What is Rhetoric, Part Two

 

Hi, fam.

It’s been a while.

I know I’ve tried to start up again once or twice, but things have just been hard. But I’m confident that I’m good to go, this time. Confident enough that we’re doing something special this time. We’re going back to the beginning.

In my second or third episode, we asked the question, “What is Rhetoric?” It was one of my most popular episodes ever. I think that’s because harried rhetoric professors all over the nation thought, “A-ha! This is much easier that having them read Aristotle, Wichelns, and Burke!” And I truly hope it was.

And if you were one of those professors, I hope it was helpful. If you are just a casual listener, and it was an introduction to rhetoric for you, I hope you were able to make sense out of it. I guess I didn’t drive you away, because you came back. And I am very happy you are here.

Today I am not going to re-hash all the Aristotle and the Burke. Today I am going to ask, “What is rhetoric?” But instead of giving you the big, appropriate, academic answer, I’m going to look inward. There are so many philosophers and theorists out there who have had something to say about what this thing IS. Which is sort of wild to think about – it’s got this many-thousand-year-old history with countless philosophers and theorists arguing over what it is, and today nobody knows what it means, and most of my students don’t even know how to pronounce it when they come to my classes. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, right?

When people set out to define rhetoric, like I said, they generally think of Aristotle and Burke.

But the people I want to think about today, who you have heard me mention before, but I am returning to, are Giambattista Vico, James Boyd White, and Friedrick Nietzsche.

In the 1700s Giambattista Vico was working out of the University of Naples. Vico wasn’t particularly well-regarded in his own time but has grown in reputation throughout the years. Vico was a critic of Rene Descartes and pretty much invented the philosophy of history, philology, and his work would eventually become the basis for things like anthropology, and even sociology. Vico’s problem with Descartes was his emphasis on math and science as the only legitimate sources of knowledge. Vico wrote robust defenses of other branches of human inquiry such as law, history, and the arts, arguing that rhetoric provided just as good, if not a superior philosophy of knowledge.

Vico objected to Descartes’s lack of acknowledgement to the function of language in producing knowledge. Vico said that without language the human knower is lost. Language reveals our passions, our thought processes, our reasoning, our imagination, and without it we would not understand the social conventions and historical contexts that shape our world. And language is not just a general blanket concept, it is specific. By that, he means it is specific to its context. The English language shapes the English differently than the French language shapes the French. So while the Cartesian method is undeniably useful, it can’t be the only method. It can’t completely overpower the sensus communis, or common sense, that the study of language teaches us. And common sense doesn’t mean understanding the practicalities of life – common sense is literally the sense we have in common. The things we understand as one, as a people. The things we share.

Vico was also one of the first major thinkers to assert that a social institution or individual is defined by its historical circumstances. Vico’s emphasis on context, and how language and context define us was the predecessor to a number of social science and humanities disciplines. This notion of context making meaning would eventually become a sticking point for major thinkers throughout philosophy and rhetorical theory. It wasn’t until much later that scholars would really delve into the fullness of what that meant.

According to Vico, there are many kinds of truth. There are the general truths that are unchanging – he refers to these as abstract truths. And science and math are good for abstract knowledge. But there are contextual truths as well. They are no less true. They are just specific truths. They are truths at that time. They are the historical or societal truths. I think we may swear by these truths even more passionately than we do the general truths, if I am being honest, because they are the truths we are more immediately invested in.

When I first encountered Vico I was floored. THIS, I thought, THIS makes sense. For me, rhetoric isn’t just about making an argument; it is about making decisions. And we make decisions in a fully-fleshed out and contextualized world. When I teach my classes, yes, I am teaching my students to be persuasive. That much is true. But what I hope they are getting out of it is not just how to make a point, but how to understand and analyze the world around them. I tell my students all the time, I want you to come out of my classes not just able to argue your perspective, but to be in a position that you won’t get continually snowed.

Vico puts that into perspective for me. Vico’s understanding of the world is a historical one – we live in a world constructed by small, discursive decisions, and we have to sort through those things constantly and consistently to make better decisions. Because the truth of our worlds is not always defined by those big, absolute transcendent ideas, but by the small, contextual ones that shape our daily lives. So discourse, actually, is the most powerful force in our lives. Because it is dialogue and discourse which guide our thinking and our decision making. Science is great. Math is awesome. But it doesn’t tell us who to marry. Who to vote for. Or even how to talk to our lovers, children, or friends. These are discursive decisions. For Vico rhetoric wasn’t just persuasion. It was how we understood our world.

