declare a Baudrillardian victory and go home, in­ determinacy challenges us to accept the burden of proof as agents of knowledge. Works Cited Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Trans. J. H. Freese. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977. Cahn, Michael. "Reading Rhetoric Rhetorically: Isocrates and the Marketing of Insight." Rhetorica 2 (1989): 121–44. Gaines, Robert. "Isocrates, EP 6.8." Hermes 118 (1990): 165-70. Grimaldi, William. Aristotle, Rhetoric I: A Commentary. New York: Fordham UP, 1980. Hariman, Robert. "Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory." Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. Ed. John L. Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: Guilford, 1999. 35–51. Haskins, Ekaterina. "Rhetoric between Orality and Literacy: Cultural Memory and Performance in Isocrates and Aristotle." Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 158-78. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap, 1963. Isocrates. Isocrates II. Trans. George Norlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1929. Lucaites, John L., Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. New York: Guilford, 1999. Ober.Josiah. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. —. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

206

Professing Rhetoric

Plato. Plato III: Lysis, Gorgias, Symposium. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. —. Oeuvres Completes V: Ion, Menexene, Euthydeme. Paris: Collection des Universites de France, 1931. Poster, Carol. "Aristotle's Rhetoric against Rhetoric: Unitarian Readings and Esoteric Hermeneutics." AmericanJournal of Philology 118(1997): 219-49. Poulakos, Takis. Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997. Roochnik, David. Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. Rummel, Erika. "Isocrates' Ideal of Rhetoric: Criteria for Evaluation." ClassicalJournal 15 (1979): 25-35. Solmsen, Friedrich. "The Aristotelian Tradition in Ancient Rhetoric." AmericanJournal of Philology 62 (1941): 35-50. Timmerman, David M. "Isocrates' Competing Conceptualization of Philosophy." Philosophy and Rhet­ oric 31(1998): 145-59. Too, Yun Lee. The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

DANIEL L. EMERY University of Iowa

Thoroughly Modern Vico: The New Science and Counter-Enlightenment Politics

For on one hand the conceit of nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no hope of getting at the princi­ ples of our Science from the philologians. And on the other hand the conceit of scholars, who will have it that what they know must have been immanently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting them from the philosophers. So, for the purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no other books in the world. (Vico, The New Science, 89) Given the self-reported originality of The New Science from Vico's comments on previous scholarship, it would seem to make it a curious point of departure for an inquiry into the emergence of modernity. For Vico, everything stated in The New Science arrived fully formed and was derived from nothing other than his own reason and the providence of God. Given his effort to radically depart from existing philosophy and emerging natural science, and the relative obscurity of his work at the time and since, it is challenging to place Vico within traditional intellectual history. Indeed, his faith in divine providence and his turn away from the rise of subject centered rationality emerging elsewhere on the continent makes The New Science at once a reiteration of classical knowledge and a radical reformulation of it. Thus scholars staking claims to traditional categories of in­ tellectual history are faces with a quandary; is Vico the last of the ancients, a dif­ ferent sort of modern, or a man ahead of his time? Mark Lilla takes up the question of Vico's place in intellectual history in G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, arguing that Vico was, and continues to be, misinterpreted by generations of philosophers (as much as he was in his own time). By returning to works prior to The New Science, Lilla hopes to illustrate Vico's position against the rise of Enlightenment within the cultural context of its emergence, and to criticize efforts by Isaiah Berlin and others to recuperate Vico as a hero of the "counter-enlightenment". Equally as interesting as Lilla's philosophic reconsideration of Vico is the challenge that his conclusions about 207

208

Professing Rhetoric

counter-enlightenment politics, applying his conclusions about the conservative nature of Vico's critique of the Enlightenment to contemporary critiques of En­ lightenment rationality. In this essay, I read the controversy over Vico's deployment as a "counter-enlightenment" hero as something more than a simple question of intellectual lin­ eage. The efforts to place Vico within or against particular rhetorical and philosophical traditions, as exemplified in Lilla's critique of Berlin, demon­ strates some of the competing tensions that emerge in the production of moder­ nity as a historical category. Whether considered "Counter-Enlightenment" in the emancipatory or chauvinist senses of that term, historical scholarship on Vico illuminates the political entailments of intellectual history as it is currently produced in rhetoric and philosophy, which in turn demonstrates the contested territory of modernity. At stake in this disagreement over modernity are our no­ tions of the legitimacy of reason, the limits of individual will, and the political entailments that arise from each of these. Lilla argues that our received view of Vico, the somewhat grave narrative of a forgotten scholar born before his time advanced since Michelet's translation of The New Science, points to an interesting tension: How could one who came to be valo­ rized by the Romantics have been so ignored or reviled by his contemporaries? Isa­ iah Berlin identifies Vico as a sort of Counter-Enlightenment John Brown, an unsuccessful rebel who nevertheless became a hero to those who would later take up the cause against Enlightenment rationality. For Berlin, Vico represents one of the earliest attempts to derive a modern philosophy free of rationalism, advancing an outlook that he will term "pluralism." According to Berlin's essay, "Giambattista Vico and Cultural History": Vico is the father of both the modern concept of culture and what one might call cultural pluralism, according to which each authen­ tic culture has its own unique vision, its own scale of values, which in the course of development is suspended by other visions and values. (59-60) For Berlin, Vico anticipated the potential dangers of rationalism allowed to reign without opposition and, in his New Science, provided a mechanism for under­ standing divergent cultures in a manner that avoided reading the past as simply the rough road to a more progressive present.1 As part of a career devoted to the development of intellectual history and to the virtues of philosophic Romantics of the nineteenth century, Berlin frequently returned to Vico as a source of inspira­ tion and influence, and for illustrations of the complexities of philosophical plural­ ism. In each case, Vico is identified as an inspiration to Romantics that followed him, both in nineteenth-century France and twentieth-century England. While Lilla admits to Berlin's view that Vico was the father of the CounterEnlightenment, he insists that Vico was certainly not a pluralist (6). Despite his appropriation by the Romantics that followed him, Vico stood against the En­

Thoroughly Modern Vico

209

lightenment not as a radical, but rather as a reactionary. The combination of pre-modern theology and modern science that makes Vico such an important and enigmatic historical figure and marks his work as the first anti-modern so­ cial science, also makes him somewhat politically suspect on Lilla's view. His sus­ picion of the motives for Vico's critique is evident even as he admits to Vico's originality, as he states "Vico is the first European thinker to have presented a profoundly anti-modern political theory in the guise of a modern social science" (9). Under the guise of scientific inquiry, Vico advances a political theory and a conservative agenda. Lilla contends that despite its philosophic monism, rationalist philosophy had pluralistic or democratizing effects on the domain of knowledge. Modern philoso­ phy sought to liberate men from previously established social orders and author­ ity. By this rationale, it is of no small political consequence that Vico launches out against rationalism in the majority of his recorded work. Indeed, Lilla argues that shoring up existing social hierarchies was one of Vico's goals. He contends that as an advocate of theological science, Vico was more inclined to seek freedom from philosophy and reason than to advocate the search for freedom through them. Ap­ plying this measure to contemporary scholarship he concludes: The contemporary attempt to revive aspects of Counter-Enlightenment thought, while retaining features of the Enlightenment out­ look (notably liberal politics) might be understandable. But it is historically and philosophically naive. Vico, his followers, and early adversaries all understood that modern thought is not a bloc, that within it are two rival traditions moving in opposite directions, forc­ ing us to choose between them. Either one resigns oneself to living with a broad Enlightenment tradition that values reason, skepti­ cism, and freedom, or one sets off with Counter-Enlightenment thinkers who abandon those principles in the pursuit of order, au­ thority, and certainty. Autaut, the modern world offers no third al­ ternative. (Lilla 13) Berlin is Lilla's obvious target. While Lilla's title would seem to suggest that Vico will be the hero of a critique of the modern, through the course of the argu­ ment Vico appears equally as dangerous and anti-democratic as his 16th century Tuscan counterpart, Machiavelli. Still, as Marcello Montanari concludes in his review of Lilla's book in TheJour­ nal of Modern History, it is difficult to pin down precisely "the modern" that Vico is positioned to be against. Clearly Vico's arguments for a science of culture rather than one of nature are a poor fit for an increasingly human centered natu­ ral philosophy premised upon individualism and rationality. But from this dif­ ference we cannot infer that he is hostile to subject centered reason in the modernist sense altogether. In fact, the search for principles of civic association was premised on the belief that through true science the divine language of

210

Professing Rhetoric

Providence might be discovered, maintaining a place for the human mind and reasonability within his analysis. Ultimately it is the faculty of reason and the practice of scientific thought that afford inquiry into the providential order of the world. If Vico's commitment to science is an indication, then it is clear that Vico holds a much more vexed relationship to the Enlightenment than either Lilla or Berlin suggests. On my view, Lilla underestimates the tension between theological hermeneu­ tics and scientific observation in The New Science, missing the connections between the sciences of culture and nature. While Vico is not attempting to mirror the practices of natural science, and perhaps is explicitly rejecting them, he still ap­ proaches the question of certain knowledge as if there were an ontological basis for such knowledge claims. It seems that Lilla's effort to produce a consistent ortho­ doxy across Vico's career undervalues elements that mark The New Science as a sig­ nificant departure from the Vico of On Method and earlier lectures on rhetoric on this very topic. Where traditional theology relied upon hermeneutic practices for uncovering the divine word, Vico seeks to establish the divine order scientifically through observation. Thus while his object of vision and warrants for observation are different, Vico is still operating under some of the assumptions of what might be called modernist scientism. I contend that the affiliation of Vico's scientism with particular modernist logics and methodological assumptions indicates an af­ finity with modern science even as it is a refutation of it. However, before illustrat­ ing this claim, that Vico's science reflects a modernist method even as it refracts and distorts it, one crucial term must be interrogated. The term modernist in general is often an adjective, as in a modernist painter or modernist philosopher. In the former case we are dealing with a different notion of modern, based on aesthetic genre distinctions. The latter example is also problematic in this case, since "philosopher" is a label toward which Vico was somewhat ambivalent at best, and to which he is quite hostile at worst. Given Vico's posthumous talent for avoiding simple genre distinctions, one fruitful av­ enue for approach would be to ask the question: how will we learn from Vico if we read his work as if he were principally a modernist rhetorician? This approach affords us opportunities to both refine our understanding of Vico's practices of analysis and to encounter the political questions of the Enlightenment more specifically. Considered within the contested terrain of modernist rhetoric, Vico's argument for a pursuit of knowledge tempered by a limited form of rela­ tivism is more easily understandable. Indeed some of this work has already been undertaken, but not without controversy, in Michael Mooney's Vico in the Tradi­ tion of Rhetoric. The choice of the term rhetorician in the phrase "modernist rhetorician" may seem uncontroversial, as Vico was a teacher of rhetoric for most of his life. Never­ theless, philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith were able to write and lecture on rhetoric and avoid calling themselves by this name. Again, it im­ portant to remember that the point of asking this question is not one of the ap­ propriate placement of Vico in scholarly history, but rather the effects of a

Thoroughly Modern Vico

211

particular association of The New Science and the old rhetoric. Vice's metaphysic is designed to examine the common nature of nations in the light of divine provi­ dence (New Science 17). For Vico, it is only through the denial of the conceit of mathematics as a universal measure that we might achieve true knowledge of the appropriate course for nations. In place of the mythologies previous scholars es­ tablished through human constructed mathematics, Vico sets forth a chronologi­ cal narrative, rooted in philosophical axioms but ultimately derived from the analysis of historical documents. First, he argued that divine providence had al­ ways been cast upon people living together, even among the Greeks and barbari­ ans who didn't recognize it. Thus, it was upon principles of divine authority that all civic bonds were formed and maintained, both before and after the birth of Christ. Additionally, Vico's inquiry relied on the fundamental importance of hu­ man ideas. Men were considered weak to the degree that they are allowed to culti­ vate imagination more than reason, but in this case, reason refers to nothing more than the knowledge of objects in and of themselves. By this measure, Vico upheld the value of philosophic criticism based on this recognition of the importance of ideas. Finally, The New Science relied upon a notion of eternal history common to all nations and the principles of natural law. The presence of a universal history, wider in scope than the history of the civic sphere suggested a true point of origin for all human action and continuity to all existing histories. Although rooted in a science of culture rather than one of nature, the presup­ positions of universal principle, natural law, and certain knowledge illustrate that assumptions common to Cartesian rationality are also present in Vico's Sci­ ence. These affinities move The New Science away from the probabilism of rhetorics reliant upon classical notions of topical invention. But despite the sci­ entism of his analysis, Vico is clearly a modernist like none other, in that the de­ velopment of the nation and civic life was the object of The New Science, where other modern sciences read politics only as an analog to nature. Fascinatingly, Vico's science is simultaneously conservative and radical, looking to history as a means for understanding the world scientifically, while simultaneously invent­ ing the category of culture in opposition to nature. Within The New Science, Vico's turn from the "table of things moral" attributed to Cebes the Thebian, to the construction of "a table of things civil" is no surprise when considered from the perspective of rhetoric, where historical precedent, eth­ ical principle, and civic association are often held together. Classically considered, the civic domain is thought to be the home turf of rhetoricians, the agonistic space in which speakers vie for glory and recognition using persuasion as the weapon of choice. Vico would likely recognize this conception of rhetoric, but in a manner different from some rhetorical histories. Based on his reconsideration of classical cultures, Vico would read the arrangement of civic space and the production of civic discourses in Greece and Rome as distinctive cultural artifacts rather than as the immediate historical predecessors of his own political culture. In this sense, classical rhetoric operates as a point of contrast rather than a forerunner of (then) contemporary politics. If Vico is a rhetorician, he is not a strict adherent to classical

