What Is The New Rhetoric? [Hardcover ed.] 1847182178, 9781847182173

Citation preview

What is the New Rhetoric?

Edited by

Susan E. Thomas

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

What is the New Rhetoric?, edited by Susan E. Thomas This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Susan E. Thomas and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-217-8; ISBN 13: 9781847182173

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Images

ix

Preface John O.Ward

x xv

Acknowledgements Introduction Susan E. Thomas

1

Chapter 1 Key Questions for a New Rhetoric Andrea A. Lunsford

4

Chapter 2 Rhetorically Speaking, What’s New? George L. Pullman

16

Chapter 3 What’s New and How New Is It? Contemporary Rhetoric, the Enlightenment, Hypertext, and the Unconscious Bruce Gardiner

29

Chapter 4 Perspectives in an Undergraduate Ethnography and Textual Culture Claire Woods

46 Education:

Rhetoric,

Chapter 5 New Rhetorics in New Sciences: Figuration and Knowledge Mediation Joan Leach

69

viii

Table Of Contents

Chapter 6 Voice Embodied: Rhetoric at the Intersection of Writing and Performance D. Ohlandt

82

Chapter 7 The New Assessment and the New Rhetoric Beth Kalikoff

94

Chapter 8 Arts of Modesty in Early Modern Women’s Poetry Patricia Pender

104

Chapter 9 Rhetorical Sex: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Kate Lilley

126

Chapter 10 Late Modern Blog Melissa Jane Hardie

140

Chapter 11 The Physical and Rhetorical Placement of the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy, 1938-6939 Fergus Armstrong

154

Chapter 12 New Voices of New Rhetoric: Student Perspectives Sacha Janzcuk, Joel Meares, and Alys Moody

175

Contributors

190

Index of Names

196

Subject Index

LIST OF IMAGES

11-1. A.W. Robertson and Grover A. Whalen with the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy. 11-2 Aerial Photograph of Westinghouse Building 11-3 Diagram of Time Capsule Site

PREFACE JOHN O. WARD

Any book that makes us think hard and critically about “truth,” “lying,”1 “communication,” “persuasion,” “education for social engagement,” “great creative writing” (versus ‘everyday scribbling’)—and much more—must surely be welcome today, when media and political “spin” saturate our environment.2 The word “rhetoric” challenges us today, not least because in many senses it meshes in so well with the popular notion of “discourse,” developed by Michel Foucault. As readers will doubtless be aware, Foucault’s notion of “discourse” (with a lot of help from Jacques Derrida’s critique of “phonologism” and other French critical theory) sublimely destroyed the “modernist” project that has governed cultural endeavour in the West since the Renaissance—and is still very much alive, so much so that one scholar has proposed that it will eventually revive and overwhelm its great rival, “postmodernism”!3 “Rhetoric” is closely linked to “discourse” because both are relativist terms – every social unit or even individual has his / her / its “discourse” or “rhetoric” and no one “discourse” or “rhetoric” should be privileged over the other.4 All disciplines also have their “discourse,” whether it is a matter of medical discourse, legal discourse, the discourse of local government, or whatever. The notion of “discourse” is in this sense contrary to the idea of “absolute disciplinary truth,” which each discipline naturally encourages.5 In fact, in a rhetorical or “discourse-oriented” perspective, “truth” becomes what you can persuade another to believe—as in modern advertising. But “rhetoric” is a much older term than “discourse.” Originally it was a classical Greek word for “the art of public speaking,”6 and was “invented” to allow people to make courtroom appearances to claim land lost to their families during the heyday of “tyrants” in Sicily.7 In the Latin-using intellectual culture that succeeded Greek culture and lasted from at least 100 B.C. to well after 1600 A.D., the term it came to be the accepted word for the storied persuasion skills of ancient Greece and Rome, as modified and extended by one thousand years of western cultural history. These storied persuasion skills were developed in a society more devoted to the teaching and practice of word play and effective verbal communication (oral and written) than any previous or even, perhaps, subsequent civilization. Why was this so? Because in the society of ancient “democratic” Athens (fifth and

What is the New Rhetoric?

xi

fourth centuries B.C.) and the Roman Republic (which ended c. 31 B.C.), “success” was open to all (so long as you were not a slave, an ex-slave, a woman, a child or a ‘foreigner!), though strongly hedged in by accepted notions of socially elite status and illustrious family lineage.8 Under the Roman Empire conformity and the linguistic skills necessary to enforce it were at a premium, so that a rhetorical education ranked even with a legal education as a sure-fire career-path for ambitious middle and upper class youths. Late in the Roman imperial period (which extended from c.31 B.C. to c. 475 A.D.) Christianity came to pose the ultimate challenge to rhetorical ideas and practices: the prolific writer and intellectual giant of his day, “Saint” Augustine (354-430 A.D.), a tried teacher of the “old rhetoric” of the Empire, decisively revolutionised rhetorical ideals and teaching by stressing behavioural admiration of great biblical heroes and deep study of the text of the Bible itself, counselling his students to “abandon” the old “preceptive” rhetoric of earlier times. Despite Augustine, the so-called Rhetorica ad Herennium,9 ‘or “Rhetoric written for [friend] Herennius” and called in later medieval and Renaissance times the “new” rhetoric, to distinguish it from the “old” rhetoric represented by Cicero’s earliest work, the De inventione (“On invention”—the first part of the rhetorical curriculum), became an all-time record hit textbook for the Greek and Roman art of persuasion in the period c.400 – 1600 A.D. Written at around the same time as Cicero’s De inventione, that is, in the first two decades of the last century B.C., the “Rhetoric written for [friend] Herennius” was soon lost and then rediscovered around 400 A.D. It achieved its premier status because it dealt with the whole rhetorical curriculum (the finding of the most appropriate arguments, the arrangement of them, the memorization of them, the delivery of them and the ornamentation of them with graceful figures of speech and thought), and it was written in simple, didactic Latin—the universal learned language of the time. It was also illustrated with easy and relevant examples, many of them composed by the writer himself, who believed that you should illustrate your rhetorical precepts with your own compositions rather than purple passages taken from prior writings. The “Rhetoric written for [friend] Herennius,” together with certain advanced Greek and Roman textbooks, gathered momentum over the thousand and more years following the Herennius text’s “rediscovery” and even the highly opinionated view of certain late-fifteenth-century rhetorical teachers that it was not by Cicero, did not dent its popularity. By the time the long road from Aristotle’s textbook on rhetoric and its near-contemporary, anonymous, “Rhetoric for Alexander” (fourth century B.C.10) had been traversed, the “old” and the “new” rhetoric amounted to a pretty formidable arsenal of techniques and practices for constructing “truth” and persuading others of it.

xii

Preface

But what are we today to make of this huge and effective corpus and in what senses can there be today a further “new rhetoric”? As George Pullman says below, “The old rhetoric, it seems, is something difficult to outrun.” In this Pullman echoes the statement of Edward P.J.Corbett, who, in his Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student,11 wrote: The author believes that the elaborate system of the ancients, which taught the student how to find something to say, how to select and organize his material, and how to phrase it in the best possible way, is still useful and effective— perhaps more useful and effective than the various courses of study that replaced it.12

We may well argue that today all the ancient techniques of persuasion are utilized—knowingly or unknowingly—in our modern systems of marketing and advertising—though we do not build into these systems the ethical and moral imperatives that great rhetorical writers of the past, such as Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, did. Nor do we make sure that our young are fully familiar with all the techniques of oral and written persuasion that may be available to them, as was common in former times. Here the warning of Pratkanis and Aronson is very pertinent: We believe that, in an age of propaganda, the most important thing for the survival of democracy is the existence of communicators who know how to present their message clearly and fairly, coupled with an informed electorate that knows the difference between a fair presentation and a con job. It is toward achieving these ends that we wrote this book.13

Rhetoric, indeed, is too important to be left to today’s marketing experts. Use of the term has expanded enormously in recent times, to include all cultures, genders, classes and even animals.14 We must ourselves nowadays understand the history and meaning of the word and how it might empower us today to meet and deal effectively with the explosion of new technologies of persuasion and communication, particularly in regard to the new electronic age and the infinite changes and possibilities associated with it. The authors of the present volume are fully aware of the inherited rhetorical tradition and of the “changes” that must be incorporated into the “new” rhetoric for our own times. Indeed, anyone nowadays interested in “writing”;15 “text / hypertext”; “printed / oral / electronic”; the “open” nature of the medieval manuscript or the electronic text, versus the “fixity” or “closed” nature of the “printed” text; “signification / representation / mechanisation / socialisation”;16 literacy / orality; literacy / literature; “dialogic”; “performance”; biology / cognitive psychology / psychoneurology / psycholinguistics; “letterracy / prosodacy / spriting /

What is the New Rhetoric?

xiii

talkument”; webtexts / films / radio essays / multi-media presentations; “multimodel public rhetoric”; “kairotic assessments”; the “return of orality, performance and delivery to the field of rhetoric, writing and the classroom”; a rhetoric of textual culture – and much, much more, not least the place all the above must occupy in the academic curricula of our modern educational institutions, will have to have this book in their hands! I recommend this book warmly to every reader interested in the world of discourse of the twenty-first century, and I congratulate its editor and its authors for their prophetic, widely visionary and multi-competent presentations, which will take the reader firmly into a future thoroughly based upon the experience of the past.