A second figure that was formative for me was Friedrich Nietzsche.

Friedrich  Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Prussia. As a young man he studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. His words have, admittedly, have to have gone under some rehabilitation over time because after he died his sister became curator of his work and she published his writing to fit her German nationalist ideology. She intentionally contradicted some of his ideas on nationalism and anti-Semitism and as a result, his works became popular with extremist movements like the Nazis. Nietzsche’s work has had to be rediscovered and rehabilitated to really understand what he had to say and how he influenced Western thought. But to be fair, those earlier understandings of his work continue to influence fascist and nationalist ideologies and philosophies in the current day.

Nietzsche had a profound impact on so many fields. He is considered the grandfather of postmodernism, for one thing. He ushered in philosophies that would radically change the intellectual landscape of the Western world. And some of those philosophies would butt up against the rest of the world, and cause tensions that we are struggling to figure out globally even today. So when I say his impact can’t really be measured, I’m not joking.

But one thing he said that really stuck with me was his insight that all words are metaphors. It’s a small thing, really, in his grand schema of thought. But it is oh-so-powerful.

To explain this, I am going to have to lean on some other theorists who picked up the idea and ran with it – but that is just illustrative of how important the idea became. The thing about metaphors, as I have talked about here before, is that they are REALLY powerful.

Picture in your mind a chair. Now, I don’t know how many of you are listening right now, but my guess is, that however many of you there are, that’s how many different versions of “chair” are floating around in your brains about now. But we all have the same basics, probably. There’s some kind of platform, held up by some legs, maybe with a back, that you sit on. Some of you are thinking of recliners, some of you are thinking of plush, stuffed chairs, and some of you are thinking of those terrible plastic things from middle-school, but regardless, we’re all thinking of chairs.

Pretty mind-bending stuff, right?

Now think of the word chair. See it in your mind. C-H-A-I-R. You know the letters. You can spell them out. You can hear the way it sounds when I say it.

Okay. Here’s the question of the hour: What does the word chair, as in those scratches on the page, or even those sounds that my mouth is making, have to do with the picture in your mind?

If you say, “Well, that’s what we call it,” you’re absolutely right. If you follow it up with, “and not much else,” you’re right again.

The mind-blowing thing isn’t that it’s a chair – the mind-blowing thing is that our word for chair, either spoken or written, has NOTHING to do with what a chair is. It is just a symbol. It is a symbol we have attached to that thing.

As Nietzsche explains, the word is a metaphor. It is an idea we have replaced with another.

The word “chair” is simply a collection of marks or sounds. It’s a random assemblage of symbols that we associate with a tangible thing.

Do you understand how WILD that is? Our words, whether written or spoken, are nothing more than metaphors. They are just symbols. They are disconnected from THINGS except for the fact that we connect them. There are exceptions, of course. An onomatopoeia represents itself, so to speak. But most words, which I might add evolve over thousands of years, so even if there ever was a connection it is lost now, are truly just metaphorical.

Think about what this means for the way we communicate.

When we speak, we are literally just negotiation metaphors. And the thing about metaphors, as I have argued earlier, is that they are very easy to misunderstand. Metaphors require interpretation. There is a level of slippage possible around a metaphor. That’s why art and poetry are a mystery to some people. They can’t understand the symbols or the metaphors. But that’s like our whole freaking language. So think about what a miracle it is that we can communicate at all. Any time we communicate with each other we are weaving a complicated tapestry of metaphorical and symbolic narratives.

How skilled do you have to be to either understand or be understood given that circumstance? How difficult is it to be clear when EVERYTHING requires some constant level of interpretation?

Nietzsche clarified a lot for me when I first started thinking about what it meant to make an argument, or just what it meant to communicate in general. I have friends and family who I love, but I have long been baffled by why they are SO BAD at communicating. And I have realized over the past 20 years of teaching this is very common. When I taught beginning composition I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with students when I tried to help them with a completely botched paragraph or two, and some poor kid said, “Well, what I meant to say was…” and when I said, “So why didn’t you say that?” they looked thunderstruck. The notion that they could just say what they meant had never occurred to them. Because this process of negotiating symbols, of finding the right word for the right context to get the right meaning across, is really, really hard if you don’t have a LOT of background knowledge to draw from.