212

Professing Rhetoric

assumptions or to an unbroken rhetorical tradition, a difference upon which we more clearly justifies the new title of modernist rhetorician. Vico borrows a Protagorean fragment, man is the measure of all things, and adds to it a new critical clause. He states, "Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, whenever it is lost in ignorance, man sees himself as the measure of all things" (54). The alleged conceits of Vico's philosophical contemporaries (Des­ cartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza in particular) find their common roots in this ten­ dency to take oneself as measure in the absence of true knowledge. Vico seeks to set the record straight by establishing reasonable and freely chosen points of de­ velopment to characterize the emergence of human reason with divine providence as its point of origin. Man may be he measure of all things, but certainly not the center of the universe. Ultimately, placing Vico's work within the context of the critique of philosophy and rhetoric will help deal with seeming impossibility of lo­ cating Vico once and for all. In end, I maintain that it is more profitable to rhetori­ cal historians to view Vico's challenge to our criteria for periodization as an opportunity to reconsider our practices more broadly than to attempt to fix Vico's place in history. In reading the debates on Vico's place in intellectual history, our own presuppositions about rhetorical history are made apparent. For this reason, it s crucial to read Berlin and Lilla in light of our contempo­ rary rhetorical and political situation. Berlin champions the Romantics for their critique of rationalist dominance as a constraint on individual expression. Lilla, conversely, criticizes the Romantics for abandoning the emancipatory power of reason, arguing that there can be no other path to freedom. In each case, the tra­ vails of recent political history and the specter of totalitarian restriction are placed on the opposite side of the argument. This reversibility suggests that what at the outset is an apparent contradiction between Romantic idealist and rationalist readings of politics might be a displacement of a fundamental affilia­ tion between them. Indeed, the principles of individual sovereignty that under­ lie both of these competing positions suggests that the opposition of romanticism and reason is actually division constitutive of the domain of mod­ ern politics. Similarly, we can conclude that both of these senses of politics are el­ ements of the set of relations that make modernist subjectivity possible, that they are divergent manifestations of a single logic. The opposition serves to shore up ideologies of individualism and volunteerism, and to the degree that one side or the other is championed in the name of freedom, the notion of the in­ dividual subject as an arbiter is left uninterrogated. Thus while Berlin and Lilla differ on their readings of Vico, their assumptions about the function of intellec­ tual history and the role of the political subject are almost shockingly similar. There are clear parallels between this controversy and Habermas's critique of poststructuralism, who argues that the turn away from rationality prevents us from making appropriate genre distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric and, even worse, robs political movements the possibility of self legitimation through rationality.2 Habermas asserts that French poststructuralism operates in the manner of Romantic politics, transforming politics into aesthetics and lev­

Thoroughly Modern Vico

213

eling the distinctions between philosophy and art (both assumptions are open to a good deal of criticism). For both Habermas and Lilla, our choice is reason or terror and therefore, we must continue the Enlightenment project in order to guarantee freedom and to guard against the potential for Fascism in the Counter-Enlightenment. However, if one considers that we are participants in a his­ torical moment that can furnish both a critique of reason and at the same time attempt to argue for an increase of political freedom (albeit on contingent foun­ dations), we might have moved beyond this modernist double bind. The divi­ sion that Lilla constructs is rooted upon the exclusion of the critique of reason from Enlightenment politics, an analysis that points to the potentially fascist conclusions of Enlightenment rationality (as in the case of Horkheimer's repres­ sive tolerance). This refusal to consider the critique of rationality lends credence to an argument of the dangers of unchecked rationality. Yet the inversion of this hierarchy which champions individual expression would still hold the individual subject as the end and arbiter of politics, ignoring the complexities of collective identification. For a truly radical critique of modernist politics, we must affect a displacement of this logic altogether. For the history of rhetoric, this implies an effort to understand the sets of relations constitutive of the modern political sub­ ject, with all the enabling constraints that this subject position insinuates and all the complexities of its development. More broadly, it might also imply the inter­ rogation of our own political beliefs and their complicity with logics that overes­ timate the power of volunteerism and individual agency. It is within this frame that a rereading of modernist rhetoric can serve our political present and future. Notes 1. Berlin's idealist reading of Vico can be found in several essays distributed across his career, as well as in the larger project Vico and Herder. 2. Habermas's critiques of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists are best seen in The Philosophic Discourses of Modernity. In the twelve lectures that make up the book, Habermas identifies a decisive break between poststructural theory and communicative rationality in the wake of the cri­ tique of subject centered reason. Where French Poststructuralism takes the critique of subject cen­ tered reason toward a potentially nihilist critique of any and all conceptions of reason, Habermas suggests that the critique of subject centered reason might have more profitably turned down a path toward the reexamination of reason as communicative action. Works Cited Berlin, Isaiah. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. New York: Viking, 1980. —. "Giambattista Vico and Cultural History." The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Ed. Henry Hardy. London: John Marrow, 1990. 49-69Lilla, Mark. G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Montanari, Marcello. Rev. of G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, by Mark Lilla.Journal of Modern History 67 (1987): 462-64. Mooney, Michael. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, and Hayden V White, eds. Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Balti­ more: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Revised Translation of the Third Edition (1744). Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fish. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1968.

This page intentionally left blank

CARLG. HERNDL Iowa State University

Rhetoric of Science as Non-Modern Practice

In 1994, Art Walzer and Alan Gross published an article in College English dis­ cussing rhetorical analyses of the space shuttle challenger accident. They de­ scribed the analyses as either being a form of naive positivism or a nihilistic postmodernism, and they proposed their Aristotelian position as one which re­ solves the failures of either extreme. I start here because Walzer and Gross iden­ tified an earlier essay written by Carolyn Miller, Barbara Fennel, and me as the representative of the radical postmodern position—an attribution that came as something of a shock to us. In part of that article we argued that the managers and engineers at Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle's solid rocket booster, could not resolve their differences because their arguments belonged to different argument fields in Steven Toulmin's terms. Specifically, we wrote that participants in the discussions "were unable, more than unwilling" to recognize and accept each other's positions (Herndl, et. al. 303). Identifying this moment in our argument as the central issue, Walzer and Gross charge that ours was an anti-rhetorical position because it makes reasoned argument impossible. I begin here not because I want to refute Walzer and Gross at this late date. Rather, I begin here because I think their critique has considerable merit; it identifies important problems that have bothered me ever since. When Walzer and Gross charged us with making argument impossible in science and technol­ ogy, they identified our position with the incommensurability thesis in rhetoric of science. In its harder or softer forms this thesis holds that differences in theo­ retical paradigms or discursive fields make it impossible for scientists to per­ suade opponents or to resolve what Kuhn famously called paradigm debates. But much of the controversy over the issue of incommensurability and the con­ sequent possibility or impossibility of rational argument grows out of the way it has been widely interpreted through the metaphor of translation. Perhaps because of their grammatical connotations, Kuhn's poorly defined terms paradigm and paradigm shift are usually interpreted in terms of translation between languages or discourses in analyses of scientific controversies. Similarly, Richard Rorty's metaphor of disputants using different "vocabularies" leads critics to understand incommensurable positions as ones between which translation is 215

216

Professing Rhetoric

impossible. Rorty refutes the notion that scientific controversies can be resolved by reference to external reality or to the truth conditions of statements. Because statements have meaning only as part of what he calls "vocabularies," scientists arguing for opposing theories can only redescribe phenomena over and over un­ til they gain adherents. If we are operating within a social constructionist or poststructural position that locates the difference here as linguistic, the meta­ phor of translation leads to a rhetorical stalemate very like the one Walzer and Gross attributed to us. There is a latent idealism in Kuhn's unfortunate com­ ments that "proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in differ­ ent worlds, " and that they "see different things" when they look at phenomena (Kuhn 150). Such talk by Kuhn and others leads to what Karl Popper calls the "myth of the framework" and Donald Davidson debunks as a "conceptual scheme." The latent idealism in Kuhn's language makes incommensurability seem absolute and final. Kuhn's and Rorty's unfortunate metaphors aside, incommensurability need not indicate a purely linguistic situation. Neither Kuhn nor Rorty un­ derstand incommensurability as a strictly linguistic problem. For Rorty the­ ories are commensurable when there is a certain procedure for making decisions rather than a situation of exact point-by-point translation between competing theories: By "commensurable" I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem in con­ flict. (316) Similarly, in his reading of Kuhn, Richard Bernstein argues that incommen­ surability only means that there is nothing which "is permanent and deter­ minate that stays the same in cross-paradigmatic comparisons," a neutral observation language or a set of rules and procedures for resolving theoreti­ cal disputes (85). Bernstein argues that incommensurability has been mis­ takenly interpreted as a "theory of meaning" when in fact Kuhn and others use it to indicate stark differences in the standards and problems different groups find engaging and persuasive. Communities of scientists do not speak different languages. Their differences are not matters of epistemol­ ogy. And, as Donald Davidson and Barbara Hernstein Smith have demon­ strated, their arguments are not untranslatable in any final sense. As Smith writes, incommensurability, [i]s neither a logically scandalous relation between theories, nor an ontologically immutable relation between systems of thought, nor a morally unhappy relationship between sets of people, but a contin­ gent, experiential relation between historically and institutionally situated conceptual/discursive practices. (152 italics added)

Rhetoric of Science as Non-Modern Practice

217

Smith's argument for institutionally situated, historical practices picks up the material and practical implications of Bernstein's argument that proponents of competing theories most often differ about the relevant standards and problems. In what follows, I suggest a new way to formulate the rhetorical problems in­ volved in scientific disputes. I want to address Walzer and Gross's criticism by moving beyond the dilemmas presented by the incommensurability thesis when it is understood through the linguistic metaphor of translation. And I want to offer, however briefly, a model of science and scientific argument that integrates the social and material with the discursive, but which does not abandon the real. To do this I turn to Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and his notion of the non-modern. In these theories, Latour formalizes the theoretical position he de­ velops throughout his earlier empirical work in books like Laboratory Life, Science in Action, and The Pasteurization of France. Latour studies "science in the making" by documenting the daily practices of laboratory scientists and the way their de­ bates reach "closure." And I turn to Donna Haraway's most recent book, Modest Witness @ Second Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™, where she de­ scribes the products of technoscience as "material-semiotic" events. In elaborat­ ing this notion, Haraway explores the leaky boundaries between the machine, the animal, and the human, and she traces the networks about which Latour theorizes. Latour and Haraway offer concrete studies of scientific practice that successfully move beyond the stalemate between objectivism and relativism that Bernstein, Rorty, and Smith have described as both unproductive and un­ necessary. The understanding of scientific practice Latour and Haraway provide takes up the material and institutional sense of incommensurability nascent in Bernstein and Smith. Together Latour and Haraway sketch a rhetorical situa­ tion in which argument between scientists is indeed "fundamentally contin­ gent, dependent on perspective and purpose," but which also makes possible argument and disciplinary change (Smith 144). Latour argues that modern science always involves two complementary sets of practices which operate simultaneously and largely invisibly. The first set of practices involve the work of "translation" and "create mixtures between en­ tirely new types of beings," what Latour calls hybrids (10). (And to anticipate Haraway, Latour's hybrids are cousins of Haraway's cyborgs.) Latour offers the growing hole in the ozone layer as an example. This hybrid links refrigerators, the food industry, the chemistry of chlorofluorocarbons, the upper atmosphere, the auto industry, skin diseases, the terrestrial ecology, scientific and industrial strategies, economic calculations and investments, national and international policy, the anxiety of ecologists, recreational habits, and meteorology. Hybrids are produced by networks which connect these seemingly disparate elements like threads. Or, in a nicely suggestive metaphor, Latour asks us to think about networks like sewer lines or gas lines, crossing a space but not filling it, connect­ ing the material, the discursive, the political, the economic, and the real sites of production. One attribute of modern science is the remarkable rate at which such hybrids proliferate and the length to which networks extend.

218

Professing Rhetoric

This first set of productive practices is always accompanied by a second set of practices Latour calls the work of purification. Purification distributes hybrids into two distinct ontological zones, the human and the non-human, the natural world and the social world. Purification establishes the dichotomy of the natural from the social and protects that distinction by allocating phenomena to one or another category. Purification distributes differences into distinct discursive fields in much the way Foucault described the regulatory work of discursive re­ gimes. Purification also erases the translation process which produces hybrids, making the process of scientific work disappear into the stabilized final product of science. Purification also cleans up the messy ontological miscegenation of networks. Latour defines the modern by these two interlocked practices. He plots the practice of purification with its dichotomy between Nature and Society on a hor­ izontal axis and the practice of translation with its networks on a vertical axis. Purification generates the distinction between the natural and the social and makes the invisible proliferation of hybrids possible. Without the proliferating work of translation, however, purification would be pointless. On this model, nature and society are the results of purification practices op­ erating on the hybrids produced by translation practices. Nature and society are the remainders when the networks are severed and we distribute the differences. For Latour, modern science involves the play of these two practices but with the caveat that they always be thought separately. The separation of the two prac­ tices is the subject of his earlier books Laboratory Life and Science in Action. In both books, Latour follows the production of scientific facts and the way the process of producing facts disappears from the final, stabilized fact. The "non-modern" dimension Latour describes begins with the "quasi-objects" and "quasi-subjects" that inhabit the center of Fig. 1. Latour borrows the term quasi-object from Michel Serres, and uses it to designate the non-modern ar­ tifacts which reside below the modern poles of nature and culture. Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the "hard" parts of nature, but they are in no

Fig. 1. Adapted from Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern.

Rhetoric of Science as Non-Modern Practice

219

way the arbitrary receptacles of a full fledged society. On the other hand, they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society—for unknown reasons—needed to be projected. (Latour 55) Neither natural nor cultural, quasi-objects are artifacts of nature-culture. Latour builds a theory of what he calls "symmetrical history" around his model of quasi-objects and the practices of purification and translation. Latour's symmetrical history explains the failures of naive positivism and of an equally naive social constructionism in science studies. It also returns us to the very simi­ lar dichotomy Walzer and Gross constructed to critique rhetorical analysis of science. Latour describes the positivist notion of science as asymmetrical because it begins with a transcendent nature and explains scientific truth by reference to nature, scientific falsehood by reference to society. The dominant forms of social constructionist theory are equally asymmetrical. They begin with a naive notion of a transcendent society and explain both truth and falsehood by reference to society and an unelaborated notion of power. Symmetrical history begins with quasi-objects, with the abundant but invisible hybrids and their networks. It ex­ plains nature and society through the work of purification that stabilizes quasi-objects, distributing them as objects of external reality on the one hand or subjects of society on the other, as nonhuman or human. Latour's radical refor­ mulation suggests that Walzer and Gross's rhetorical model is a failed modern formulation that never adequately escapes the play back and forth between the two results of purification practices. Despite Walzer and Gross's rejection of the positivist and postmodernist alternatives, they silently accept the ontological terms of the dichotomy. I return to this issue and the question of incommensurability it invokes shortly. But I want to look first at Donna Haraway's work because it demonstrates in slightly different terms Latour's ar­ gument about networks and quasi-objects. In Modest Witness Haraway practices a "cyborg anthropology" similar to Latour's symmetrical history. Cyborg anthropology draws, of course, on her fa­ mous figure of the cyborg, the boundary transgressing being who queers the bor­ ders between male and female, human and nonhuman. In Modest Witness, Haraway regards technoscience through the "mutated murine eyes" of OncoMouse. The most obvious and extraordinary cyborg in her discussion, OncoMouse is a hybrid, a quasi-object of Latour's nonmodern realm. OncoMouse is a laboratory mouse genetically engineered to contract breast cancer. It is also the first patented animal in the world. OncoMouse is also an ordinary commodity cir­ culating in transnational capital. It is owned and distributed by Du Pont who market OncoMouse under their slogan "Available to researchers only from Du Pont where better things for better living come to life." Finally, OncoMouse is a figure in the Christian salvation narrative that promises a cure for cancer. Haraway's OncoMouse epitomizes her cyborg: "a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices" (51).