Notes 1. See Jeremy Campbell The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood (New York: Norton, 2002). 2. According to Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, in Age of Propaganda:The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Freeman, 1992), 4, ‘Each year … the typical American [read ‘Australian’] … will view roughly 38,000 commercials…’ 3. Expressed in an as yet unpublished pioneer essay by D.J.McRuvie: "Absolute Modernity." McRuvie’s dissertation (available in Sydney’s Fisher Library), is well worth reading in these regards: D.J.McRuvie "Changes in the intelligibility of writing in late medieval, early Renaissance Italy: an aspect of the origins of Italian humanism" (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1981). 4. For the impact of this idea on aboriginal history, see the introduction to Jan Kociumbas, ed., Maps, Dreams, History: Race and Representation in Australia, (Sydney Studies in History 8, History Department, University of Sydney, 1998). 5. In the arena of science the ideas of Thomas Kuhn best express the notion of ‘discourse’ versus ‘disciplinary truth’: Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6. See Viginia Cox and J.O. Ward, eds., The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition, (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 7. This volume should be consulted for any questions about the ‘afterlife’ of the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herenniuum. 7. Sixth and fifth centuries B.C.. See George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 58ff. Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), has a somewhat different view of things. 8. For an excellent recent novel illustrating all this, read Robert Harris’ Imperium (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 9. See George Pullman’s essay below. 10. See George Kennedy The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 82-124.

xiv

Preface

11. Edward P.J Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). See Lunsford’s chapter below. 12. Edward P.J Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), vii. The present writer had occasion once to deliver a lecture on the use of classical rhetorical theory in modern advertising (and modern advertising has produced a vast scholastic and didactic literature than dwarfs the ancient rhetorical curriculum!). He chose for his example the front page of a current issue of the Virgin Blue in-flight magazine Voyeur and showed how almost every technique advised in the Rhetorica ad Herennium was to be found exploited in this one front page! 13. Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, in Age of Propaganda:The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Freeman, 1992), xv. 14. Some of the books that I have found to illustrate this remark are: Rematp Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Guiliana Menozzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1989); William A. Covino, The Art of Wondering; A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook,1988); James Elkins Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (London: Routledge, 2000); Kathryn T. Flannery, The Emperor’s New clothes: Lliterature, Literacy and the Ideology of Style (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition From Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997); James Kastely, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); David Knechtges and Eugene Vance, eds., Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture; China, Europe and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Andrea A. Lunsford, ed., Reclaiming Rhetoric: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Paivi Mehtonen, Obscure Language, Unclear Literature: Theory and Practice from Quintilian to the Enlightenment, trans. Robert MacGilleon (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences, 2003); Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, 1992); James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Brenda Dean Schildgen, ed., The Rhetoric Canon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Suttcliffe, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999); C. Jan Swearingen, Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Victor A. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953, Davis, California: Hermagoras Press, 1985). The best ‘history’ of rhetoric is Thomas M.Conley Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 1994), whilst the most ambitious claim for the comprehensive nature of ‘rhetoric’ is George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 15. See Lunsford’s re-definition of this term in her paper below. 16. See Gardiner’s paper below.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the generous support of the following: Fergus Armstrong, who worked tirelessly and enthusiastically with me on every aspect of the manuscript and never ran short of good ideas—or good humor. Bruce Gardiner, who took over my teaching and administrative responsibilities (on top of his own duties) for several weeks in August 2005 so that I could convene the conference. His intellectual generosity and collegiality know no bounds. Geraldine Barnes, Stephen Garton, and Adrian Mitchell, who provided financial and moral support for the conference and this publication—and offered much good advice along the way. I am fortunate to have such mentors. My colleagues in the Faculty of Arts, who offered advice and encouragement. Phillip Jones and the Research in Humanities and Social Sciences team, who provided financial support and publicity for the conference. Judyth Sachs, who supported the conference—and writing studies at the University of Sydney. The Plain English Foundation, who co-sponsored the conference. Jay Chandra, Prayag Datt, and Andrea Yapp, who handled the conference’s finances seemingly effortlessly. Vicki Asmussen, who handled every little detail of the conference with grace and good humor. The Acron Dog Walkers, who served as a “test audience” for the book, offering feedback and ultimately informing my own definition of rhetoric. My husband Zeke, who supported me unfailingly.

xvi

Acknowledgments

Elle, Chevy, and Betsy, my favorite rhetoricians. My amazing students in Academic Writing, Modern Rhetoric, Page to Screen, and Writing and Rhetoric: brilliant reminders of why I chose this profession. And finally, the all-star lineup of contributors, with whom I have been privileged to work and from whom I have learned much.

INTRODUCTION SUSAN THOMAS

This collection of essays, resulting from the international conference of the same name, explores how rhetoric is informing and influencing research and teaching practices in higher education. It offers a broad interdisciplinary scope and focuses on issues pertinent to the academy, including the relationship between rhetoric and technology, teaching methodologies, research methodologies, broader issues of educational practice, professional communication, and ethics. Though sometimes considered worlds apart in theory and practice, the arts and sciences are united by their reliance on rhetoric—the theoretical bridge between classical and contemporary communication practices and between the academy and the professions. Since the 1960s, the definitions of “new rhetoric” have expanded to encompass a variety of theories and movements, raising the question of how rhetoric is understood and employed in the twenty-first century. When scholars and business leaders gathered at the University of Sydney on 3 September 2005 to discuss “What is the New Rhetoric?,” three major themes emerged: 1. 2. 3.

How the classical art of rhetoric is still relevant today; How it is directly related to modern technologies and the new modes of communication they have spawned; How rhetorical practice is informing research methodologies and teaching and learning practices in the contemporary academy.

The essays collected here represent variations on these themes, with each attempting to answer the title’s deliberately provocative question. The five canons of classical rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) are present in everyday communication, written as well as oral, especially in technological environments. In “Rhetorically Speaking, What’s New?,” George Pullman argues that “the traditional art of memory as it comes to us via Cicero and Quintilian, is a mnemotechnique that might be called associative visualization—associating topics upon which we need to speak with

2

Introduction

an object we can readily imagine. The icons on the computer desktop, for example, are memory aids in the sense that they enable us to activate programs the actual location of which we probably don’t even know.” In “Key Questions for a New Rhetoric,” Andrea Lunsford points out that contemporary pedagogies are “deeply technologised, with orality, peformance and delivery returning to the classroom.” She indicates that with the fifth canon of rhetoric [delivery] returning to prominence via new technologies, “students must now assess how they deliver the knowledge they produce—-which evokes a new rhetoric as epistemic . . . and multimodal.” Particularly in this age of information, critical applications of rhetoric are vital for managing, interpreting and processing data, but in the euphoria of technological advancement, have we been too quick to ascribe to the electronic word virtues long inherent in traditional print text? In “What’s New and How New Is It,” Bruce Gardiner argues that print text has always possessed the capacity for multi-dimensionality and that hypertext offers merely another mode of textual production rather than a revolution in authorship or readership. With terms such as “rhetoric of the media,” “empty rhetoric,” and “political rhetoric” in common parlance, it’s no surprise that “rhetoric” is often a slippery term, associated with trickery, deception or simply the antithesis of reality. In the academy, the word “rhetoric” is too often perceived as synonymous with remedial, with “fixing up” bad writing, with teaching grammar and with decorating prose. But in the contemporary university, rhetoric has a much deeper role that far surpasses these narrow definitions. In “Perspectives in an Undergraduate Education: Rhetoric, Ethnography and Textual Culture,” Claire Woods argues that rhetoric is central to a critical understanding of textual culture, to developing “an understanding of the theoretical and applied work involved in the tekhne of text production as readers, writers, makers and receivers of multi-genre textual forms.” She suggests that a dynamic coalescence of theoretical perspectives applied to the study of texts and to writing pedagogy might allow for the emergence of a new version of rhetoric: the rhetoric of textual culture. In “Rhetorics of the Sciences: Mediation and New Rhetorical Theory,” Joan Leach identifies the classical rhetorical terminology of figuration as “a fine location for considering ‘new rhetorics,’”claiming that “it is rhetorical critics and theorists’ stance on the antique, more specifically—on figuration—that frequently divides them.” She asks, “how can the discourses of a field of inquiry alive only since the 17th century usefully be analysed with terms from the 5th century BCE?” and reviews key arguments about the “continued relevance of figuration for generating theories of meaning in and about scientific texts.” In “Voice Embodied: Rhetoric at the Intersection of Writing and Performance,” D. Ohlandt argues that the disciplines of theatre studies and writing studies are more closely linked

What is the New Rhetoric?