Consider the constraints that puts on us. In order to make ourselves heard, or to understand anybody else, we are in a constant struggle to negotiate and interpret metaphors. That’s a lot of work. The flip-side to that is, we are the artists of our own realities, in some ways. Vico talks about things like small truths, and we make decisions because of discourse – but that discourse is very much a matter of our own creation. We are literally negotiating the metaphors that craft the world we live in.

How powerful are we? How much creative potential do we have? How AWESOME are we?

Now, I am not claiming I am some all-powerful goddess to controls time and space. That’s a terrifying thought. But, Vico tells me that my life is governed by small, daily truths, and those truths are discursive. And Nietzsche tells me that discourse is a matter of negotiating metaphors, which I do on the daily through my own creative power.

So when I talk about what rhetoric is, it is way beyond just making an argument. For me, rhetoric is a creative force. It is agency. It is what makes me a world-builder.

And the lovely thing about it is that you don’t have to know anything about Vico or Nietzsche for any of this to be applicable. You negotiate metaphors every day, regardless of who or what you have read. You think in terms of discursive truths every day, and my guess is you’ve not put a lot of thought into much 18^th century philology. But that’s kind of why I am so drawn to these two. Because in my mind they are so fundamental that you don’t need to have read them – they just explain what you are doing anyway. However, I will argue that the more you read about this kind of thing, the better you GET at things like negotiate metaphors and contexts. Just something to think about.

The final person I’d like us to consider brings us into the 20^th and 21st centuries. He’s been with me since I started my dissertation and has brought me all the way through my academic career. He’s not super popular with people in my field, but I’m working all the time to change that!

I am pretty sure I’ve talked about him before, because I’ve talked about the concept of constitutive rhetoric. But since that topic never gets old, we’re going to look a little into James Boyd White.

White literally coined the term “constitutive rhetoric.” A dude named Maurice Charland took it and ran with it, and he’s the guy comm scholars love to cite, but White is the OG. And I happen to like White a whole lot more than Charland.

Charland’s version of constative rhetoric is very…post-structural? Maybe even…structural? And structuralism is not my bag. But White describes a process by which we create ourselves. We make minute, discursive choices, down to the very word, that build our identities. White was talking specifically about the law, and as a legal rhetoric scholar, that obviously appeals to me. We write ourselves into being when we write the law. We have literally constituted our national identity in our national laws. That’s very cool.

But in my mind, this is larger. Constitutive rhetoric isn’t just legal – It is political and social. In the most basic sense, we make up who we are as we go along by talking about ourselves.

HOW AMAZING IS THAT???

Now, admittedly, that can sound nihilistic at the outset. What, like there is no foundation? We are just aimlessly making crap up all the time and that’s just -BOOM- US?

But that’s why I have defined rhetoric progressively, with these theorists in the back of my mind the whole time. White’s understanding of rhetoric isn’t that it is just all made up – it is that the rhetorical choices we make are so incredibly, in a very detailed sense, important. And, this is important, we are the ones making the choices. We constitute ourselves, our nation, our family identities – all those things that define us – by making choices about how we discursively negotiate the world in which we live. I mean, what would you know about me if you didn’t listen to me talk or read what I had written? What would you know of my home of Rochester if you weren’t familiar with it’s fascinating history of being at the forefront of major social movements? White brings it all together for us this way.

Here is what I mean: Vico has taught me that nothing exists outside of its context. The words we use, the decisions we make – they are all living and breathing in specific moments, languages, and places. So the reality of those decisions is defined by those things as well. And Nietzsche has taught me that when I operate within those contexts, I am doing some major interpretive work. To communicate my desires or intentions, or to understand another’s, I have to make sense of a system of metaphors that, in reality, kind of defy reason. And White has taught me that each choice I make in this complicated dance can make a difference. And this negotiation of symbols doesn’t just “persuade” or “argue” as old-school rhetoricians like to posit, but it constitutes. It makes up who we are and how we understand each other.

So, we return to the original question: what is rhetoric?

Rhetoric helps me to understand that I am defined by my contexts and I have to understand the world just that way – contextually. But it also gives me the agency to negotiate the discourse within that context to make myself known and understood. Most importantly, rhetoric is the means by which I not only establish that I have a point to make, but that I have the ethos necessary to make a point. My identity is created and maintained rhetorically. For good or for ill.

Aristotle didn’t see that coming.

So all of that is why I am still a rhetorician. Because I want to share with people this amazing power – to build, create, and communicate. But also to interpret the world we live in compassionately and humanely.

It’s not a bad gig.