220

Professing Rhetoric

Where Latour refers to his quasi-objects as elements of nature-culture, Haraway talks of the nature-of-no-nature. OncoMouse implodes the modern distinctions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Like the other technoscience hybrids Haraway traces, OncoMouse is a material-semiotic event. It is "an articulation of high-technology capitol, [trademark and intellec­ tual property law,] diverse skills, interdisciplinary negotiations, bodily organic structures, marketing strategies, personal and symbolic codes, medical doc­ trines, transnational economics, scientific industry's labor systems, and patient-consumer hopes and fears" (1). The term material-semiotic here tries to capture the cyborg as made but not made up, as participating in the natural, the social, and the discursive all at once, as collapsing the founding categories of the modern. In the chapter in which she discusses OncoMouse, Haraway connects the development of transuranic elements during the Cold War, the science fic­ tion novels of Johanna Russ, the periodic table of elements, patent law, research funding patterns, and the marketing images for OncoMouse and other geneti­ cally engineered corporate products. The controlling metaphor of this chapter and of large parts of the book is that of kinship as a technology for producing the material and semiotic effect of natural relationships and differences. Thus, kin­ ship can work like Latour's purification to distribute cyborgs into closed catego­ ries, or it can work as it does in Haraway's hands to queer these distinctions by tracing out the networks which cyborg quasi-objects and quasi-subjects like OncoMouse both inhabit and constitute. Lest I collapse Haraway's project into Latour's I should point out that Haraway pursues a more active political agenda than Latour. Working from feminist science studies, she echoes Sandra Harding's question "Whose science? Whose Knowledge?" and continually asks in whose interests these hybrids work. Haraway struggles to make an opening through which to change technoscience into a more egalitarian and just practice. Having traced the gene­ alogy of technoscientific networks, she writes: "The relations among the techni­ cal, mythic, economic, political, formal, textual, historical, and organic are not causal. But articulations are consequential; they matter" (68-69). Haraway's observation that articulations matter leads me back, finally, to the rhetoric of science, persuasion, and the modern dilemma of incommensurability. Latour's theory of networks and Haraway's demonstration of the kinship rela­ tions that her cyborgs inhabit suggest that rhetorical studies of science might profitably examine the rhetorical production involved in the work of purifica­ tion. How do the quasi-objects of "science in the making" become stabilized as facts? What discursive practices dismember networks and distribute artifacts into sutured categories, constructing scientific authority along the way? More importantly, Latour's model and Haraway's cyborg anthropology suggest that we consider scientific debates and the difficulties of persuasion as struggles over defining quasi-objects. And they suggest that we think of disputes in terms of divergent networks rather than as translation problems. Incommensurable the­ ories then might emerge from different networks and stabilize their quasi-ob-

Rhetoric of Science as Non-Modern Practice

221

jects through different techniques. Disputes between theories are certainly discursive, and they are certainly social. They certainly involve different material and ideological investments, and they are tied to the real. Latour urges us to think all four at once. And Haraway's insight that the relations between ele­ ments of networks are not determinate and that articulation matters suggests that we think about persuasion and scientific debates as struggles to extend net­ works. On this model, rhetoric articulates and rearticulates networks, building broader, more extended networks by enrolling powerful actants from the mate­ rial, the social, the discursive and the real. Works Cited Bernstein, Richard. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermenetttics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1983. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1984. Haraway, Donna J. Modest Witness @ Second Millennium. PemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge, 1997. Harding, Sandra. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking From Women's Lives. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Herndl, Carl G., Barbara A. Fennell, and Carolyn R. Miller. "Understanding Failures in Organiza­ tional Discourse: The Accident at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger Disaster." Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1991. 279-305. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd Ed. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1970. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Popper, Karl. "Normal Science and Its Dangers." Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. 51-58. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979­ Smith, Barbara Hernstein. Belief and Resistance: The Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Walzer, Arthur, and Alan Gross. "Positivists, Postmodernists, Aristotelians, and the Challenger Di­ saster." College English 56.4 (1994): 420-33.

This page intentionally left blank

WAYNE C. BOOTH, Professor of English Emeritus The University of Chicago

Ending the War between Science and Religion: Can Rhetorology Do the Job?1

Every effort to relate science and religion can be described as overly ambi­ tious, even dangerous. But the topic deserves, and has been receiving, many books, with astonishingly different titles and approaches.2 Wherever we look on the public scene, we see quarrels between defenders of religion or science (some­ times called "reason" or "secular humanism"), the combatants making little or no effort to understand one another, aiming their clever ripostes at targets that are not really there. And our books and journals are full of advice, useful and use­ less, about how to turn the warfare into dialogue.3 The battles are not likely to end soon. Whether the conflict is labeled as rea­ son versus superstition, blind dogmatic rationalism versus genuine human val­ ues, secular humanism versus religious fundamentalism, atheism versus theism—no matter what the terms, the conflict between hard thought about natural law and hard thought about the source and grounds of nature and value will outlive you and me and our grandchildren. Approaches to the conflict are overwhelmingly diverse. Some authors still take the extremist line that the enemy of reason, sometimes called religion, of­ ten called superstition, will finally die. Some of them, like Michio Kaku in his Vi­ sions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century, aggressively claim, or at least imply, that science will solve all religious problems, including how to achieve immortality. At the other extreme, John Polkinghorne, a particle physi­ cist and priest, brilliantly argues for complete harmony between his version of hard science and his particular version of Christianity. The more cautious prob­ ers, like Ian Barbour in his books that won the Temple Foundation prize, dig deeply into scientific method and theological arguments, claiming to find, in the tradition of Whitehead and Hartshorne (process theology), a meeting ground between some versions of science and some theologies. In all this literature one finds, predictably, the three traditional ways of deal­ ing with intellectual warfare: diplomacy, tolerance, or sheer relativism. In effect some say: "if you'll grant us our genuinely deserved territory, we won't impose on yours." An extreme version of such diplomacy denies any common ground. Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps the most popular of all biological rhetoricians, has 223

224

Professing Rhetoric

recently claimed total validity for both religion and science, but with absolutely no overlap: he invents the acronym NOMA, for Non-Overlapping MAgesteria. His approach is in effect an analogy for what two nations do if they decide to quit fighting and say, "You go your way, legitimately, as I go mine, legitimately." Toleration is a bit different: "I know that my views are the only correct ones, but I'll not interfere with yours—provided you don't attack me too strongly." Most serious scientists spend no time at all attacking religion; probably a larger percentage of religious believers do attack science, especially evolutionary the­ ory, but my hunch is, with no statistical evidence to back it, that most take the tolerant line: let those folks pursue their narrow bits of truth, while we deal with the more important stuff. Let them work on the fossils and dinosaurs, while we work on the soul. And vice versa. The extreme form of accommodation, complete relativism, is not just toler­ ance but indifference. There is no real truth in either direction, no ultimate real­ ity, or, even if there is, the differences don't matter. So let's just stop arguing. If it's all mere guesswork, or dogmatism, why argue about it?4 Whichever of these lines is taken, the results seem about the same: You go your way, on your mental territory, and I'll go my way on mine, and if we encounter conflict over the bor­ derlines, all we can do is either bargain, tolerate, or just scoff. Diplomacy, toleration, and skeptical relativism at least diminish the open warfare, but they simply ignore the plain fact that when one examines the rheto­ ric of scientists and religious thinkers, one inevitably finds lots of overlap in the deepest convictions of the combatants. Science and religion are not totally sepa­ rate enterprises, even when they seem to clash. Whenever the deepest of human interests are engaged, and seem to clash, especially when the clashing is not about mere physical territory but about ideas and human values, deep rhetorical analy­ sis is invited. Even diplomacy gets us nowhere when the quarrel offers no bar­ gaining chips, nothing to "give up" in exchange except the very ideas we care most about; it gets us nowhere if we are discussing whether Plato's Ideas really exist, or whether God is really dead, or whether pursuers of scientific truth and pursuers of religious truth can ever discover that they are on the same path, or whether, contrary to the relativists, truth of any kind really exists, or whether, as many like Steven Weinberg and Kaku argue, hard science will ultimately arrive at a final theory that explains everything, and may leave life itself pointless. Rhetorology What we obviously most need is a sharpening and deepening of a version of rhetorical study usually at best hinted at: not mere persuasion, and not merely the more responsible kinds of persuasion, and not the study of how this or that author has persuaded, but the probing of the deepest convictions underlying both sides in any conflict, to see where they might join. We need to push the pur­ suit of understanding, of genuine listening to the opponent, to its furthest possi­ ble limits: to the depths where our ultimate commitments, our "religions," or

Ending the War between Science and Religion

225

"faiths," or "ultimate passions" may still seem to clash, but perhaps do not. And because the usual terms in rhetorical studies carry narrower implications than that pursuit, I propose that we label this kind of rhetorical inquiry with the ugly neologism, rhetorology: the probing for shared grounds underlying any two ri­ val rhetorics.5 Such a quest is itself based on a prejudice: the assumption that there is, after all, some ground that is shared. I am a passionate believer in science—of most kinds. I am also a lifetime pursuer of religious truth. Even though some believers consider me dodgy, as I use terms like metaphorical, symbolic, or mythological, I still con­ sider myself genuinely religious. And I have found that some secularists who think they are not religious reveal their bias by becoming religiously furious when I claim that, according to the shared ground I pursue here, they really are.6 What are the rhetorological paths for plowing through this mess? I like to fall back on a very rough parallel with Aristotle's four causes, which too many scientismists (see note 4 above) reduce to one or two, efficient and material causes; they leave out final and formal causes, especially when they are in the laboratory. If we want to find out where the differences and similarities lie, we have to ask not just Aristotle's four kinds of questions but at least five. First, "What are the rival goals or ends of this or that project?" Then, "What are the rival methods for pursuing the goals?" Then, "What are the rival definitions of the subject-matter that is being quarreled about?," and then "What are the rival general principles, or deepest assumptions, underlying the arguments?"—what John Gage at the Rhetorical Society of America (RSA) conference this year called "an entire belief structure," of both speaker and audience. And finally, borrowing the word "scene" from Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad, which was actually based on Aristotle's four, we who are living in the time of cultural studies must add a fifth: the scene of any disputes is the range of cultural influences playing upon the disputants. For full rhetorological treatment, one would move through all five variables, providing examples. For this essay I will just concentrate on the one "cause" that is most significant in the search for common ground: the definition of the sub­ ject, religion. Definition My definition of genuine religion is: any belief system that reveals the following seven marks, ortopoi.7 In concentrating on this special kind of definition the other four rhetorical categories will of course be implicit all along, most obviously the search for shared general principles. But for now, the question is whether we can find that all religionists and at least some scientists—and rationalists, and secu­ lar humanists, and atheists—in some sense share the marks—the beliefs and experiences—even when they don't know it. Can anyone think of any terms more polymorphous, even perverse, than "re­ ligion," "religious," and "religiously," let alone "spiritual" or "devout" or "be­

226

Professing Rhetoric

lief"? "She practiced the violin religiously for five years, and then quit." Scientists are often said to reveal "religious fervor" in their pursuit of truth. "I watch '60 Minutes' religiously," said a letter to The New Yorker recently. "Spiri­ tual" was the word that TV star Rosanne thought best fit her experience when she was offended by the sexism of "Saturday Night Live"! After three frustrating tries hosting the show, she said, she "got really spiritual" and wrote her protest letter. We could go on to crazy varieties of use of "faith," "devotion," "believer," and so on. Some who consider themselves religious will not qualify in my definition of genuine religion. They reduce everything to the question of whether their church gives them moments of feeling high, whether it serves their private souls. For me that is at best only one of the seven marks to be found in all genuine religions. For such reductionists we need some other label—perhaps gee-ligion, with an exclamation point, or dis-ligion. Some of these, the ones who offer little more than a self-praising cheering up before Sunday brunch—"I'm OK, you're OK!, the world's OK!"—we might call me-ligions—or, in the extreme forms, narcis­ sism or even "spiritual autism."8 But there I go already, rejecting one belief system, me-ligions, as a non-religion, when the whole point of my project is to produce more and better rhetorology among rivals. My judgment dramatizes the fact that no matter what definition of religion we settle on, we ourselves will be committing, by the very act of defining, problematic evaluations of the kind I just committed. If our definition is accepted, that means that a new friend has earned our badge of ap­ proval: we join in the "religious community." If our definition is rejected, it will be because this "outsider" is sure that it was chosen in order to eliminate his or her absolutely religious religion. The three standard ways of dealing with this near-chaos of both overlapping and contradictory definitions are, first, avoid definition entirely, since "religion" is nothing more than a catchall term—what I've even heard called a garbage-bag. Richard Rorty has claimed that whenever religion enters the discus­ sion, any sensible person will just withdraw because real conversation has been blocked. Secondly, one can do what I would have done if asked to define religion, at the age of fourteen or so as an officially devout Mormon: just proclaim the one true definition that best fits my one true church. Finally, one can attempt an ecu­ menical definition, as William James did in his wonderful Varieties: one that un­ covers the psychological analogies among seemingly contrasting believers, without becoming so broad as to be meaningless. Obviously whether or how one uses the label "religion" in referring to any or all of the movements that I'll touch on here will depend on which of these paths we choose.9 On the one hand are those who believe you have not in any real sense defined a religion as genuine until you have described it in its full particularity, including the precise details of its unique foundation story and its unique rituals. A genu­ inely religious believer under this definition, whom we might call a uniquist, is one who is certain about the unique validity of his or her particular foundation