3

than one might realize. She uses practical examples from the writing classroom and the acting workshop to demonstrate how putting performance studies back into Rhetoric (or the other way around) can be mutually beneficial for two seemingly unlike disciplines. In “The New Assessment and the New Rhetoric,” Beth Kalikoff describes how responding to our students’ work is a rhetorical act all its own and why it is necessary to assess our own assessment methods in light of rhetorical best practice. In “Arts of Modesty in Early Modern Women’s Poetry” and “Rhetorical Sex,” Patricia Pender and Kate Lilley demonstrate how a better understanding of women’s rhetoric as represented in early modern literature is enhanced by the application of contemporary rhetorical theory. In “The Physical and Rhetorical Placement of the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy,” Fergus Armstrong discusses the Westinghouse Corporation’s rhetorical strategy in marketing the time capsule (and thereby the corporation itself) as the promotional drawcard for the Westinghouse Company Building at the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair. In “Late Modern Blog,” Melissa Hardie compares the postcarding craze of the 1940s to the contemporary blogging phenomenon. And in “New Voices of New Rhetoric,” Sacha Janzcuk, Joel Meares and Alys Moody discuss Walter Ong’s concept of open and closed textual systems, reality television, and fanfiction. As Edward P.J. Corbett, widely regarded as a giant of 20th-century rhetoric, described it, and as these essays prove, rhetoric is the “enabling discipline,” which blurs cultural and disciplinary boundaries in order to enable better communication—in the classroom, in the boardroom, and even in the chatroom. Although the laptop has replaced the scroll, the classical art of rhetoric remains a pillar of ethical and meaningful human communication. I am particularly pleased that this collection offers a diversity of viewpoints, from well-known, seasoned experts in the fields of Rhetoric and Composition, Communication Studies, English Studies, Performance Studies, and Science, as well as new voices of emerging scholars. It is my hope that this book will be a valuable research and teaching resource in the humanities and sciences alike, in both tertiary and secondary educational circles and wherever rhetorical inquiry is taking shape.

CHAPTER ONE KEY QUESTIONS FOR A NEW RHETORIC ANDREA A. LUNSFORD

Most U.S. scholars of rhetoric and writing studies who are around my age have a story to tell about how and when they discovered rhetoric, and I am certainly no exception to that rule. I started teaching at a two-year college in Florida in 1968, after completing my MA in English and teaching in high school for a couple of years. A year later or two, the dean of the college asked me to write some guides for students to use in writing papers for the required composition courses. I spent the entire summer working on this project and ended up with little booklets on Writing an Expository Essay, Writing a Descriptive Essay, Writing a Narrative Essay, Writing a Persuasive Essay, and—what I was especially proud of—Writing a Combination Essay. I had figured out how to write these booklets by finding essays in these modes and analyzing them, breaking them down into steps, and then trying to guide students through that process. I did this completely by instinct: I was utterly without training in the teaching of writing, having exempted the required courses at my university, having gone through a one-half-day training session before I became a Teaching Assistant during my MA program, and having taught only literature in high school. So I was fairly proud of coming up with something to say about how to write various kinds of college papers. Pride, as they say, goeth before a fall. And one day that fall, after the school year started and I had presented the little booklets to my dean, I was sitting in my little cubicle office when I received a complimentary book from Oxford University Press. It was titled Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, by Edward P. J. Corbett. I knew absolutely nothing about rhetoric, classical or otherwise, so I took the book home with me and started to read—and to discover rhetoric. What I found, of course, was that I had no need to invent everything in those little booklets from scratch: here before me was a systematic account of the arts of communication, one that had been around for over two thousand years. I tell this story to remind myself, and others, that the “old” rhetoric was

What is the New Rhetoric?

5

entirely new to me and, indeed, the “old” or traditional rhetoric has a way of becoming new to successive generations of students and scholars. The next year I got up my courage to apply to Ph.D. programs, and on the top of my list was Ohio State University, where Professor Corbett taught. I studied there for five years and became the first person at that university to take a specialty in rhetoric and writing studies, though I pretty much had to do this all in directed reading sessions with Professor Corbett, who was not teaching graduate courses on rhetoric when I got there. The tradition I studied with Ed Corbett was decidedly “old”: I worked my way chronologically from Plato and Aristotle up to Chaim Perelman and Kenneth Burke, and by the time I left Ohio State for the University of British Columbia in 1977, a number of graduate students were choosing to pursue specialties in rhetoric and writing. In 1987 I returned to Ohio State to help build the undergraduate and graduate program in rhetoric and writing within the Department of English. Today that university has 14 scholars professing rhetoric and writing, a writing minor at the undergraduate level, a full graduate program, a Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing— all in addition to the required first-year writing program. Ohio State’s program is typical of a number of large state universities in the United States, where the revival of rhetoric in the 1960s (this was the “new” rhetoric of the time) took hold most strongly. What characterized those early programs was a deep commitment to undergraduate education and to access to that education for all students; a recognition that the ancient art of rhetoric (which Aristotle defined both as “the art of discovering in any case all the available means of persuasion” and as “the art and practice of coming to sound judgment”) provided a robust theoretical and historical foundation for the teaching of writing, and a determination to achieve disciplinary status for the field of rhetoric and writing studies, then widely referred to as “composition and rhetoric.” What is new in this rendition of the rhetorical tradition, then, is the very self-conscious linking of rhetoric with writing or composition. In retrospect, it’s clear that as the cultural capital of writing grew (beginning in the age of the printing press and reaching a crescendo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the fortunes of rhetoric declined. What counted was not the eloquence of old but what could be put in writing. As a result, colleges turned away from the “old” rhetorical tradition, which had focused on students composing and performing their own discourses and increasingly to controlled instruction in correct writing and, primarily, to reading, to hermeneutics, and to the consumption rather than the production of discourse. So what was “new” in the 60s and 70s revival of rhetoric was, at least in part, an attempt to return to the old tradition and to concentrate on the actual discursive practices and products of student writers.1 Not coincidentally, this “new” rhetoric with its

6

Chapter One

commitment to student writing was to form the basis for a new discipline, which Robert Connors calls Composition-Rhetoric. In some ways, these goals have been met in the U.S., sometimes even spectacularly so. Today, several book series (such as those at the University of Pittsburgh Press and Southern Illinois University Press) and dozens of journals are devoted to rhetoric and writing, and at least one of them—College Composition and Communication—is harder to publish in than the PMLA. Scores of intensive Ph.D. programs in rhetoric and writing criss-cross the country, and an ever-growing number of conferences—from the Rhetoric Society of America, to Feminisms and Rhetorics—now make it impossible for any scholar to attend them all. And even the so-called Ivy League Schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have begun writing programs for undergraduates. At Stanford, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric teaches two required courses for all students, offers several undergraduate elective courses in writing and rhetoric as well as at least two graduate courses every year (I am currently teaching a graduate seminar on rhetoric’s fourth canon, Memoria). Such successes are at best only partial, however: writing and rhetoric is still a marginalized field faced with a series of daunting challenges, and many U.S. scholars would agree, I think, that the future of the discipline depends on responding to these challenges in ways that will help to create and maintain yet another “new” rhetoric. First among these challenges is location: Where within the university should a “new” rhetoric be housed and what should be its institutional affiliations and responsibilities? In the U.S., these questions are very much up for grabs. Most programs in rhetoric and writing remain within Departments of English (or occasionally Departments of Communications), but the last decade has seen a growing trend for rhetoric and writing to separate and form departments of their own that offer both undergraduate and graduate courses. These new departments do not yet have a firm core: some focus on professional discourse, some on literacy and language, some on media, some on history, some on technology, and writing, and some try for an omnibus approach that would bring all these strands together. What is lost in such a move to new departments, of course, is the connection to reading and literature, which remain in Departments of English. What is gained, however, is a chance to establish disciplinary power within university structures and to create programs and courses responsive to student needs in the 21st century. My own sense is that such new departments will continue to proliferate and that in doing so the outlines of an undergraduate major in rhetoric and writing will grow ever more clear. But I have some doubts, not about departments of rhetoric and writing per se, but about departments in general: it seems clear that disciplinary boundaries are crumbling, that the old framework of departments, based on the 19th century

What is the New Rhetoric?