Ending the War between Science and Religion

227

story and about most or all of the details of doctrine which that story is claimed to embody. Like the devout young Mormon Wayne Booth, such uniquists take for granted that religious inquiry consists mainly in the pursuit of what some one true story has to say about our origins and how we should live our lives. Other religions can be tolerated, even respected, but you cannot fit them under any umbrella that covers you. The best they deserve is something like "mis­ guided religions" or "partial religions." In other words, religion for them is not to be found in any ecumenical or pluralistic definition of common characteristics but in the full, intra-textual, thick description of the details of one faith, one rit­ ual, one communal practice, and one scriptural embeddedness. Can you imag­ ine how shocked that young Mormon was when he learned that some of the benighted churches actually used wine instead of water in the sacrament? Can you imagine how miserable he felt when a favorite scoutmaster, when on a tour with the boys, sinfully ordered a cup of coffee? Any one detail of that kind can seem enough to credit or discredit any religion as sinful: my religion bans pork, while your fake religion bans alcohol; mine of­ fers a sacrament consisting literally of the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ, while yours is so silly as to call such sacrament only metaphorical. And so on. Even when an ecumenicist like me attempts to do full justice to particularity, the re­ sult will always look a bit "thin" from the perspective of such uniquists, since it is still bound into a project that puts aside superficial differences and the diverse blessings and rewards they provide, while pursuing the common core. We'll have a few words about such particularist blessings toward the end here. Though ecumenicists who are explicitly religious will usually at some point succumb to making judgments about relative worth, what is at their center is what is shared, not what makes the different religions peculiar. And if they make value judgments against some professions of religion, as I have already revealed that I do, they are still likely to leave not a single one clearly at the top of the hi­ erarchy but rather a plurality of the "great religions," contrasted with the not so great or utterly defective. Throwing all caution to the winds, I now shall suggest not a quotable defini­ tion but seven absolutely essential marks of genuine religion, not only the emo­ tional experience but the beliefs underlying those experiences—beliefs, assumptions, principles, that I think are found in all who believe in, and practice, some sort of religion. My list of marks, or topoi, is sure to leave out one or more of the blessings we come to later. But remember, we're not here defining "good" or "complete" or "best" religion: its just genuine religion.10 Mark One: Insistence that the world as we experience it is somehow flawed, as compared with what would be better. Something is wrong, deficient, broken, inadequate, lacking. Something is rotten not only in the state of Denmark, but everywhere. As the popular license plate puts it, Shit Happens. (I recently saw a plate that said "Defecatory Disasters Inevitable"). No one can ever deny that everybody in the world believes in this mark, and actually experiences it except in those rare moments when all is bliss or ecstatic

228

Professing Rhetoric

oblivion. Discussing it always reminds me of an experience of my colleague Da­ vid Tracy, Catholic theologian, as he met for several years with leaders of other "great religions" hoping to find common ground. Meeting annually with Bud­ dhists, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Hindus—no Mormons, of course—Tracy would return looking discouraged. "We found little or nothing this year." But one year not long ago he came back much buoyed up, looking positively opti­ mistic. When asked what they had agreed on, he said, as I remember it, "We all agreed that something is radically wrong with creation."11 Mark Two: There is obviously implicit in the notion of wrongness a value judgment: if something is judged to be wrong, there has to be a notion of some­ thing righter: the flaws must be seen in the light of the Unflawed, some truth, some notion of justice, or "goodness," or of some possible purging of ugliness. You can't say that something is wrong without implying that some standard for the judgment exists somewhere other than just in your own preferences. Again it's obvious that all or almost all scientists would join us here: they have the stan­ dard of scientific truth and personal integrity in the pursuit of science. Which leads us to ... Mark Three: Insistence that there is some supreme order or cosmos or reality, something about the whole of things that provides the standard according to which I make the judgments of Marks One and Two. In other words, when marks two and three—the "tightness" and the cosmic source of that rightness—disappear, there is no genuine religion. Some me-ligionists fall off the boat here, but most scientists do not. They are publishing many books about the quest for a final theory that will explain everything (Weinberg, Final Theory]. Most of them, even the most ardent atheists, believe in Mark Three: there is a cosmos. As Matthew Arnold's truncated definition puts it, religion is belief in some power "greater than ourselves, making for righteousness." The word "righteous" will put some people off these days, meaning something like dog­ matic or arrogant. But what Arnold meant was "something righter than wrong­ ness," and every scientist has to believe in that or else give up the quest for truth. These three marks, intertwined, are nicely revealed by the David Tracy anec­ dote: "Something is radically wrong with creation." His report of the discovery was not just that "something is unpleasant about the world," or "there's a lot of stuff in the world that I personally disapprove of or grieve over." Everybody be­ lieves that: not just devout Muslims and Catholics and Calvinists and Mormons but also the me-ligionists and atheists and drug addicts and serial killers: every­ body thinks that something could and should be better about the world—even if it is only that "I ought to have more drugs available" or "I don't have enough corpses yet buried in my cellar" or "Why can't I get every day the feelings I get in that new entertainment church on Sunday morning?" No, to repeat: to qualify as a religion, a belief system has to relate the first mark to the second and third: it must at least imply a story, some sort of master-narrative that says things like, "Something went wrong with creation," or "Something ought to have been righter," or at least "I can see what would have

Ending the War between Science and Religion

229

been better." It's not just "I don't like some things about it," but rather, "Some things are wrong when judged by what would be right, by what a full rightness would demand, by what the whole of creation as I see it—my cosmos, my God, my view of nature—implies as the way things should be but are not." In more traditional language, there was, and in some sense there still is, a fall. It is a brokenness, a decline from what would have been better to what is in fact at best a combination of the better—some ideal—and the worse.12 Lamentation thus moves toward religion only when it is linked with the sec­ ond and third marks—only when the lamenter realizes not just that shit hap­ pens but that shit's happening, and its definition in relation to what is not shit but genuine nourishment, is somehow built into the very structure of things: some cosmos. Shit has always happened, from the beginning (or, for some, al­ most from the beginning), but there was/is a place from which the fall can be judged as fall. It is defined by an elusive notion of its opposite, an order or cosmos which in some sense judges the happening as wrong. Mark Four, emerging from the first three: All who are genuinely religious (not just complaining or reveling) will somehow see themselves as in some inescap­ able sense a part of the brokenness. It's not just other people—those terrorists out there, say—who are out of joint. 7 am. I'm not as good or kind or effective or smart or learned or organized or courteous or alert or wise as I ought to be. Even the best of us, even the stron­ gest, the purist, the humblest, are inherently lacking, deficient, in need of fur­ ther repair, or if you prefer the words, we are sinful or guilty. I am an inseparable part of a cosmos that produced this flawed fraction of itself, me, including in that fraction a sense of regret about my flaws. (I may or may not feel deep gratitude to my "creator" for creating me, individually: that mark, prominent in many re­ ligions, belongs in the list of non-universal "blessings" below.) As we see in all honest scientists, mark four for them is revealed as lamenta­ tion about personal ignorance: what I don't know and ought to know! Why am I not closer to scientific perfection? Mark Five, following inescapably from the first four: The cosmos I believe in, the cosmos I may or may not feel gratitude toward for its gift of my very exis­ tence, the cosmos that is in its manifestations in my world in some degree broken—my cosmos calls upon me to do something about the brokenness. I must do what I can in the repair job, working to heal both my own deficien­ cies and to aid my fellow creatures in healing theirs. In some scientific religions that I discuss elsewhere, this sometimes means no more than "I have a duty to work at removing my own ignorance." More often even for scientists it becomes a moral command to remove the world's ignorance. For some official religions, as in versions of Judaism and in the Mormonism still naggingly active in my soul, it produces floods of daily self-reproach: that which I have done I should not have done, and that which I have not done I should have done. In many de­ nominations, perhaps especially Mormonism, it produces missionary work. But regardless of our various feelings, we are granted, by any genuine religion, a

230

Professing Rhetoric

sense of at least this one indisputable meaning of life: a purpose that transcends, while often overlapping and reinforcing, our particular feelings of the moment. I've never met a genuine scientist who does not share this sense of a passionate purpose for improvement—of something.13 Mark Six, an inescapable corollary of the other five: Whenever my notion of what my cosmos requires of me conflicts with my immediate wishes or impulses, I ought to surrender to its commandments. Rather than pursuing what is easiest or most pleasant or most reassuring to my present sensations or wishes, I obey or pursue It. Our impulses, our immediate wishes, ought to be overridden when­ ever they conflict with responsibility to cosmic commandments. We have obli­ gations not just to others but to the Other. Religious talk dwells on this; for scientists it is often only implicit. But next time you meet a scientist who is furi­ ous about a colleague who has cheated, ask him or her why cheating is really wrong. For example, if I am a scientist, and I am tempted to make a reputation or fortune by falsifying my results, I have an absolute command, not just from my conscience but from my cosmos, to combat the temptation. Finally, Mark Seven, a mark that must have been on every reader's mind: the psychological or emotionalfeelings connected with all of this: specifically, all gen­ uine religions either openly or subtly offer spiritual highs that result from con­ tact with the ultimate, the cosmos, the whole of things. I could fill the rest of this talk with quotations from scientists about how thrilled they are when they make full contact with what they consider reality or scientific truth or the challenge of the ultimate mysteries or beauty.14 Most religions have offered in their myths, unlike the truncated stories told by many sciences, explicit acknowledgment of finally irresolvable mystery, since the wholeness of the invisible cosmos is beyond total rational demonstration. The supreme order was always some kind of numinous mysterium tremendum. (Otto 1—30.) Some contemporary scientists have captured something of this mysterious wonder, admitting that no human being will ever grasp the "incom­ prehensible" whole. But many like Kaku aggressively claim that "in principle" our "religion" will capture it all. Even they usually reveal, however, a spiritual sense of awe or glory or gratitude for that "all." Non-Essential Blessings or Rewards It's obvious that many religionists will feel impatient about all that I've left out here: this or that reward or blessing that their religion considers essential. Even among common groundists who might happily accept my seven marks, there would be striking differences as soon as we turn to the relative value of var­ ious psychological or emotional or ethical rewards in addition to the spiritual highs. The shared marks leave out what many see as something essential, or even the one true definitional mark: —my sense of gratitude for Jesus's love;

Ending the War between Science and Religion

231

—my joy when wearing the holy shroud; —my passion for the blessed sacraments; —my gratitude for the rules of behavior my Church provides, the character-guidance: courage, hope, love, charity, humility; —my love of the sacred text, my Bible, my Book of Mormon; —my bliss when joining a congregation in ritual or song. The most decisive omission is of the "blessing" that is perhaps the most off-putting for most scientists: the comfort of belief in a God who intervenes in human affairs, willing and able to violate natural laws. A great majority of Americans believe that if and when we pray in the right way, God hears us and intervenes, allocating good fortune, Providence, to us according to what we de­ serve, while punishing or ignoring those who don't pray. For many this is not only one of the blessings but absolutely the number one mark of religious belief: if you believe in the Divine Intervener, you are religious; if you don't believe in a Meddler, you're an atheist. A full rhetorological probing would ask just what both sides in this dispute mean by the notion of Providence, or Meddling. What ground is shared by those whose Cosmos, God, intervenes, and those whose Cosmos, Nature, does not? To grapple with this conflict would require a whole book. I can only suggest, in concluding, that we should all do some tough rhetorological thinking about just what is meant by Providence and Intervention. All of us in the long run will, I hope, give up the notion that if I pray to God, as the hurricane approaches, He will save me while killing all of my neighbors just because they didn't con­ sciously pray to Him. But should not the true scientist be grateful for the fact that some power "greater than ourselves," some Cosmos,provided the conditions of his or her research, and stillprovides, daily, the whole range of possibilities that life itself yields? If I'm saved in the hurricane, my God—the range of blessed possibilities—provided the circumstances. If I prayed for a condition of soul suitable for dealing with disasters, my God provided the condition of my soul en­ abling me to utter that prayer.15 Escaping such roiling waters, can we not at least hope that by practicing rhetorology of some kind, pursued more skillfully than I've done here, we can di­ minish the pointless demonizing that diverse "sides" commit, as they attempt to destroy the other "sides"? Notes 1. This is a shortened version of a talk given at the Rhetorical Society of America (RSA) confer­ ence in May 2000. Another version was delivered at a conference on religious rivalries, at Notre Dame in June; it will appear next year in a collection edited by James Boyd White. One version is in the South African Journal for the Study of Religion, Vol. 14(1), 2001. Other versions, especially of my attempt at a definition of religion, have appeared elsewhere, and will continue to appear—perhaps finally in book form.

232

Professing Rhetoric

2. See my Works Cited list, which refers to some works not relied on here. 3. I have a shelf eight feet long containing books and articles on the subject, some from earlier cen­ turies but most of them published since Capra's The Tao of Physics, in 1975. The wealthy Temple Foun­ dation is now giving $100,000 prizes for the best books relating science and religion; for example, Barbour. 4. For a splendid questioning of utter cultural relativism, probing the religious issues it raises, see Shweder. 5. Maybe you can think of a better word, but I can't: "dialogue" is too narrow, "dialogology" even uglier, "discourse analysis" totally uninformative and unchallenging: "rhetoristics," a failed effort. "Dialectics" or "dialecticalism" are perhaps the best rivals, but they seem to leave rhetoric behind. And so on to through hermeneutics, or what Steven Mailloux has called cultural hermeneutics: still misleading. So why not rhetorology. 6. I don't like that word religionist, but it's hard to find a better one: call them the believers? well, scientists are believers? the faithful? Well, scientists are pursuing their faith. The devout? Sounds pe­ jorative. The theologians? Sounds too exclusive. So it will have to be religionists—even though one of my dictionaries says that that word sometimes means simply bigots. For those who want the term reli­ gionist to mean "bigot" I would like to revive a term I invented decades ago, scientismist, for bigoted sci­ entists. Greg Wilson, in his talk at the 2000 RSA conference, referred to one current branch of statisticians as sometimes called "religious bigots." 7. If the word topics had not been corrupted by history, it would go well here. 8. Jacques Derrida, in The Gift of Death, uses the term irresponsible orgiasts for the me-ligionists, those who have no sense of responsibility to "the other." 9. One of the very best discussions of the ambiguities in all religious language—a kind of "decons­ truction" and "reconstruction"—is in Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma, a book that William James knew well. 10. As soon as you begin to add the various "blessings" that this or that denomination claims to grant, you move closer to uniquism, and then Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblances" must take over: this handful overlaps with that handful, which in turn overlaps with a further handful, but none share all qualities with all the others. 11. I can be quite sure that Tracy would by now report this experience rather differently. After all, he did not witness his own face on his return from the two different experiences. And I wonder how Leibnitz would respond, as he worked out his theory of "the best of all possible worlds." But his whole project was based on the acknowledgment that when judged from the human perspective, a very great deal "went wrong" in creation. 12. Some Buddhists, I gather, would reverse this temporal scheme: not a "fall" but a "rise." But to do that does not destroy the real meaning of "something went wrong": it either was or could have been better. (My hints of a kind of temporality here—echoing the Bible story—of the Fall, needn't be taken literally: as Kenneth Burke makes clear in The Rhetoric of Religion, stories about temporal rising and falling can always be translated into non-temporal, vertical ladders: temporally, we were up there and now we're down here trying to climb back up; non-temporally we're standing on that ladder, in a fixed, "eternal" moment. 13. The particle physicist Steven Weinberg has expressed the fear that the sense of purpose in life may well disappear, for him and other devout scientists, once they have obtained the full "final theory"—once the scientific quest is completed. His religion may die once its goal is reached. Many cos­ mologists, however, disagree with this qualification of Mark Five (see Lightman). 14. Both words, mystery, and beauty fill Steven Weinberg's book, Dreams of a Final Theory. 15. We have to admit that God also provided the conditions that led to the hurricane—which lands us back in the old messy waters of theodicy—how to pardon God for creating evil. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards A Better Apprehension of the Bible. London: Smith, 1873. Popular ed., 1883. Barbour, Ian. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. Rev. and expanded edition of Gifford Lectures. San Francisco: Harper, 1997.

Ending the War between Science and Religion

233

—. Religion in an Age of Science. The Gifford Lectures. San Francisco: Harper, 1990. Burke, Kenneth. The Rhetoric of Religion. Boston: Beacon, 1961. Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1995. Trans. of Donner la mort, 1992. Gage, John. "Why Rhetoricians Should Teach Dialectic." Unpublished talk at RSA Conf., Washington, D.C., 2000. Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New "York: Ballantine, 1999. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Gifford Lectures. New York: Longmans, 1902. Scholarly edition published in The Works of WilliamJames, Frederick Burkhardt, ed. (Cam­ bridge: Harvard U, 1985), v. 13. Kaku, Michio. Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century. New York: Anchor, 1997. Lightman, Alan, and Roberta Brawer. Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Re­ lation to the Rational. Trans. John W. Harvey. Oxford U, 1923. Orig. Das Heilige, 1917. Polkinghorne, John. The Faith of a Physicist. Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker. Princeton UP, 1994. (Gifford Lectures, 1993-94.) —. Belief in God in an Age of Science. New Haven: Yale U, 1998. Rorty, Richard. "Religion as Conversation Stopper." Common Knowledge 3:1, Spring, 1994. 1-6. Shweder, Richard. "Post-Nietzschian Anthropology: The Idea of Multiple Objective Worlds." In Krausz, Michael, ed. Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame, 1989. 99-139Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1992. —. The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. New York: Basic, 1976. Suggested Readings Anyone who knows anything about this subject is sure to object to the omission of some important work here—especially of diverse "enlightenment" works that portrayed the relation as essentially a war, with science always win­ ning. Attfield, Robin. God and the Secular: A Philosophical Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant. Cardiff, Wales: Salisbury, 1978. Bonnor, William. The Mystery of the Expanding Universe. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Bowler, Peter J. Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Bronowski, Jacob. Science and Human Values. Rev. ed. New York: Harper, 1965. Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysti­ cism. New York: Random, 1975. Davis, Paul. God and the New Physics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983­ Dewey, John. A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale U, 1934. —. "Religion, Science, and Philosophy." Problems of Men. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Draper, John William. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. New York: D. Appleton, 1974. Drees, C. Willem. Religion, Science, and Naturalism. Cambridge U, 1996. Einstein, Albert. "Science and Religion." In Ferris, 828-35. Ferrarotti, Franco. Faith Without Dogma: The Place of Religion in Postmodern Societies. London: Transac­ tion, 1993. Ferris, Timothy, ed. The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. Boston, Little Brown, 1991. Gilkey, Langdon. Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1969. Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard U, 1990. Inchausti, Robert. Thomas Merton's American Prophecy. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. Jaki, Stanley L. Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe. Rev. ed. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1986.

234

Professing Rhetoric

Jones, William Powell. The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Available in innumerable translations. Orig: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 2nd ed. 1794. Murdock, Iris. The Sovereignty of God. London, Routledge, 1969­ Polanyi. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1958. Pratt, Vernon. Religion and Secularisation. New York: Macmillan, 1970. Richardson, Mark W., and Wildman, Wesley J., eds. Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue. New York: Routledge, 1996. Wright, Robert. Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. New York: Harper, 1988.

JAMES L. KASTELY University of Houston

The Open Question of the Conversation Between Science and Religion: A Response to Wayne Booth's Rhetorology

I begin with two short answers to Wayne's final questions. First, "Must the true scientist give up the notion that some power, greater than ourselves, pro­ vided the conditions of his or her research and provides, daily, the whole range of possibilities that life itself yields?" No, I don't see any incompatibility with a scientist both believing in this power and rigorously pursuing his or her empir­ ical or theoretical inquiries into some aspect of our world. Two, "Is not the sci­ entist who believes that a given science can solve all of our questions exhibiting rank superstition, over-belief,uberglaube?" Yes. Both of these questions engage a common theme, which is the hubris behind the belief in the self-sufficiency of science. Both are traditional yet postmodern concerns with recognizing the limits of science or, by expansion, the limits of any human enterprise. Both questions, in the terms that Wayne has just developed, are religious. And, for me, both point to an ancient text, Oepidus Tyranus. I have always read that play as a tragedy exploring the pollution that followed inexorably on an overconfi­ dence in a human intelligence to be adequate to the world that we inherit and inhabit. It is Oedipus's overvaluing, however well-intentioned, of human rea­ soning that lies at the center of that tragedy. He assumes that all problems that we confront are similar in kind to the riddle that the Sphinx poses and that we are the answer to our problem. He assumes, in effect, that all problems are rid­ dles, and it is his inability to distinguish between that which is mysterious and that which is puzzling that creates the difficulties that ultimately undo him. And like so many of Sophocles's great protagonists Oedipus prides himself on his unwillingness to yield, to listen to another. And, as is so often the case in Sophoclean tragedy, the resistance of the protagonist to persuasion raises seri­ ous questions for rhetoric. How does one talk to Oedipus? Wayne has offered one possibility. I would like in my response to explore how his answer suggests an important role for rhetoric in the controversies between science and reli­ 235

236

Professing Rhetoric

gion, and then I would like to explore one difficulty that his search for a com­ mon ground encounters. Before I begin, however, I wanted to mention that when I was first ap­ proached by Fred to be a respondent, I was reluctant and said quite frankly that I did not consider myself particularly qualified to speak about either science or re­ ligion. My only claim to expertise in these areas is that I am a lapsed Catholic and that I failed miserably as a biology-chemistry pre-med major. My last contact with science, some thirty or so years ago, was an organic chemistry lab in which I worked for two weeks on an experiment only to throw away the distillate that I was supposed to have produced and to save the water that I was supposed to have discarded. So to state the obvious, I bring dubious credentials. Not that my less than wonderful credentials create any qualms that would necessarily stop me from making any pronouncements, but I just wanted to be up front with my own limitations. I finally agreed to be a respondent because I find Wayne's larger and on-going intellectual project of determining common ground for important discus­ sions on topics that divide us to be one absolutely essential for a democracy, and I hold a belief that I suspect many of you share, which is that rhetoric as both a theoretical and a practical discipline has much to offer in the resituation of con­ flicts from the unproductive paradigms in which they are often placed to ones more amenable to serious exchanges. It is not that I have a simple faith in rhetoric or human reason. In fact, I am skeptical about any large scale advance in understanding. (It is not an accident that I read Sophocles.) I believe that Aristotle's definition of rhetoric not as the art of persuasion but as the art that seeks "the available means of persuasion in each case"—in its recognition that there are cases in which, for a variety of rea­ sons, persuasion is not possible—is a crucial starting point for anyone who is se­ rious about rhetoric. But this definition cuts two ways. If it warns us to be cautious or realistic about the possibilities for reasoned exchange, it also sets us the task of vigilantly looking for ways to open serious conversations. One of our tasks as rhetors is to see if we can locate these available means, to see if we can create conditions for genuine discourse. For in such moments of genuine discourse we surprise ourselves and, if we are lucky, we see the world dif­ ferently. One of the mysteries of logos is that in can transform disagreement into commonality, that it can, on occasion, allow otherness to enter our lives and make demands on us that we account for ourselves. So even if I don't feel quali­ fied to speak as an expert on either science or religion, I am engaged philosophi­ cally by the reach and purpose of Wayne's project, and I deeply admire his courage or possibly hubris in undertaking this project. One aspect of Wayne's project that engages me is his willingness to push be­ yond the immediately available responses to the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the concerns of religion and those of science. When disagreement cuts so deep, it is initially appealing to move toward stances of enlightened tolerance or a cautious diplomacy. But the problem with both these responses, as Wayne

The Open Question of the Conversation Between Science and Religion

237

points out, is that they preclude serious discursive exchange. When we find that our solution to disagreement or misunderstanding is to either tacitly or overtly agree to disagree, we, in effect, acknowledge an anxiety that maybe we do not share a world and that we would prefer not to have to deal with that fact. And al­ though there are many times that such a cautious suspension of conversation is a good solution (only the most obtuse bore would insist that all disagreements be talked through), when the disagreement involves those beliefs around which people organize their lives, then a silence of compromise can easily become unhealthy—that which is not voiced does not go away but is repressed only to emerge anew in some disguised form as a social analogue to a personal neurosis. So, if it is at all possible, we need to figure out ways for respectful but serious conversation—conversation that explores what is genuinely held in common while it respects fully the differences. The conflicts between religion and science are conflicts that those interested in rhetoric should address, and one of the contri­ butions of rhetoric is to see if these controversies can be relocated through an in­ vestigation of the necessary conditions for their voicing. Wayne's solution—to go beyond a consideration of persuasion to locate ways in which we can collectively probe "the deepest convictions underlying both sides in any conflict"—leads him to move past the concerns that structure the ordinary practices of rhetoric and seek a meta-position in an effort at what he has labeled "rhetorology." As I understand it, what separates rhetorology from rhet­ oric is that rhetorologist cannot assume the existence of a set of topoi that could structure a conversation but must, instead, discover or create those topoi. The rhetorologist does not give instruction on how to function better or more artisti­ cally within the confines of normal discourse but invites us to reflect upon the conditions that are necessary if we are to risk understandings essential to who we are in order to try to understand better both others and ourselves. I might add that such a project seems to me to be very much within the tradition of Kenneth Burke, and I am led to think immediately of Burke's monumental work in the Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives in which he sought to influence, by creative relo­ cation, the major global political controversy of the mid-twentieth century (namely the Cold War) by redefining war as a "special case of peace" as a perver­ sion of peace. This is the magic of rhetoric: where those who are unrhetorical would attribute aggression to the human race as an essential and natural part of our collective psychology, Burke simply reverses this move (defining aggression as inextricably involved in cooperation) and defines war in terms of peace. I see Wayne operating in this tradition: where others see primarily conflict and disso­ nance, Wayne looks for what is or can be held in common. And like Burke, Wayne is ever mindful of the recalcitrance within the situation, ever mindful that however skillful the rhetorologist may be, he or she cannot simply will a new reality, even if it holds the promise of being a superior one, but must deal with us in our full complexity. So Wayne begins with two terms: science and religion. One of these terms, science, seems less controversial and hence receives less of his attention. In his search for

238

Professing Rhetoric

common ground, Wayne does not look so much for what science and religion hold in common as he attempts to establish that many (sometimes he seems to want to argue that all) serious scientists, in fact, have conducted their very pursuit of sci­ ence within a set of experiences that are religious. What science and religion share, then, is religious experience—that is their common ground. Needless to say, this is a claim that Wayne reasonably assumes will generate opposition both from many scientists and from practitioners of religion. As rhetorologist, what he must do is encourage both groups to look at religious experience with eyes that are new and to test what they see against the felt experience that structures their involvement in the world. Wayne's solution is to avoid the trap of providing yet another definition of re­ ligion which itself would simply beg the question of shared experience and equally to avoid framing his discussion of religion in terms of the emotional con­ tent of personal experience or in terms of the blessings that follow from certain religious practices or beliefs. Instead, he will develop something that I would like to call an analytic of religious experience. He sets forth seven topics that es­ tablish the conditions necessary for religious experiences and that form the basis for a larger master narrative that informs religious understanding. In effect, Wayne locates the conditions for a religious conversation. I don't want simply to recapitulate his discussion; rather, I want just to focus briefly on its master narrative. In this narrative, religious thought arises from an experience of the world as broken, flawed, or incomplete. This brokenness ex­ tends to ourselves and presents itself as a task. Each of us, at some level, feels a need to address this brokenness—we feel this as, to borrow from Kant, a cate­ gorical imperative. To feel this brokenness as a demand that needs to be ad­ dressed is to participate in a religious experience. However, if we all (or most of us) feel such a demand, what then distinguishes science from religion? Here Wayne is less explicit, but he clearly implies that sci­ ence feels the need to address the categorical imperative to respond to our brokenness by attempting to know the world. Thus, science becomes a particu­ lar mode of response within the universal category of response that is religion. Religion marks our need to respond to creation. Again I am reminded of Burke, who once claimed that it makes all the difference if one reads creation as a past participle or as a present participle. If we read creation to mean a created, then we assume that the creation is complete and that if we are to become actors in such a universe, our task is to understand the laws that structure its creation. We become scientists. If, on the other hand, we read creation as a present participle, we see the universe as a creating and assume that the universe is not yet com­ plete. If we view the universe this way, then we naturally seek to influence at least the direction of the creating. For Burke, that means we become creators ourselves; that is, we become poets. In the vocabulary that Wayne has been de­ veloping, however, it means that we respond to the world religiously. Does this then mean (and I ask this as a genuine question) that we can distinguish science and religion as two different responses to a commonly felt demand to address