7

German system, is no longer adequate for the work scholars need to do, and that some other structure needs to arise (a sign of this is the exponential growth of interdisciplinary centers and institutes). So a “new” department of rhetoric and writing may find itself “old” fairly shortly. No matter where rhetoric and writing is located, the field faces other serious challenges and opportunities, chief among them the relationship to new technologies. When I think of the changes I have seen in my lifetime, my head fairly swims. When I won the ninth grade typing medal in my junior high school, I did it on a manual typewriter, the kind you had to literally pound. As an undergraduate, I had the luxury of a little portable manual typewriter: not until graduate school did I sink into the pleasures of the IBM selectric. At the age of 63, then, I am old enough to take a long view of the history of writing and rhetoric’s connection to technology, one that did little to prepare me for the learning curve I faced when I got my first computer in 1985. Since then I have become more proficient—and I am still a rocket-fast keyboarder thanks to that ninth-grade drilling. But I am still very much a learner of the new media, one who is almost daily surprised by how writing and the teaching of writing have changed in the thirty years of my career. Every few years, a new body of literature needs to be learned, a new set of practices and a new kind of teaching mastered. I realize as I look back over my career that I and other teachers of writing and rhetoric have had to reinvent ourselves and our discipline several times, and that more change is definitely in sight. Thus the newest “new” rhetoric is one that is deeply mediated, deeply technologized. In fact, writing is one of the western world’s oldest technologies and rhetoric, plastic art that it is, has consistently transformed itself in relation to new and emerging technologies. Today, this ability to mold itself to new realities is key to the new rhetoric, presenting special challenges, and special opportunities for those who profess rhetoric and writing. No change has been more significant than the return of orality, performance, and delivery to the field of rhetoric and writing and to the classroom. As noted above, in the U.S., the increasing hegemony of writing throughout the nineteenth century had hidden the body and performance from critical view and shifted attention away from oral and embodied delivery to textual production of the printed page. Beginning in the mid twentieth century, however, and growing exponentially in the last two decades, the arts and crafts associated with delivery, the fifth canon of rhetoric, have moved to the center of our discipline. To view writing as an active performance, that is as an act always involving the body and performance—enriches I. A. Richards's notion of the interinanimation of words: it is not only that individual words shift meaning given their context within a sentence, but also that words shift meaning given their embodied context and their physical location in the world. Calling attention to this

8

Chapter One

phenomenon raises our awareness of the power language gains through physical interaction and exchange, and it transforms our understanding of Kenneth Burke's definition of humans as "symbol-using, symbol-misusing animals." To be human is to speak and write and perform through multiple systems of signification and to inhabit not only what Walter Ong calls “secondary orality,” a term associated with the electric technologies that make possible the phenomenon of 24/7 surround-sound split-screen cable-TV culture but also "secondary literacy," a term I use to name a literacy that is both highly inflected by oral forms, structures, and rhythms and highly aware of itself as writing, understood as variously organized and mediated systems of signification. In this scene of secondary orality and secondary literacy, student writers must be able to think critically and carefully about how to deliver the knowledge they produce. Yet in the U.S., we are still only marginally prepared to help them do so. It is as though our old reliable rhetorical triangle of writer, reader, and message is transforming itself before our eyes, moving from three discrete angles to a shimmering, humming, dynamic set of performative relationships. And in this scene, writing favors immediacy, quickness, associative leaps, and a fluid and flexible sense of correctness—akin to what Winston Weathers long ago described as Grammar B. As I’m using it, then, secondary literacy advances a looser prose style, infiltrated by visual and aural components to mirror the agility and shiftiness of language filtered through and transformed by digital technologies and to allow for, indeed demand, performance. To describe such literacies, we need more expansive definitions of writing along with a flexible critical vocabulary and a catalogue of the writing and rhetorical situations that call for amplified, performative, and embodied discourse of many different kinds. The Read/Write Weblog notes, in late April, 2005, that “neither ‘read’ nor ‘write’ really means what it used to when we talk about literacy or being literate.” My colleague Marvin Diogenes and I have talked endlessly about what I’m calling our “vocabulary problem,” and eventually we tried our hand at defining writing in a way that does not mirror the reductiveness of current dictionary definitions: Writing: A technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media.

For all its clumsiness, this definition aims to capture the sense of writing I am trying to evoke—of a new rhetoric and writing as epistemic, performative, multivocal, multimodal, and multi-mediated.

What is the New Rhetoric?

9

One scholar who has been hard at work trying to create a more flexible critical vocabulary for writing and rhetoric is Tara Shankar, who recently completed her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In her dissertation, “Speaking on the Record,” Shankar traces the increasing power of writing, which she terms graphocentrism, noting that writing eventually became “the primary outlet for the most elitist uses of languages in many cultures.” She argues that the domination of print-based writing is now at an end and introduces a set of terms aimed at clarifying communicative relationships. To begin, she defines literacy as “the knowledge of language, domains of experience, and structure of discourse that permit one to use language as an object for learning reflection and analysis” and distinguishes this from Seymour Papert’s term letteracy, the “mechanical and presentational skills specific to writing.” This she contrasts with prosodacy, oral decoding and encoding abilities that indicate awareness of ways in which situated intentions, emotion, identity, and expression can be realized in and through the repleteness of spoken language.” Into this mix she adds the key term spriting. By “sprite,” a portmanteau combining speaking and writing, Shankar means speaking that “yields two technologically supported representations: the speech in audible form, and the speech in visual form. Spriting, therefore, equally encompasses digital speech recorders, speech editing tools, and any speech dictation recognition tools that would use speech in addition to text as an output mode.” The product of spriting she identifies as a spoken document, or talkument. As one reads a written text, she says, so one audes a talkument. Much later in this fascinating dissertation, Shankar introduces spriting to two elementary schools and studies the collaborative “talkuments” the children produce using “SpriterWriter,” a system for composing and editing talkuments. Finding that students produce talkuments collaboratively with the greatest of ease, Shankar concludes that “Spriting seems to admit even closer, more integral collaborations than does writing, perhaps because spriting can more easily incorporate conversation as both planning and composition material.” Even more provocative to me, Shankar finds that “when children are released from the representational strictures of paper and pencil to compose language, they do not just talk their words, they sing their words. . . . . They sing pure sound and rhythm, words, advertisements, school songs, popular songs and television theme songs with equal abandon.” That is to say, they perform. Shankar is not alone in her attention to performance. Recently, in fact, Jon Udell has called for performative literacies to become the basis for writing programs in the United States. In a discussion of the power of screencasting, Udell says “Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were (and Shankar would agree), but we’ll increasingly combine them with

Chapter One

10

speech and video.” Teachers, however, can scarcely wait, however, for our own community, much less our society, to refine and accept such new terminologies or to perfect the tools and techniques necessary to them. While this work goes on, whatever we call what our students are doing is racing ahead of our ability to describe it. So what’s a poor writing program to do? In the face of the enormous changes to literacies, Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric has been challenged to add a second required course to the Stanford curriculum. This new course, which we implemented fully during this last school year, has a complex mandate. In it, students are to build on the rhetorical analysis, research, and argument abilities that they practiced in their first writing course (and delivered primarily in traditional print forms) by continuing to carry out substantive research and develop compelling argumentative positions. But the course shifts focus from invention, arrangement, and style to rhetoric’s fifth canon, delivery. Last September, the entire PWR faculty met for a week to work on this new PWR 2 course, and we ended the week exhilarated and enthusiastic about our goals: x x x x x x

To build on the analytic and research-based argument strategies developed in PWR 1 through more intensive work with oral, visual, and multimedia rhetoric; To identify, evaluate, and synthesize materials across a range of media and to explore how to present these materials effectively in support of the students’ own arguments; To analyze the rhetoric of oral, visual, and multimedia documents with attention to how purpose, audience, and context help shape decisions about format, structure, and persuasive appeals; To learn to design appropriate and effective oral and multimedia texts; To conduct research appropriate to the specific documents being created; To reflect systematically on oral, visual, and multimedia rhetoric and writing.