The Open Question of the Conversation Between Science and Religion

239

brokenness? Does science see its task as to respond to this condition by render­ ing the world knowable, while religion understands that it must respond to this demand through action? Can we talk about science and religion in terms of knowledge and action? There seems much that is promising here. Even as I attempt to get clear on what Wayne is exploring and on how I am to understand that, I come back to an issue that has been haunting me. If we create the conditions for a meaningful discussion between those with deep commit­ ments to science and those with equally deep commitments to religion by estab­ lishing the universality of a set of experiences that we see as generically or formally the grounds for any religious experience, do we so generalize our ac­ count of religious experience that we appear to many who are deeply religious to eviscerate their understanding of what is special and unique about their religious experience? Wayne explicitly addresses this problem. He sees two broad yet dif­ fering approaches to the discussion of religion. There are those, like himself, who seek to locate the common ground and those that he labels as uniquist or particularist, those for whom religion is inescapably grounded in a set of per­ sonal experiences that do not generalize. Their religious experiences are not seen or felt as instances of some larger formal condition. I find myself returning to this divide quite simply because it inevitably leads us back to a major, probably the major, difference between some practitioners of science and some practitioners of religion. Being a skillful rhetor, let alone a skillful rhetorologist, Wayne has created ways of promoting talk about our shared religious experience of the world by carefully not mentioning the role of a personal god. However, as always, Wayne is scrupulous in his development of the full complexity of what he seeks to address, and, as such, he acknowledges the explosiveness that surrounds the issue of providential intervention. He ac­ knowledges further that it is the issue of providential intervention (the action of a personal God who is willing at times to intervene to help those who believe) that has created "the most pointless battles in the destructive warfare between the religious and those who think they are not religious." So the question be­ comes: how do we address this issue? Is this simply a difference that needs to be respected? Is it a difference that will ultimately doom conversation between those who are religious and those who do not see themselves as religious? Even though I raise the question, I am not going to propose any immediate answer. I hope this is not simply evasion on my part. Rather, I think that what Wayne has accomplished is to make that an open question. What I mean by that is that we don't know the answer in advance. What Wayne has offered us is a way to open the conversation. But those of us who are students of rhetoric can assume that the outcome of the conversation cannot be known to us in advance. This takes us back to the issue of risk. What Wayne is doing, as I see it, is creat­ ing a set of circumstances in which it becomes reasonable to risk ourselves, to risk understandings that are crucial to how we see ourselves. What he is allow­ ing us to do is to find out with whom we can talk. He does not and cannot tell us where those conversations will lead. That is why the title to his talk must end

240

Professing Rhetoric

with a question mark. We are returned the sagacity of Aristotle defining rhetoric not in terms of persuasion but in terms of the search for the available means of persuasion. It is this search that rhetoric can offer to those who advocate science and those who structure their lives according to the beliefs of a particular reli­ gion. It is this search that Wayne has opened. I had originally ended here, but I woke up at five this morning and realized that I had not yet said exactly what I wanted to say. I realized that I had in some half-conscious way left the content of Wayne's open question. But in that strange combination of early morning haze and lucidity, my unconscious al­ lowed me to finally hear the question that Wayne addressed to me. It was, in­ deed, a high risk question, maybe even an impertinent one. Wayne was asking: What in your life do you hold sacred? He was proposing that we take this ques­ tion seriously, and he was offering us a way to attend to this question with an ap­ propriate rigor and generosity. I realized that, in fact, he had just begun that conversation.

Author Index

Adams, Timothy Dow, 138 Adler–Kassner, Linda, 177 Aguilera–Hellweg, Max, 96 Ahrentzen, Sherry, 104, 105 Alcorn.John D., 68 Andersen, Kristi, 52 Anderson, Ray Lynn, 96 Anson, Chris M., 121, 177 Antczak, Frederick J., 146 Anthony, Kathryn, 104 Aristotle, 34,76, 138,205 Arnold, Matthew, 232 Aronowitz, Stanley, 18 Ashin, Mark, 18 Atwill, Janet M., 28 Augst, Thomas, 53–60 Aune, James Arnt, 1–10, 11

B Bacon, Jacqueline, 43 Balir, Hugh, 96 Bancroft, George, 44 Barber, Jonathan, 82, 84 Barbour, Ian, 232 Barthes, Roland, 153 Bartkevicius, Joselyn, 153 Bastionelli, Pierre, 96 Battersby, Christine, 105 Baudrillard, Jean, 169 Baumlin, Tita French, 121

Bell, Alexander Melville, 82, 84 Benjamin, Walter, 153 Benn, Alvin, 68 Bennett, Beth S., 29–34 Benson, Thomas W., 146 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 44 Bergson, Henri, 153 Berkhofer, Robert F., 44 Berkon, Susan Fondiler, 105 Berlant, Lauren, 44 Berlin, Isaiah, 213 Bernstein, Melviee, 84 Bernstein, Richard, 221 Bieder, Robert E., 44 Biesecker, Barbara, 28 Bilsky, Manuel, 18 Birmingham, Elizabeth, 97–104 Birrell, James, 105 Bitzer, Lloyd F., 146 Bizzell, Patricia, 84, 138, 192 Blair, Hugh, 79, 84 Blanchot, Maurice, 169 Blassingame, John, 60 Blight, David W., 68 Blitefield, Jerry, 69–76 Bloomer, Jennifer, 97, 105 Bolinger, Dwight, 84 Bolter, Jay David, 35 Bonner, Ethan, 192 Booth, Wayne C., 146, 223–231 Bowdon, Melody, 171–177 Branch, Taylor, 68 Brawer, Roberta, 232 241

Author Index

242

Brooke, Robert, 121

Brooks, H. Allen, 105

Burgh, John, 79, 84

Burke, Kenneth, 19, 35, 232

Butler, Charles, 78, 84

Butler, Judith, 114, 169

c Cahn, Michael, 205

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 44, 96

Garden, Maren, 114

Carlacio, Jami, 155—162 Carroll, Lewis, 153

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 52

Caudill, Sally, 205

Chapman, James, 84

Chappell, Eve, 52

Chaput, Catherine, 179–186 Chesebrough, David, 60

Child, Lydia Maria, 37, 44

Chiseri–Strater, Elizabeth, 192

Cicero, 84, 138

Clark, Gregory, 35

Clover, Carl, 96

Cmiel, Kenneth, 60

Code, Lorraine, 114

Collins, James, 192

Collins, Patricia Hill, 129

Colm, Alan, 68

Comfort, Juanita Rodgers, 123—129 Comstock, Andrew, 82, 84, 85

Condit, Carl, 105

Condit, Celeste Michelle, 162, 205

Congleton, J.E., 19

Conrad, Charles, 146

Corbett, Edward P.J., 11, 138

Corbin, Juliet, 121

Coulter, E. Merton, 68

Crowley, Sharon, 28, 68, 177

Cuff, Dana, 105

D Dare, Lane, 121

Darley, John M., 138

Davidson, Donald, 221

Davie, Donald, 153

Davis, Robert Gorham, 19

Denton, Robert E., Jr., 146

Derrida, Jaques, 232

Dewey, John, 52

Dickson, Barbara, 96

Didion, Joan, 153

Dillard, Annie, 153

Dobson, Eric John, 78, 80, 85

Douglass, Frederick, 60

Dykema, Karl W., 19

E Eadie, William, 28

Eberly, Rosa A., 11

Edmundson, Mark, 192

Ellis, Carolyn, 129

Elsasser, Nan, 192

Ely, Mary, 52

Emery, Daniel L., 207–213 Enos, Theresa, 28

F Faigley, Lester, 192

Faulkner, William, 153

Feenberg, Andrew, 121

Fennel, Barbara A., 221

Fisher Walter R., 146

Fishman, Stephen, 52

Flaherty, Michael G., 129

Flannery, Kathryn T., 107–113 Fleming, David, 162

Fletty, Valborg, 52

Foucault, Michel, 186

Frederickson, Mark, 105

G Gage, John, 232

Gaines, Robert, 205

Garver, Eugene, 146

Gass, William, 153

Gates, Bill, 11

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 44, 162

243

Author Index Gee, James Paul, 192

Geere, Anne Ruggles, 177

Genentte, Gerard, 138

Gill, Brendan, 105

Gillam, Alice, 155–162 Giroux, Henry, 18

Glair, Carole, 68

Glaser, Barney G., 121

Glejzer, Richard, 163–169 Glen, Cheryl, 105

Glynn, Anne, 105

Goggin, Maureen Daly, 28

Gorgias, 96

Gose, Ben, 186

Gould, Stephen Jay, 232

Graff, Gerald, 11, 19,60 Grimaldi, William, 205

Groat, Linda, 105

Gross, Alan, 221

Grossman, Elizabeth, 105

Gussman, Deborah, 37—43, 44

H Habermas, Jiirgen, 11, 192

Halloran, S. Michael, 35

Hankins, S.R., 146

Haraway, Donna J., 221

Harding, Sandra, 221

Hariman, Robert, 35, 205

Harkin, Patricia, 192

Harris, Wendell V., 129

Harrison, Peter, 105

Hart, John, 78, 79, 85

Hart, Roderick P., 35

Haskins, Ekaterina V, 199–205 Havelock, Eric A., 35, 205

Hayden, Dawn, 121

Hazlitt, McCrea, 18

Heilbrun, Carolyn G., 114

Herndl, Carl G., 215–221, 221

Herzberg, Bruce, 84, 138, 177

Hibbert, Christopher, 138

hooks, bell, 114, 192

Horwitz, Tony, 68

Howard–Pitney, David, 44

Howell, Wilbur Samuel, 85

Howells, Helen Elizabeth, 131–137 Hughes, Francesca, 105

I

Irvine, Patricia, 192

Isocrates, 205

Ives, Sumner, 19

J

Jackson, R. Michael, 87–95 Jameson, Frederic, 11

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 96, 146

Jarratt, Susan C., 121, 138

Jasinski, James, 146

Jeppeson, Marsha S., 68

Johannesen, Richard L., 146

Johnson, Donald Leslie, 105

Johnson, Grace A., 52

Johnson, Nan, 60

Jones, James Pickett, 68

Jordan, June, 129

I

Baku, Ichiro, 232

Archer, Carolyn L., 44

Basely, James L., 235–240 Kay, Jane Holt, 105

Kelly, George, 19

Demode, Frank, 76

King, Stephen, 96

Kings ley, Karen, 105

Kinneavy, James L., 76

Kipnis, Laura, 96

Klaus, Carl H., 129, 153

Klien, Stephen A., 139–145, 146

Kuhn, Thomas, 221

L Lacan, Jacques, 169

Lampe, Gregory, 61

Langer, Susanne I., 153

Lanham, Richard A., 138, 162

244

Author Index

Larsen, Anne R., 138

Larson, Paul, 105

Latour, Bruno, 221

Lauer, Janice M., 28

Leff, Michael, 35

Lewis, William F., 146

Lightman, Alan, 232

Lilla, Mark, 213

Lloyd, Donald, 19

Lorde, Audre, 129

Lu, Min–zhan, 192

Lucaites, John L., 205

Lyotard, Jean–François, 169, 192

M Mailloux, Steven, 28, 35

Marx, Karl, 10, 186

Mastin, Frank, J.r, 68

May, James M., 138

McCarthy, Lucille, 52

McCoy, Robert T., 105

McGee, Michael C., 146

McKoski, Nancy, 13–18 McMillan, James B., 19

Metzger, David, 169

Miller, Carolyn, 28, 96, 221

Miller, Susan, 28, 192

Mitchell, W.J.T., 96

Mooney, Michael, 213

Moran, Charles, 121

Moten, Derryn E., 63–68 Mouffe, Chantal, 162

Murphy, John M., 146

N Nash, Gary B., 44

Nash, George H., 19

Neff, Joyce Magnotto, 105–120, 121

Nelson, Gary, 28

Nelson, Francis W, 19

Nelson, Norman E., 19

Nespor, Jan, 192 Norton, Janice, 21–28

o Ober, Josiah, 205

Ohmann, Richard, 192

Ong, Walter, 35

Orwell, George, 153

Otto, Rudolf, 232

P Park, Maud Wood, 52

Pearce, Roy Harvey, 44

Percy, Walker, 153

Polkinghorne, John, 232

Popper, Karl, 221

Porter, Carolyn, 60

Porter, James E., 35

Porter, Rev. E., 84

Postman, Neil, 192

Poulakos, John, 76

Poulakos, Takis, 206

Pratt, Mary Louise, 192

Priestley, Joseph, 79, 85

Pucci, Enrico, Jr., 68

Purcell, Edward A., Jr., 19

Puttenham, George, 78, 85

Q Queen Victoria, 132, 138

Quintilian, 85, 138

R Ratcliffe, Krista, 162

Readings, Bill, 192

Reitzes, Lisa, 105

Reynolds, John Frederick, 35

Reynolds, Nedra, 114, 121, 138

Rich, Adrienne, 114

Ringer, Fritz I., 11

Robert, K.B., 96

Roberts, Chas. W., 19

Robinson, Robert, 80

Robinson, Sidney I., 105

245

Author Index Rogers, William, Jr., 68

Roochnik, David, 206

Roof, Judith, 114

Root, Robert, Jr., 153

Rorty, Richard, 221,232 Rosenfield, Lawrence W., 96

Rosier, Martha, 96

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 52

Rubbo, Anna, 105

Rummel, Erika, 206

Rush, James, 82, 85

Russell, William, 84, 85

Ryan, Alan, 19

s Sarton, May, 11 Scaff, Lawrence A., 11

SchellJohnR, 138

Scher, Steven J., 138

Schiappa, Edward, 162

Schilb, John, 192

Schroeder, Christopher, 187–192 Schryer, Catherine, 96

Schutz, Aaron, 177

Scollon, Ron, 192

Scollon, Suzanne B., 192

Scott, Donald, 60

Scott, Robert L., 162

Scully, Vincent, 105

Shank, Wesley I., 105

Sharer, Wendy B., 45–51 Sheehan, Bernard W., 44

Sheridan, Thomas, 79, 81, 85

Shweder, Richard, 232

Sloane, Thomas O., 11

Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 221

Smith, Craig R., 35

Soley, Lawrence, 11

Solmsen, Friedrich, 206

Solomon, Martha, 146

Soskis, Benjamin, 11

Sprague, Paul E., 105

Sprague, Rosamond Kent, 76

Stanley, Lawrence I., 147—153

Stewart, Charles J., 35

Strauss, Anselm, L., 121

Streeter, Robert E., 18

Sullivan, Dale, 76

Sutton, Jane, 162

T Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, 213

Thelwall, John, 81,82, 85

Thorpe, Clarence D., 19

Timmerman, David M., 206

Tomlinson.J.D.W, 96

Too, Yun Lee, 206

Trimbur, John, 192

Twitchell, James B., 96

Twombly, Robert C, 105

V

Vanzanten, David T, 105

Vico, Giambattista, 213

Vivian, Bradford, 193–197

w Walker, Alice, 129

Walker, John, 79, 81,85 Wallace, Karl, 85

Walzer, Arthur, 221

Warnick, Barbara, 35

Warren, Robert Penn, 68

Weaver, Richard, 18, 19

Weber, Max, 10

Webster, Noah, 60

Weiler, Kathleen, 114

Weinberg, Steven, 232

Weirick, James, 105

Welch, Kathleen, 35

Wells, June Murry, 68 Wertheimer, Linda, 96

Wesley, John, 85

West, Temple, 121

Weston, Anthony, 162

White, HaydenV, 213

246

White, James Boyd, 11, 146 Wichelns, Herbert A., 35 Wiegman, Robyn, 114 Williams, Linda, 96 Williams, Patricia, 114 Williamson, Roxanne Kuter, 105 Wilson, Richard Guy, 105