We decided to pursue these goals through an assignment sequence that would be standard across our many different themed sections. We’d begin with an assignment we called “texts in translation,” one that asked students to take a fairly brief text and translate it from one form of delivery to another, to analyze the rhetorical strategies operative in the two versions, and then present their findings to the class. This assignment would, we hoped, set the stage for a multimedia research-based argument, one that would include substantive writing, research, collaboration, and delivery of the argument in one or more

What is the New Rhetoric?

11

media. This assignment would take up most of five to six weeks of the course and might include various steps such as a proposal, documentation of research, several drafts, and the final live delivery of the project. The final major project would ask students to create a reflective essay that essentially analyzed their work in the course, noting how various media shaped their writing, how their rhetorical choices were affected by various media, how they used a new medium effectively in the presentation of research. This final meta-analysis would often lead to the third major class presentation. As an aside, let me say that, early on, we faced the challenge of how to allow our students to “draft” their presentations in the same way they draft print essays. To address this issue, we developed a core of undergraduate tutors, one or two of whom are attached to each section. The tutors, who take a special training course, observe and respond extensively to the students’ practice presentations and help with taping the presentations for further discussion and analysis. Now had we not been in such a state of euphoria, we would have noticed that this set of goals and assignments is, at the very least, daunting. And certainly our experience in trying to carry out one of our own assignments during a one-week institute held in September 2004 should have alerted us to the difficulty of what we were planning to do. We plunged into teaching PWR 2 with abandon, however: in retrospect it’s easy to see that we were to some extent dazzled by the possibilities presented to us, especially in the tech classrooms our Academic Technology Specialist specially designed for the PWR 2 classes. We and our students can do it all, we thought. And indeed, we managed to do a lot. Teachers and students alike plunged into multimedia writing, producing films and videos, extensive audio essays (which are currently aired every week on Stanford’s campus radio station), and web texts of all kinds. But our students helped to rein us in. In their evaluations and in the extensive focus group discussions we held with students following their experience in PWR 2, they told us in no uncertain terms that while they loved the opportunity to explore new media in writing and to push their writing in new directions, they weren’t sure their writing was actually improving. (In other words, they knew they were learning something, but many of them wouldn’t call it writing.) So caught up were they in the fine points of Audacity, a software program for editing audio essays, or the pleasures of iMovies or the production of a Zine that the actual writing (or at least what students understood as writing) in these endeavors seemed to suffer. Moreover, they noted with irritation that the class workload differed dramatically across sections and, especially, that some classes provided for very thorough instruction in presentation and for lots of “drafts” of oral/multimedia presentations, while others did not. In short, they echoed our own concerns. Mid-year reflection told

Chapter One

12

us we did not have this course really “down” yet, so we went back to the drawing board. In particular, our Curriculum Committee worked to address three major concerns: x x x

How to balance academic with practical, real-world writing assignments; How to balance critique and analysis of multimedia rhetoric (skills most of us generally felt confident teaching) with practice in developing multimedia texts (here we felt less confident); How to balance technical training (ranging from PowerPoint to video production) with instruction in writing, rhetoric, and presentation.

We heard early on from upper administrators about their “horrible suspicion” that we might “just be teaching PowerPoint” on the one hand, and from our Undergraduate Advisory Board about their near-violent disagreements over what constituted an effective PowerPoint presentation, much less on how to teach one. So we’ve been particularly interested to compare reactions to this newly required second course to what we hear about PWR 1, the more “traditional” first-year course. While some students complain that our focus on research-based argument is too limiting, and that they want a chance to write more creatively or expressively, we don’t hear complaints about how we define research-based argument in the context of a research university. It’s in the context of PWR 2 that everyone—and no one—is an expert, and we feel as though we are hearing from every one of these folks. With these points in mind, a group of us began to reconsider our course goals, to try to focus more on the role of writing and presentation in the course. We realized, for example, that just as we did not expect students in PWR 1 to conduct research at the level of graduate students, so we should not expect students in PWR 2 to create full-length films, videos, hypertexts, or other digital work at the level of students with specialized training in those areas. (Indeed, we were reminded politely, Stanford’s new major in Film and Media Studies would be grappling with that advanced task.) Instead, we posited that PWR 2 should orient students to media production as a means of persuasion in the way that PWR 1 does this task for research at the university level. What we had to remind ourselves (over and over again) was that the core values of PWR 2 entail rhetoric, research, argument, and presentation rather than advanced training in media production. The result of this rethinking and refocusing was fairly dramatic: almost to a person, we felt that our PWR 2 courses in the spring were far more coherent and rigorous than the ones we had taught in the winter because they placed the delivery of a research-based argument at the center of

What is the New Rhetoric?

13

the curriculum. And while we do not yet have student evaluations for these classes, we are hopeful that students will have noted the differences as well. When we began our work on PWR 2, we thought that redefining writing (as highly mediated) and developing a new vocabulary for communicative literacies would yield to careful observation: just look around, we thought, and take note of what writing looks like today and how it functions—then new definitions and terms will be apparent enough. Our current version of the latest “new” rhetoric would be born. How naïve could we be! Redefining terms or creating a “new rhetoric and writing” is one thing: realizing and fully implementing any such redefinitions is quite another. Indeed, we have learned that teaching writing based on a substantive redefinition of writing affects every single aspect of our work: our theories of writing and rhetoric, our curriculum, our classroom configurations, our staffing, training, evaluation principles and procedures, our relationships with other programs (and with upper administration), and our methods and materials. We know, for instance, that traditional and familiar theories of writing have not focused on the material conditions of production or accounted for the inclusion of aural and visual elements (what we have nicknamed the “three v’s”: vocal, visual, verbal) at every stage of the writing process, much less on effective ways to perform the knowledge produced during those stages. And while the field of rhetoric and writing has led the way in how best to assess traditional forms of academic writing, we are now engaged in the complex work of assessing forms of digital, multimedia, and performed writing. We have even had to re-think our methods, from how we use collaboration in the classroom to how we teach research, to how we respond to students and their writing (or spriting). We of course are not the only ones struggling with this set of complex issues. In a blog entry on “screencasting as the new FYC,” C. G. Brooke takes up Jon Udell’s question: “Would I really suggest that techies will become fluid storytellers not only in the medium of the written essay, but also in the medium of the narrated screencast?” and then turns that quotation around to say “Would I really suggest that first-year composition take up the challenge of meeting those techies halfway, as well as the challenge of questioning our assumptions about the scope of writing?” to which he answers “Hell yes.” This is the challenge my colleague Eric Miraglia raised for us this year: how to fulfill our Faculty Senate’s mandate to “teach effective writing and speaking” while allowing students an opportunity for “authoring in the most compelling discursive modalities of their generation.” There is no doubt in my mind that these “compelling discursive modalities”—webtexts, films, radio essays, multimedia presentations—are here to stay and that they, in fact, constitute the heart of what students of a new rhetoric need to learn and practice. But moving in this direction will not be easy.

14

Chapter One

First, we need to remember the power of the old rhetoric, and indeed to understand that the new modalities our students are practicing are in some ways echoes of the scene of writing and speaking in 5th century BCE Greece, when the oral performance of discourse took precedence. But we also need to remember the power and history of print textuality: the era of the book may be closing, but the power of print remains. The challenge for those professing writing and rhetoric today lies in facing such tensions and finding ways to honor while attempting to move beyond them. Doing so seems to me much more important than deciding on whether writing and rhetoric should be housed in a new and separate department or even arguing over whether there is or is not a “new” rhetoric. Perhaps the wisest course of action is to recognize that where there is language there will always be rhetoric, and that rhetoric will inevitably renew itself with each succeeding generation.

Notes 1. In making this claim about the linking of rhetoric to composition as a feature of a “new” rhetoric, I could go on to trace the focus on student writing (the process movement in composition and rhetoric) to a growing realization of how vastly writers differ (the late social constructionist and post process movements) and inevitably to the importance of difference of all kinds to writing and the teaching of writing. That trajectory leads to another radical revisioning of rhetoric—as potentially inclusive and non-hierarchical, for example) and has been the subject of a number of efforts by feminist and postcolonial scholars.

Works Cited Brooke, C. G. “Screencasting as the new FYC?” 28 April 2005 . Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 2nd ed., 1971. Diogenes, Marvin and Andrea Lunsford. “Toward Delivering New Definitions of Writing.” Forthcoming in Yancey ed. Perelman, Chaim and Lucie Olbrechts Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: a Treatise on Argumentation. University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. “Read/Write Writing.” Posting by Will R. to the Read/Write WEblogg on 28 April 2005. . Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. Shankar, Tara Michelle Rosenberger. “Speaking on the Record.” Unpublished Dissertation. MIT, 2005.

What is the New Rhetoric?

15

Udell, Jon. “The New Freshman Comp.” Published on O’Reilly Network, 22 April 2005. 4 June 2005 . Weathers, Winston. An Alternate Style: Options in Composition. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden Books, 1980

CHAPTER TWO RHETORICALLY SPEAKING, WHAT’S NEW? GEORGE PULLMAN

The pretext for this collection is a deceptively simple question. What is the new rhetoric seems straightforward, but it is in fact complex because the two key words are polysemous and over determined—new can mean recent, innovative, better, improved, fresh, innocent, jejune, and a host of other mostly positive adjectives, while rhetoric can mean nearly anything, although its connotations are typically negative: political lies, corporate spin, long tedious lists of Greek and Roman terms for patterns of expression no one knowingly uses, purple prose, boiler plate arrangement schemas, unimaginative reproductions of traditional topics and commonplaces, emotional appeals offered in the absence of reason, bullshit, and so on. Given the malodor of the word rhetoric, it makes sense to want a new rhetoric, in the sense of a practice and theory of discursive activity that effectively distance themselves from old rhetoric, exemplified for the most part, albeit in very different ways, by Plato and Aristotle. The problem for anyone who would posit a new rhetoric is that Plato invented the word for his own purposes, while Aristotle so thoroughly described the phenomenon we have come to think of as technical rhetoric that it is very difficult for anyone to come up with anything that does not echo something from the past, which suggests that ancient rhetorical theory is still relevant in a digital age. I will try to demonstrate the plausibility of this assertion by first historicizing the expression “the new rhetoric,” and then looking at how several electronic forms of communication unknowingly echo ancient rhetorical practices. During the middle ages an unsigned rhetoric text was reproduced next to De inventione in Cicero’s corpus. Harry Caplan speculated that “perhaps because of a belief that Cicero wrote the treatise to replace his juvenile rhetoric text, it [became known as] Rhetorica Nova” (Caplan viii). During the Renaissance, however, scholars determined that Cicero did not write the text and thus “the new rhetoric” ceased to be the new rhetoric. When you consider how much of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, as it has since been known, descends directly from the Aristotelian tradition and from Hellenistic rhetoric more broadly, the new

What is the New Rhetoric?

17

rhetoric wasn’t really new in that sense either. In other words, the first time the expression “the new rhetoric” appeared it referred to something that was neither new in the sense of more recent nor new in the sense of innovative. In retrospect, calling Rhetorica ad Herennium Rhetorica Nova and associating it with Cicero may have been nothing more than rhetorical acts in the pejorative sense of purely promotional statements. The expression “the new rhetoric” seems to have entered the rhetorical lexicon as either a mistake or a strategic lie. In 1936, I. A. Richards, who had studied “The New Criticism” at Cambridge, published Philosophy and Rhetoric, in which he asserted that rhetoric as a discipline had fallen into such disrepair that it ought to be abandoned altogether or else entirely rebuilt from the foundations up. He offered a new definition of rhetoric, as being the “study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” By focusing on misunderstanding instead of persuasion, Richards did something that appears novel; he shifted the focus from manufacturing belief among non-believers to securing agreement through clarification. But this amounts to shifting the focus of rhetoric from persuasion to hermeneutics, something Augustine did in the fourth century when he published De Doctrine Christiana. Richards based his new rhetorical theory on the assertion that traditional rhetoric was worthless and came up with something that echoed the tradition, which is not to say that Richards did something unethical or stupid, but rather that he did something traditionally rhetorical; he denigrated the word “rhetoric” in order to promote one aspect of the tradition over other aspects. If you think about it, remedying misunderstanding can be heard as a euphemism for persuasion, a way of talking about rhetoric without evoking unpleasant associations. But it was not heard that way at the time. Daniel Fogarty (Roots for a New Rhetoric) identified Richards’ hermeneutic turn as an innovation that when coupled with the work of Kenneth Burke and the semanticists Korzybski, Hayakawa, and Irving J. Lee (3-4) provided the foundation of a new rhetoric, one that was philosophically based. By philosophical Fogarty meant a rhetoric that would seek to describe the phenomena of discourse and not simply rehearse the ancient rules of how to persuade an audience or embellish one’s speech. Thus this “new rhetoric” came to be identified with the study of language beyond persuasion, or as Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede put it, “the new rhetoric . . . stresses not coercive persuasion but communication, understanding, and reduction of threat through dialogue” (37-39). Lunsford and Ede go on to warn the profession that the pursuit of a new rhetoric in the absence of a careful reading of the tradition would lead to “unfortunate oversimplifications and distortions,” (37) a warning which fell on deaf ears apparently, because rhetoric textbooks continue to talk about the new rhetoric as though there were one.

18

Chapter Two

(Herzberg and Bizzell 966, and Foss, Foss, and Trapp 23). There are in fact at least two 20th-century rhetorics that claim to be the new rhetoric. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation was first translated into English in 1969 and has been widely and diversely cited ever since. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca repopulated the phrase “the new rhetoric” with content that was exclusively focused on persuasion, in a sense a reversal of the other new rhetoric, but persuasion in a non-agonistic sense. Their innovation was to define rhetoric as the practice of increasing adherence to already held beliefs, either through association of the new with the venerable, or the disassociation of the new from the old. By defining rhetoric as an utterance designed to increase adherence to existing beliefs, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca bring all rhetorical activity under the heading of epideictic, to use Aristotle’s terminology. While this clearly refocuses Aristotle’s terminology, the text is devoted to quasi-logical proofs and loci communes, both of which clearly echo Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Topica. In deed, the very idea that rhetoric is about informal verbal argumentation makes Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric even more traditional than the slightly older new rhetoric promoted by Daniel Fogarty in the name of I. A. Richards. So we have three instances of new rhetorics that are not really new. The old rhetoric, it seems, is something difficult to outrun. The desire to distance oneself from it, however, is understandable when you remember that the word “rhetoric” comes from Plato’s Gorgias, where Plato invented the term as a straw dog for philosophy, as an inferior facsimile of real thinking, real education, real politics, and real living. In this dialogue, Plato has Socrates assert that rhetoric, in the sense of political discourse, is a degenerate practice because it only ever says what it knows the audience wants to hear, which is morally reprehensible, he insinuates, because the audience doesn’t know what it really wants. It imagines, but it doesn’t know. Socrates would replace the corrupt rhetorical educational and political systems with philosophical systems that teach the general public what it should want and what it should think, philosophical systems that would turn doxa, public opinion, into orthodoxia, correct opinion. It is, therefore, easy to read Plato’s Socrates as one of the world’s first propagandists, although to call him one would be anachronistic. The word propaganda doesn’t appear until 1622, when Pope Gregory XV created the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, a group of cardinals whose charge was to ensure that the Catholic missionaries were propagating the orthodox faith, which is a good thing if you are a Catholic who believes the Vatican knows what it’s doing, but a bad thing if you are anyone else. And thus the word eventually fell from grace, becoming identified with state generated misconceptions, a synonym for the most insidious form of rhetoric, propaganda.

What is the New Rhetoric?