Author Index Wolff, Robert Paul, 10 Woodward, Gary, 44 Woolf, Virginia, 138

Z zanola Macola, Annalisa, 77–84, 79, 85

Subject Index A Abolitionism and Frederick Douglass rhetorical careei 53

and Maria Stewart rhetoric, 157

Abolitionist rhetoric, 37

Academic vocation, 1,4, 10

compared to Jewish people, 5

Accommodation, 224

Actio, 79

Active listening compared to rhetorical listening, 160

Activism education and changes in rhetoric education, 172–173 League of Women Voters efforts in, 50

Actor-network theory, 217

Adams, Timothy Dow (Morley), 132

Adaptory rhetoric, 37, 38

Adler–Kassner, Linda, 173

Adornment, 32, 33

Advisory rhetoric, 37

African Americans, 54. Seealso Douglass, Frederick Montgomery saved by, 65

and Signifying, 157–158 Against the Sophists, 200, 201

Agency and construction, 165

ethical, 69

rhetorical, 70

and sexual identity, 166

Aguilera–Hellweg, Max, 88, 92, 95

Ahrentzen, Sherry, 98

American Elocutionists' manuals, 84

American Enterprise Institute, 6

American Indians Child's rhetorical treatment of, 38–39 19th cent, portrayal of, 40

American Studies Association (ASA), 183

An Apology for Poetry, 136

A Nation Calls, 45

"And," 150

Andersen, Kristi, 46

"Angel of the House," 132

V Woolfon, 133

Anson, Chris, 115, 174

Antidosis, 158

Apology form classical origins of, 136

female Renaissance speech, 135

preface–writing, 131–139 Appropriateness/authority/agency/audience, 30, 32

Arcades Project, 149

Architectural studies gendered discourse in, 97—104 Architecture and the Text: The (S) crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, 97

Aristotle, 30, 32, 71, 134,225

techne question in, 199–202 Aronowitz, Stanley, 14

Arrangement canon, 134

Artist vs. scholar, 3

The Art of Pronunciation, 80

Art of Rhetoric, 201

As I Lay Dying, 147

Associationist psychology, 5 5

Atwill, Janet, 24

Authority

247

248

Subject Index

apology for, 131

and disclosure, 107, 110

and distance education, 119

and ITV, 120

regaining, through apology, 134

B Bacon, Jacqueline, 37

Bancroft, George, 38

Barbour, Ian, 223

Barthes, Roland, 152

Bartkevicius, Joselyn, 147, 148

Bastionelli, Pierre, 90

Battersby, Christine, 101

Baumlin, Tita, 115, 135

Beale, Francis, 123

Beecher, Henry Ward, 50

The Bell Curve, 6

Bellow, Saul, 1

Benjamin, Walter, 149, 151

Bennett, William, 1

Bentley College tutoring project, 174

Bergson, Henri, 152

Berlant, Lauren, 40

Berlin, Isaiah, 207–213 Berlin, James, 24

Bernstein, Richard, 216

"Beruf" (vocation of scholarship), 4

Big T rhetoric, 157

Bilingual educational model Hillcrest model, 175

Bingham, Caleb, 55, 56

Bird, Isabelle, 132, 136

Bizzell, Pat, 191

Black feminist writers and ethos of essay rhetoric, 123—129 Blair, Hugh, 92

Blanchot, Maurice, 168

Blassingame, John, 54, 60

Bloomer, Jennifer, 97

Bodies that Matter, 166

Bolinger, Dwight, 83

Bolter, Jay David, 30

Bork, Robert, 6

The British Elocutionary Movement, 80

British women writers/18th & 19th centu­ ries preface–writing by, 131–137 Brodkey, Linda, 25

Bryant, Rev. William, 83

Burke, Kenneth, 14, 31, 237

Bush, George W., 6, 7

Bushjeb, 176

Butler, Judith, 164, 165–167

c Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 40, 88

Campus novels, 1, 10

Carey, James, 1

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 45–46, 50

Causality question, 163—164, 168

Chapman, Maria Weston, 59

Chapman, Rev. James, 83

Character. See public character Chemical Warfare Service/US. War Dept., 51

Chesebrough, David, 54, 57, 58

Chronicle of Higher Education, 1

Cicero, 9, 56, 59, 69, 79, 134

"Citizen critics," 9

Citizenship schools, 48

City of God, 149

Civic discourse and nineteenth century reform, 54

and service learning, 172

Civic space, politics of and disciplinary boundaries, 27

Claremont McKenna University, 5

Class and literacy, 189

Classical colleges role of, 16

Classical education, 16

1930s revival of, 17

Classical rhetoric Douglass' effect on, 58–59 expansion upon, 156

fifth canon of, 79, 83

second canon of, 134

sophistry re–visited, 193–197 Vico's role, 207–213 Clinton, William J., 7, 171

249

Subject Index The Closing of the American Mind, 1

Code, Lorraine, 108

"Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Epi­ sode, Segment," 149

Collins, Patricia Hill, 125

Columbian Orator, 54, 55, 56

Communications studies. See also political communication WWII era evolution of, 17

Communication studies and study of rhetoric, 30

Communication technology and role of graduate student apprentice, 185

and role of rhetoric, 30

The Communist Manifesto, 1

Community, ideal of and gender, 133

and service learning, 174

"Community Service and Critical Teaching,' 174

Competency skills, 33

Composition 'real audience' service–based, 176—177 Composition and communication discipline; and rhetoric, 13, 18, 155–162

Composition instruction pedagogical emphasis of, 30

vs. rhetorical education, 25

Composition in the University, 171

Composition pedagogy, 14–15 Composition textbooks and critical thought, 189

Condit, Celeste Michelle, 159–160 The Confederacy connection to Montgomery, Alabama, 6

Conference on College Composition and Communications (CCCC), 13, 18

Confrontational relationships and heroism myth, 145

science and religion, 223–231 scientific rhetoric, 215—221 Construction and agency, 165

'Contact zone' (Pratt), 191

Containment (Aristotle), 71–72 Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, 24

Contending with Words, 187

Context of use

and literacy instruction, 188

Controversy and rhetoric, 9

Cook, Eliza, 132, 133

Corporations and university influence, 7, 182, 184

Counter–enlightenment politics and The New Science, 207—213 Covington, Sally, 5

"Crafting Virtue: The Rhetorical Construc­ tion of Morality," 159

Creative nonfiction, 147—153 Crisis of meaning, 188

Critical inquiry and disciplinary boundaries, 27

the 'critical' standard, 189

Critical thinking skills, 31

Crowley, Sharon, 24, 25, 26, 67, 171–172

Cuff, Dana, 98

Cultural memory, 67

Cultural plurality and rhetoric pedagogy, 156

Culture and literacy, 187–192 'Cyborg anthropology' (Haraway), 219

D Dallas Morning News, 6

Davidson, Donald, 216

Davie, Donald, 151

Davis, Angela, 123

Debate clubs (19th cent.), 56

The Decline of the German Mandarins, 3

Decorum. See propriety in rhetorical practice Delivery principles of, 79—81 Democracy and Education, 48

Democratic ideals and Dewey's influence, 48

and progressive education, 13

Democratic systems. Seealso political rhetoric and civic culture, 140

elementary school example of, 171

and rhetoric learning, 156

Denton, Robert E., Jr., 140

Departmental relationships, 23

Detraction Displayed, 131

250

Subject Index

Dewey, John, 13, 15

Deweyian ideas, 51

influence on League of Women Voters,

47–48

Douglass, as described by Garrison, 55–56 expanded definition of, 58—59 19th cent. Webster definition of, 56

Didion, Joan, 148, 151

Empiricism and humanistic scholarship, 15

Dillard, Annie, 148, 149

Employment opportunity in rhetoric, 22–23

Disciplinary boundaries, 18, 21–28 diminishment of, 27

The Englishwoman in America, 132

"Entzauberung" (disenchantment), 3

Disclosure and authority. See authority

Essay rhetoric black feminist ethos in, 123–129 Essays on Various Subjects, 132

Disguise of location, 108

Distance education and mediated ethos, 115—120 also undergraduate rhetoric educa­

Ethical action three guidelines for, 159

Ethical agency, 69

tion

Ethical dilemmas, 161

Doctoral programs in rhetoric, 22, 23. See

Doctorow, E.L., 149

Ethic of ends, 4, 155

Domesticity in 19th cent, rhetoric, 41

of women, Victorian, 132

Ethic of public character, 140

Douglass, Frederick, 68

rhetorical career, 5 3—60 Drop–out rate (college), 187

D'Souza, Dinesh, 6

E Eadie, William, 22, 26

Eberly, Rosa, 9

Ebonics controversy (Oakland), 161

Ecclesiasticism and classical colleges, 16

Editor and Publisher, 7

Edmundson, Mark, 187

Education purpose of, 187–188 and revised literacy understanding, 191

Ethic of responsibility, 4, 9

Aristotle, 30–31, 32

and essay–writing, 125

teaching virtue, 158–162 Ethics and rhetoric particularity of speaker's position, 163–169 Ethics and service public school example, 171—177 Ethos and black feminist essay rhetors, 123–129 and the politics of disclosure, 107–113 as possibility, 113

and preface–writing, 135

and virtual teaching, 115–120 Experiential learning Garland School curriculum in, 50

F

Edwards, George, 7

Faulkner, William, 63

Eisenhower, Dwight, 13, 18

Election campaigns and romantic hero myth, 142—143 Elizabeth I, 135

Elocution roots of, 81

Female rhetoric (19th cent.), 38

Feminist theory and disciplinary boundaries, 27

The First Settlers of New England, 37

Elocutionists, 78

Eloquence ideal, 5 3

competing standards of, 5 5

First Things, 6

First–year requirement (composition), 22, 25

argument against, 171—172 and Rhet/Comp's security, 24

S. Crowley on, 26

Subject Index staffing, and unionization, 183

Fisher, Walter R., 142

251 Globalization, 8

Fishman, Stephen, 48

Globalization rhetoric and local events, 179–186

Flâneur concept paranarrative, 151–152

'God' terms, 142

Goggin, Maureen, 24, 25

Fleming, David, 155

Golden Chersonese, 136

Fletty, Valborg, 48

Good versus Evil and performative tradition, 142

Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 65

For the Time Being, 149

Foucault, Michel, 164, 179

Gore, Al campaign rhetoric of, 143—144

the four causes, 225

Gorgias, 32, 69, 87, 158, 162

Free market rhetoric, 8

Functionalism as principle of scientific naturalism, 15

Gould, Stephen Jay, 223

Graduate student labor, 179—186

G

Graff, Gerald, 9, 16

Grammar of Motives (Burke), 237

Gramsci, Antonio, 5

Griffin, Marion Mahoney, 97, 99–100

Gage, John, 225

Griffin, Walter Burley, 98

Garland School for Homemaking, 49

Groat, Linda, 98

Garrison, William Lloyd, 55, 56–57

Gross, Alan, 215

Gates, Henry Louis, 157

Grounded theory, 117

Gender and academic practice, 9

and the architectural canon, 97—104 and essay rhetoric, 123–129 ideal woman, literary, 133

and imagination, 136

and preface–writing, 132

and the professoriat, 27

Guthrie, WK.C, 195, 196

Gender Trouble, 165

Hankins, S.R., 142

General Feder ation of Women's Clubs, 49

Haraway, Donna, 113, 217

General Semantics movement, 17

Gennette, Gerard, 137

Genre in rhetoric, 87

essay, 123–129 historical markers, 63—68 horror, 90

preface, 131–139 George Bush School of Government and Public Service, 6

H Habermas, Jürgen, 7

"The Habitation of Rhetoric" (Leff), 29

Halloran, Michael, 56

Hariman, Robert, 32

Harkin, Patricia, 187

Harmony in language, 79

Harris, Wendell, 124

Harvard University, 5

Havelock, Eric A., 33

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 132

Hayek, 8

Heartland Institute, 6

George Mason University, 5

Heidegger, Martin, 5

Gere, Ann Ruggles, 174

Herald of Freedom, 58

Gesture in language, 78

historical treatises on, 79

Gildersleeve, Virginia, 48

Giroux, Henry, 14

Hernstein, Richard, 6

Glenn, Cheryl, 99

Heritage Foundation, 6

Heroism. Seealso romantic heroism and American public character, 142

and civic relationships, 145

252

Subject Index

as ideological worldview, 144

Herzberg, Bruce, 174

Hesiod, 69

Heterosexual matrix, 165

The Higham Patriot, 54

Hillcrest School project, 175–177 Historical markers (southern) as rhetoric, 63—68 History of rhetoric, 157

History of Sexuality, 179

Hobbes, Thomas, 210

Holt Street Baptist Church, 63

hooks, bell, 109, 112, 123, 188

Horror as genre, 90

Humility and classical rhetoric, 134

'Hybrids' theory (Latour), 217

Hypertext, 30

I

Ideal writer/reader, 189

Ideas Have Consequences (Weaver), 17

Illustration of Lying, 131

Imagination gendering of, 136

Incommensurability thesis, 215, 216, 220

Indian Removal Act of 1830, 43

Individuals and society, 179

Institutes of Oratory, 134

Instructor credibility, 115—120 Interactive television. See media and instruc­ tion Internet as example of government planning, 8

Internetworked writing, 30

Intonation in language, 78

historical treatises on, 79

Introduction to Metaphysics, 152

Isocrates, 158, 162

performative conception of, 199—205 techne question in, 202–205 J

Jameson, Frederic, 4

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 88

Jasinski, James, 141

Jefferson, Thomas, 66

Jeremiad American, 37–38 Johnson, Donald Leslie, 103

Johnson, Grace, 49–50 Johnson, Nan, 58

Jordan, June, 128 Journal of Architectural Education, 98

Juvenile Miscellany (Child), 43

I

Kairos and the rhetorical place, 69—76 Kairotic ethics, 31

Baku, Ichiro, 223

Archer, Caroline, 43

Kaufer, David, 25

Kennedy, John F., 142

Demode, Frank, 70—71 King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., 63