19

So I find it amusing that one of the more innovative rhetoricians of the modern world preferred the word propaganda to the word rhetoric. In 1928, eight years before Richards published Philosophy and Rhetoric, Edward Bernays published a book called Propaganda. Bernays is known, thanks in many ways to his own efforts, as the originator of public relations; his biography is called The Father of Spin, and the job title he created for himself was public relations counsel (Propaganda 63). Despite the fact that he almost never used the word rhetoric, it seems pretty clear to me that Bernays was a modern American rhetor, and because he also was an adjunct professor at NYU on occasion, a modern American rhetorician as well. Bernays recognized that businesses had relied on paternalistic rhetorical practices for so long that they were no longer in touch with what people wanted, and were thus stuck trying to sell things the public didn’t want, in ways that made Corporate America seem indifferent to the public’s well being. He characterizes the attitude of big business in America prior to the stock market crash as, “The Public be damned” (Crystallizing xxv). After the crash, everything changed. People were deeply distrustful of Corporate America and Bernays understood that to be successful a company needed to understand what people wanted and be understood to want the best for the people in return. Thus he set himself up as a go between, interpreting public opinion for business, and promoting business interests as public interests. Bernays sometimes referred to his public relations theory as the new propaganda. He differentiated “old propaganda” from “new propaganda” by saying that while an ad rep had to make his clients’ products seem like products people wanted to buy, the public relations counsel had to know what people wanted in the first place and how he might then go about manufacturing desire if it weren’t already present, product research and development, trend spotting, test marketing, celebrity endorsement, product placement, sports sponsorship, and so on. The public relations counsel also had to make sure that the company’s image in the public’s eye was above reproach. And thus he found ways to make his clients’ companies seem philanthropic, through charitable contributions, fund raisers, sponsorship of the arts, construction of public buildings, and so on. He also understood that above all, people do what they think is good for them and since they don’t really have any idea what is good for them, they accept expert testimony faithfully. The difference between the new and the old propaganda is perhaps best exemplified by the work Bernays did for the Beechnut meat processing factory. In those days, Americans were eating smaller and smaller breakfasts: coffee and bagel on the run. There were many companies selling bacon, and Bernays’ big idea was that rather than taking the traditional approach of competing head to head with other bacon manufacturers, decrying their products and ballyhooing

20

Chapter Two

Beechnut’s, he convinced a prominent New York physician to endorse a “big breakfasts are good” letter to a widely circulated medical publication. From there, or so Bernays claimed, the idea took off, and once people realized they “should be” eating big breakfasts, bacon came back in favor and Beechnut’s sales rose. Bernays did the same thing on a far grander scale with the American Fruit Company’s banana business, creating a think tank to underwrite the publication of academic research that showed that bananas contributed to digestive health. In describing this success in his book Crystallizing Public Opinion, he asserts that it “demonstrated that good public relations depended not alone on words, but on action deserving public support, and education of the public to acquaint it with such action (iv). Bernays transformed the idea of the good man skilled in speaking before a more or less homogenous audience into an entire department of people creating opportunities for the product to seem to speak for itself before a vastly diverse and geographically separated crowd. And whereas the rhetor of old stood before the people to advocate public policy, Bernays stood behind the scenes manipulating public policy to sell products. Bernays was an innovative rhetorician also in the sense that whereas the traditional rhetorician taught people how to exploit a rhetorical situation, Bernays taught people how to create rhetorical situations they could then exploit. He created a rhetoric of kairos, a set of techniques for influencing timing, which the classical tradition had never done, as far as I know. The classical tradition was clearly aware that kairos was critical to rhetorical success, but it said nothing about how to create the right time. In other words, whereas the classical tradition could advise you to plant crops right after it rains, Bernays could make it rain. But it would be a mistake to perceive the contemporary practices of niche marketing and product placement as a truly new rhetoric because they are based on the primary principles of ancient rhetoric. Bernays’ techniques relied on market research, on knowing what consumers wanted and knowing what their aspirations and fears were, which is audience analysis plain and simple, something one might get almost directly from the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Bernays’ techniques also relied on his being invisible to the people he was working on. Something else he might well have learned directly from Aristotle, who observed that when it comes to rhetorical acts, people do not like to see their hosts mixing the wine. Discovery of art leads to suspicion of the artist. Bernays also relied heavily on the idea of ethos, both corporate and personal, and was torn between the pursuit of wealth and power on the one hand and a sense that his skills were dangerous and ought to be curbed by ethics on the other. The last quarter of Crystallizing Public Opinion is called “Ethical Relations.” Like any decent person who discovers he or she has the gift of rhetoric, Bernays both crowed about his own achievements

What is the New Rhetoric?

21

and cringed at them as well. He promoted himself as someone who used his powers for good purposes only, never knowingly deceiving or harming the public, but one of his first triumphs was increasing sales of Lucky Strikes cigarettes by convincing American women that smoking cigarettes was classy rather than trashy. He lived long enough (1891–1995) himself to apologize for that, but he claimed no one knew at the time that smoking was unhealthy. It is said that the sophist Gorgias used to challenge his audience to give him a topic, any topic, and he would make up a speech on the spot. Bernays might have said, give me a product, any product, and I’ll make people think life unbearable without it. Thus I think it safe to say that while Bernays studiously ignored the rhetorical tradition, he lived and practiced it in a way that would have made Plato shake his head in anger and Gorgias shake his head in wonder. While Richards and to a lesser extent Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca tried to distance themselves from rhetorical tradition, and Bernays tried to ignore it, they did not in the process create something that could be called entirely new, nothing that wasn’t in some way prefigured, which to me suggests that the rhetorical tradition is more than a collection of texts one can choose to ignore or revile, but rather a set of solutions to recurrent social problems, both real and fictitious. So embedded in social interaction is traditional rhetorical practice that even people entirely innocent of its history, who inhabit what seem utterly different worlds, have sometimes reinvented classical techniques. It is hard to imagine two worlds more different than the Agora and the Internet. And yet many people live online these days. They buy things online; they meet people online; they hang out with friends and talk politics online. They have online identities and relationships that are native to the electronic environment and do not need to materialize. And yet despite their electronic foundation, these communities share some of the basic issues that traditional communities share—learning whom to trust and whom to shun being chief among them. So many of our face to face rhetorical decisions are made by visual cues, clothing, accent, eye-contact, the ease or discomfort with which a person appears to inhabit his or her social context as a function of body and physical space. These significant rhetorical cues are difficult to reproduce online—emoticons not withstanding. Adding to the potential for rhetorical conflict caused by misunderstanding is the fact that some people are emboldened by a sense of anonymity to abandon normal decorum. The two most common rhetorical breaches are trolling and flaming—saying provocative things in order to stir up trouble or launching uncalled-for personal attacks. Dealing with obstreperous people has led online community leaders to various forms of social control; one approach is to gate the community by making people identify themselves before they can participate. There are also panoptic approaches, where someone monitors what’s said and sanctions abuse. Derek

22

Chapter Two

Powazek, who wrote a book about designing online communities, came up with an interesting and very old-school solution. Powazek’s first impulse was to monitor all activity and personally banish the ne’er-do-wells, but there were too many people in the community for one cop to police. He thought about deputizing trusted citizens but he disliked the idea of a stratified society. Eventually he came up with the idea of a rating system. Whenever a community member encountered despicable behavior, he or she would write the offender’s name on a form. If a citizen accumulated five citations, he was automatically barred from participating in the community for a specified period of time: he was exiled, in other words. Powazeck doesn’t have a word for his innovation, but the Greeks did: ostracism. The fact that Powazek re-invented ostracism as if it were entirely novel rather than an online variation of an ancient rhetorical practice suggests to me that rhetorical practices can be best be described as solutions to manifest social relations rather than as culturally embedded artifacts. This might indicate that some kinds of rhetorical activity are atemporal and a-cultural, which would support that idea that there is nothing new or old in rhetoric but what we are capable of remembering and what we would like others to forget. It is worth remembering that Aristotle asserted in his Sophistical Refutations that no one had ever said anything about logical fallacies before he came along: the rhetoric of the new as practiced in academic discourse 2500 years ago. The subject of memory, which was one of the five canons of traditional rhetoric, has of late been thought one of the most obsolete. (See John Frederick Reynolds et al. , and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 6). But there have been some developments in text processing and distribution that suggest memory is ascendant again and that it is bringing some old mnemotechnic ideas back with it. As you may recall, the Rhetoric Ad Herennium offers a system for remembering large chunks of information by associating pieces of information with objects that are easily visualized. If you want to remember witnesses, visualize ram’s testicles; if you want to remember the characteristics of rhetoric, visualize a noblewoman with three sheep tethered by golden chains, that sort of thing. If static visual cues don’t help, you can use a well-worn path through a familiar place to help you reference the material for your speech. Think about how the elder Seneca could recall as an old man, apparently word for word, the speeches he heard as a young man. Francis Yates has shown how these kinds of visual systems were used to memorize the galaxy. These memory systems are simple in design. They use a key to reference some piece of information. Databases work the same way. And many contemporary web documents (anything marked up in RSS or XML) are essentially databases (Pullman), repositories of information that can be sorted, organized, and repurposed almost

What is the New Rhetoric?