King, Stephen, 91

Kinneavy, James, 69

Kipness, Laura, 91

Kirsch, John, 7

Klaus, Carl, 124, 149

Knowledge and utterance, 163—164, 167

Kreick, Ernest, 4

Kuhn, Thomas, 215,216

L Labor. See graduate student labor Labor market, 8

Laine, Dale, 7

Lampe, Gregory, 54, 55, 59

Land grant universities and open enrollment, 13

Langer, Susanne, 151

Language and scientism, 18

Language and truth, 67

Language of emotions, 78

Language of ideas, 78

Language study 20th century, 193

Lanham, Richard, 158

Larsen, Anne, 135

Subject Index Latour, Bruno, 217

Lauer, Janice, 23

League of the South, 66

League of Women Voters and 1920s rhetorical education, 45–52 Leff, Michael, 29, 31

Left–wing ideology, 5

Lilla, Mark, 207–213 Lingua Franca, 1

Linguistic metaphor of translation, 217

Linguistics movement, 17

Literacy Bentley College tutoring project, 174

and League of Women Voters, 45–52 need rates of, 188

Literacy crisis cultural roots of, 187–192 revised understanding of, 190

Literary clubs (19th cent.), 56

Lloyd, Donald, 18

Location and the politics of disclosure, 107–113 and sophist nomadic, 194

Logic and grammar and scientism, 17

Logon paideia, 199

Lorde, Audre, 126

Lyotard, Jean François, 163–169, 188

M Magazine publishing 19th century, 55

The Magic of America, 99, 100

Mailloux, Steven, 26

Market ideology, 5. Seealso corporations and government intervention, 8

and modern universities, 188

Marketization and academia, 9

and mass public, 8

Market regulation and the democratic left, 9

Mason City, Iowa architecture, 98

Massachusetts Anti–Slavery Convention (Nantucket), 53

Mass public and marketization, 8

253

Mauro, Gerry, 6

McCarthy, Lucille, 48

McGee, Michael, 23

Meaning crisis of, 188

and legitimacy, 189, 190

Media and instruction ethos mediated by, 115–120 Metaphysics and sophistry, 193–197 Metzger, David, 169

Miantonimo, 39

Middle–class standards of literacy, 189

Miller, Carolyn, 21,87, 88

Miller, Keith, 24

Miller, Susan, 25, 188

Minorities on campus growth of, 14, 15

von Mises, 8

Mitchell, W.J.T., 93

Modernity in historical scholarship context, 208,

210

Modern Language Association (MLA), 183

Modern university growth of, 16

Modest Witness, 219

Montanari, Marcello, 209

Montgomery, Alabama historical markers in, 63–68 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 63

Mooney, Michael, 210

Moral suasion universal potential realized, 57—58 More, Hannah, 132, 133, 136

Mouffe, Chantal, 156

"Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Stra­ tegic Philanthropy of Conserva­ tive Foundations, 5

"Moving Wall," 73

Murray, Charles, 6

My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), 55,

57

N The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, 55, 57

Nash, George, 17

254

Subject Index

National American Woman Suffrage Associ­ ation (NAWSA), 45, 49

The National Antislavery Standard, 53

National Committee for Responsive Philan­ thropy, 5

National Communications Association (NCA), 22

National Council of Teachers of English, 23

National Institute of Literacy, 188

National Institutes of Health (NIH), 7

National Labor Relations Board, 7

National Women's Political Caucus, 112

Native Americans. See American Indians Nelson, Gary, 26

Neo–Aristotelian–Thomistic movement, 16

Neo–Humanism, 16

Nesporjan, 188

The New Criterion, 6

New Criticism, 16

New Deal era, 13, 16, 18

The New Science, 208, 210, 211

and counter–enlightenment politics, 207–213 Newspaper publishing 19th century, 54

Noddings, Nel, 174

Norick, Ron, 74

North Star, 60

"Notes Towards a Politics of Location," 107

O Oakland School Board debate/Ebonics, 161

Objectivism as principle of scientific naturalism, 15

Oedipus Tyranus, 235

Of Oratory, 134

Oklahoma City bombing and memorial,

74–75 Olin Foundation, 5

OncoMouse (Haraway), 219—220 Ong, Walter, 33

On the Contrary, 9

Open enrollment, 14

Opie, Amelia, 131

Oral language, 11. See also public speech forgotten appeal of, 32

Johnson's "Spoken English" course, 49–50 Oratory (19th century) Frederick Douglass effect on, 53–60 Origins of rhetoric, 157

Orwell, George, 150

P

Paradigm debates, 215

Park, Maud Wood, 50

Parks, Rosa, 63

Particularism as principle of scientific naturalism, 15

Passage to Juneau, 149

Pedagogy of rhetoric finding common ground, 29—34 League of Women Voters, 47–52 preparing ethical citizens, 155—162 relevance of concepts, 30

and service learning, 172

Pequot tribe, 39

Performative traditions, 141–144. Seealso sexuality as performance in Isocrates, 202–205 Perkins, Dwight Heald, 99

Personal disclosure and black feminist essayists, 123—129 and essay–writing, 125–126 examples, 126—129 Philosophy of language (20th cent.), 193

Physicality and public speech, 58–59, 77–84 Physics, 71

Place. See also location and kairos, 71—76 Plato techne question in, 199–202 Platonic idealism, 58

Platonic thought and sophistry re–visited, 193–197 Poems (E. Cook), 132

Poetic form and rhetoric, 32—33 Polinghorne, John, 223

Political communication

255

Subject Index and League of Women Voters, 47–48 Political rhetoric and romantic heroism, 139–145 Politics and teaching of rhetoric, 25

Politics and the academician, 3

Politics and the university, 2

Popper, Karl, 216

Pornography as genre, 90

Porter, James, 30, 31, 32

Porter, Rev. Ebenezer, 83

Positivism and 'symmetrical history' theory (Latour), 219

Posner, 8

Publishers role in literacy ideal, 189

'Purification' theory (Latour), 218

Puritans Child's rhetorical treatment of, 38–39

Q The Q question, 158

Quasi–objects, 220

Quintilian, 56, 79, 134, 135, 159

R Raban, Jonathan, 149

Postman, Neil, 188

Racist assumptions and early anti–slavery movement, 54

Poststructuralism, 212

Ratcliffe, Krista, 160

Poulakos, John, 70, 194

Prairie School vs. Sullivan School, 103n.l

Rational choice theory, 8

Pratt, Louis, 191

Preface–writing history of, 132, 134

rhetoric of, 131–139 Prior, E. Marion, 63

Private Enterprise Research Center, 6

Professoriat, 27

Progressive education reactions to, 13, 17

Pronuntiatio, 79

Propriety in rhetorical practice, 31, 32

Protagoras, 9, 158

The Public and Its Problems, 47, 51

Public character definition, 141

and political discourse, 140

Public discourse. See political rhetoric Public lecture Douglass' perception of, 60

19th cent, growth of, 55

Public rhetoric and place, 72

and rhetorical morality, 159

Public speech and elocution movement, 83

evolving standards for, 59

19th cent. Anglo–European standards for, 54

19th cent, growth of, 56

Readings, Bill, 188, 190

Reagan, Ronald, 142

'Real audience' student composition, 177

Reformist rhetorics. See revisionist rhetorics Regulation of speech, attempted, 7

"Rektoratsrede" (Heidegger), 5

Relativism, 224

Religion seven marks of, 225—230 reply to, 238

Religion and science rhetorology effect on, 223–231 reply to, 235–240 Remedial writing, 14

Republicanism in 19th cent, rhetoric, 41–42 Rescuing the Subject, 25

Resistance and graduate student labor, 180—187 The Return of the Political Mind, 156

Return to Me, 88

Revisionist rhetorics, 37

Re-words, 142

Reynolds, John Frederick, 33

Reynolds, Nedra, 107

Rhetoric, 134

Rhetoric academic evolution of, 13–18 and classical education, 16

egalitarian evolution of, 57–58

256 as evaluative discipline (1950s), 18

and north–south issues, 66

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 81

exordium, 134

Rhetorical agency, 70

Rhetorical criticism pedagogical emphasis of, 29—30 Rhetorical education Isocrates, 199–205 League of Women Voters' early ap­ proach, 49

Rhetorical hybrids, 88

Rhetorical listening, 160

Rhetorical place, and kairos, 69—76 Rhetorical scholarship 20th century changes in, 29

Rhetorical spaces. See location Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, 108

Rhetorical studies recoupling with rhetoric and composi­ tion, 21–28 sophistry re–visited, 193–197 threats to, 26

vs. composition instruction, 25

Rhetoric and composition ethics and service, 171–177 recoupling with rhetorical studies, 21—28 return to, 14

Rhetorician role of, 9, 29

Rhetoric of Motives (Burke) 14, 237

Rhetoric of science, 215–221 and religion, 223–231 Rhetoric reclamation, 15

Rhetoric Society of America Conference, 21

Rhetorology, 224

and the war between science and reli­ gion, 223–231 reply to, 237

Rich, Adrienne, 107

Right–wing ideology, 5

and CCCC, 13

Ringer, Fritz, 3

Roberts, Charles W., 14

La Rochefoucauld, François, 77

Romantic heroism and political rhetoric, 139–145 Roochnik, David, 201

Subject Index

Root, Robert, 149

Rorty, Richard, 215, 226

Rosier, Martha, 93

Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 46

S The Sacred Heart, 88, 89, 90, 93

Sallis.John, 197

Sarton, May, 10 Scaife Foundation, 5

Schilb, John, 187

Scholar vs. artist, 3

Schryer, Catherine, 88

Schutz, Aaron, 174

Science and religion rhetorology effect on, 223–231 reply to, 235–240 Science journalism as rhetorical genre, 88

Scientific naturalism principles of, 15

Scientific rhetoric, 215–221. See also science and religion Scientism, 15

reactions to, 16–17 Scott, Robert, 159

Secondary orality, 31, 33

Second language acquisition Hillcrest model, 175

Self–revelation. See personal disclosure Selzer, Richard, 90

Service revision of notion of, 171—177 "Service–Learning and English Studies: Re­ thinking 'Public' Service," 174

Sexual harassment in architectural studies, 98

Sexuality as performance, 164

Shaftesbury psychology, 55

Sheridan, Thomas, 77

Signifying, 157

Slavery issue and rhetorical perceptions, 66—67 Sloane, Thomas, 9

The Small Room, 10

Smith, Adam, 210

257

Subject Index Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 216

Teacher as philosopher, 17

Smith, Craig R., 32

Teacher ethos. See ethos

Social sciences, 13

rhetorical elements in, 14, 15

1930s pervasiveness of, 16

Techne versus paideia, 199—205 Technologies of the Self, 179

Socrates, 196

Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), 65

Technology. See also communication technol­

ogy boundary exploration of, 217

Sophistry, 20th century refiguring, 193–197

Temperance movement, 54

Sophists and temporal dimension of speech, 70

Temporality and fiction reading, 70—71 and kairos, 69–71 Tenure assault on, 7

Sophocles, 235

Southern historical markers planning and writing for, 66

as rhetoric, 63–68

Texas A & M University, 6

Speaker's position and causality theory, 169

Speaking and knowing, 163

Theatre circuit and elocution movement, 83

Speech Communication Association. See Na­

Thomas, Carey, 48

Textbooks in composition, 189

tional Communications Associa­

Toleration, 224

tion

Toward Better Problems, 161

Spider Web Chart, 51

Stasis inquiry and teaching virtue, 160

Stewart, Maria, 157

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 57

Strictures, 136

Student–focused research, 14

Student population Rhet/Comp, 22

Rhetorical Studies, 22

shifts, and progressive ideals, 13, 14

Students on purpose of college, 187

and rhetorical studies, 30, 171–172 role of, 13

Sturken, Marita, 67

"To Write the Truth" (Weaver), 17

Trail of Tears (Cherokees), 43

Trembling in public, 57–60 Truth and rhetoric, 67

Twitchell, James, 92

Two–party system and League of Women Voters, 45–52

U Undergraduate rhetoric education, 155–162 Unionization University of Arizona student labor, 180–187

Style in rhetorical practice, 31

Unions and the democratic left, 9

Sullivan, Dale, 70

United Daughters of Confederacy (UDC),

Summers, Christina Hoff, 6

65

Universal requirement. See first–year require­

Sutton, Jane, 157

'Symmetrical history' theory (Latour), 219

ment University and politics, 2. Seealso graduate

T

student labor Talking Back, 188

Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remem­ bering, 67

The University in Ruins, 188

University of Arizona student labor, 180–187 University of California at Los Angeles, 6

258

Subject Index

University of Chicago, 5

University of Illinois, 14

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 155

V

Van zanten, David, 102

Vico, Giambattista, 207—213 Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, 210

Viet Nam Memorial, 73

Virtual education. See media and instruction Virtue (The Q question) teaching, 158–162 Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, 223

Vitanza, Victor, 24, 26, 194

Vocation of scholarship. See academic vocation Voucher system (Florida schools), 176

W Walker,'Alice, 123, 127

Walter Burley Griffin: Selected Designs, 102

Walzer, Art, 215

Walzer, Michael, 140

Warnick, Barbara, 29

Warren, Robert Penn, 64

Ways of Reading approach in composition classroom, 14

Weaver, Richard, 17

Weber, Max, 2

ethic of responsibility of, 10

Weiler, Kathleen, 112

Weirick, James, 100

Welfare state and the democratic left, 9

"Wertfreibeit" (value freedom), 3, 8

"Western heritage" and academia, 5, 9

Weston, Anthony, 161

Wheelock School, 49

White, James Boyd, 2

The White Album, 148

Whitman, Walt, 132

Who Stole Feminism? (Hoff), 6

"Why We Crave Horror Movies" (S. King), 91

Williams, Linda, 90, 91

Wilson, James Harrison, 65

Montgomery marker honoring, 64

Wingspread "Prospects for Rhetoric" confer­ ence, 21

"Wissenschaft als Beruf" (Weber), 2

Women Berlant's 'female complaint,' 40

as candidates for architectural studies, 98

Child's rhetorical treatment of, 39

Women's Christian Temperance Union, 50

Women's colleges and citizenship schools, 48

Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), 50–51 Women's rights, 54. Seealso League of Women Voters in 19th cent, rhetoric, 42

Women voters political education of, 45–52 Women writers and preface–writing, 131—137 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foun­ dation, 184

Words and logic, 15

Wordsworth, William, 132

Workshop #13/Women's Political Caucus, 109–112 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 99

Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Composition, 173

Writing the Disaster, 168

Y Yale University, 5