23

at will. The only difference in the digital mnemotechnic system is that it can search millions of documents in seconds, which means that any of us can access several galaxies of information as if our heads were crammed full of scenes and backgrounds. The current buzzword for the visual representation of data is infovis, an abbreviation of information visualization. There are quite a few companies now dedicated to finding ways to represent information threedimensionally. Oddly enough, one common form of such a visualization looks like a galaxy, with a key term in the middle and related words spread out around the screen but connected to the center and to some of each other by lines. Relations among the terms are often indicated by color and proximity, suggesting constellations of meaning. These graphical depictions of data are being developed as an aid for dealing with the deluge of information the Internet makes possible. Each of us has at our disposal material for thousands of speeches, and thousands of documents to use as models. And yet the mnemotechnique that we use is virtually the same as those the orators and their direct descendents used. Theirs was faster—if I’m not mistaken the human brain when properly exercised is still a superior processor—but ours has sped up considerably now that we don’t always have to rely solely on books. It is also becoming more portable. A few years ago our collective memories were tethered to our office walls. But wireless devices and open access points are making it possible to jack in from anywhere. Although I’m too cheap to pay for the service, my cell phone can search the web. It can also read text. So I could have it prompt me for what to say next as I stand here. I could get it to fetch a statistic or a quotation to help me illustrate a point, or book a seat on an earlier flight if things go really badly. Wireless technology makes the Internet portable, providing instant access to ideas and information out of which speeches about nearly anything can be created on the fly. Give me a subject and I’ll give you a speech. Invention in the sense of coming up with or remembering things to say has been in some ways simplified by ready access to Internet search engines. It has been complicated at the same time, however, by the sheer volume of information available—and thus more and more people need ways to store, sort, and organize the content they acquire. Visualization helps, and so too do topics, not in Aristotle’s sense of patterns of thought, but in Cicero’s sense of commonplaces where one can find thoughts of a certain kind: the database again, or more specifically, the content management system (CMS). CMSs are web-based information systems that make it relatively easy for a person or group of people to store, track, and share information, creating in effect a highly elaborated concordance of summaries, quotations, bookmarks, and notes. One can record anything at all, provide key words for it, and thus develop over time a searchable collection of information that can be re-used and re-purposed when the occasion requires it. Keeping such collections of

24

Chapter Two

information is a time-honored practice. Since the Renaissance, writers and public speakers have kept commonplace books, notebooks with subject headings ranging from the sublime to the mundane, under which they kept quotations, observations, and musings to be drawn on at later dates. These repositories of distilled and filtered information were highly effective tools for helping a person generate ideas and adorn their compositions with apt quotations. Interestingly, the commonplace book became a genre, which publishers offered for sale to those people who wanted the information but lacked the desire or the resources to acquire it themselves. In his introduction to “Renaissance Commonplace books from the British Library” William Sherman observes that at the time “there was a growing market for printed books to guide the compilation of manuscript notes, and compilers of manuscript commonplace books were expected to cut and paste (sometimes literally) excerpts from printed texts.” The literate taste of the time ran to copia rather than originality, and command of what others had said, decorously displayed, was more important than original composition. The contemporary equivalent of the commonplace book may not as yet have reached the level of a genre, but there are repositories of information that serve the same function, sifting through the tons of information available, sorting, organizing, and rendering more accessible what anyone could find had they the patience and commitment to search for themselves. Some of these repositories have fee for use or subscription economic models and in that sense are very much like the commonplace books published hundreds of years ago. But it is easy enough to keep and publish your own commonplace book using a content management system that allows you to cut and paste quotations, or whole sites, into your own database to be retrieved later or even published for others to view, which makes the electronic commonplace book an interesting new form of old school rhetorical practice, one that encourages the traditional rhetorical practice of building what you have to say out of what others have already said—rather than pretending to make it all up yourself. If the electronic rhetorical practices are anti-romantic, they will return us to rhetorical activities much more like those practiced by the ancients than those practiced by our grandparents. When the contemporary equivalent of the commonplace book is sorted not by topic but by date, you get what’s known as a weblog, a website that consists of frequent observations about life online and off, increasingly with digital images captured on a cell phone. The weblog offers the writer a portico in cyberspace, a place to tell the world what it looks like from a particular vantage. You don’t need the sanction of a governing body or even the prestige of an association to publish a blog. Nor do you need any technical knowledge. Anyone, in other words, can publish anything they like. The phenomenon of weblogging has been around for just over eight years and already there are

What is the New Rhetoric?

25

millions of webloggers. There is very little organization to the practice. Some web services offer link sharing and blogs-most-recently-updated lists that create a kind of audience for the bloggers who use them, but for the most part bloggers are simply out there on their own, putting their views out and creating an audience by linking to other bloggers and commenting on the blogs they read. For the most part the practice is unpaid. Some webloggers beg for donations, and others make money selling t-shirts and hats. There are, however, a few who have started making names for themselves as journalists and critics. Some have even gone on to publish books. The fact that anyone can publish a blog—there’s a blog called “The Homeless Guy.” The author, Kevin Barbieux, sleeps in the streets and uses libraries and cafés to keep his blog. The weblog’s capacity to permit nearly anyone to reach virtually everyone has enable people to pursue a kind of sophistic existence, trading their electronic words and online ethos for reputation and wealth—not much wealth, I admit, but there are a few who make enough to quit their day jobs. Kevin Barbieux, I recently discovered, has blogged his way of the streets. The weblog is more, however, than a portico for virtual sophists or an entrée into the societies of letters. It is opening new political and economic opportunities for people who in the past would not have been able to overcome the barriers to entry, both financial and technical. In 1928 Bernays asserted that propaganda, “tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale that will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and action is likewise expensive” (Propaganda 63). This was true in 1928 and in 1998 as well, but the weblog has eliminated the overt barriers to entry when it comes to editorializing. Of course, the fact that a weblog looks like personal expression hasn’t gone unnoticed by corporations, and businesses of all sizes have started keeping blogs, some designed to enhance corporate ethos, some little more than corporate shills, and even the truly independent bloggers can garner advertising or trade a positive review for a copy of something. If there are odd echoes of ancient rhetoric in contemporary invention and memory, there are also some in arrangement as well. The organic and linear constructions that Plato champions in Phaedrus (246C) are highly literate, acontextual, and systematic. Pull out one piece and the whole thing stops making sense. Add something and you’ve got something new. With digital rhetoric, you have something much more like the Lysias speech. You can assemble chunks of information in data heaps, and then format and reformat them at will because the content is separate from the form. You can do this because it’s technically possible but also because people do not read information from a computer screen the way they were taught to read books. They don’t

26

Chapter Two

begin at the beginning and read to the end. They scan the screen looking for something to fix on; they jump around, tune in and out; they carry their own personal context with them, and often they don’t afford the information authority or agency. Texts and images and sounds are raw material out of which to build others texts and images and sounds. The objectification of words that inscription necessitated is being erased by endless repetition and rearrangement. The paternity of ideas that Plato sought is being questioned and the business model that copyright enforces, the one that’s leading the music industry to sue kids for downloading music, could be replaced by something much more sophistic, a rhetoric where personality is more important than paternity, where citizenship is global and ideas and words are freely exchanged not as commodities but as creative opportunities. I realize that I am both assuming an identity for sophistry that can’t be proven and accusing Plato of engendering a destructive rhetoric. Neither of which is entirely necessary for the point I’m trying to make, namely that the issues created when classical rhetoric was created, about how to restrict rhetorical power, have returned in the realm of digital rhetoric. Indeed, if you reread the last section of Phaedrus (274D – 275B) the myth of Theuth and the creation of writing, you will see a direct analogue to current concerns about writing and the Internet. If you were to ask the average teacher what he or she thinks of the Internet’s impact on student writing, pretty quickly you would hear, I’m guessing, something about plagiarism and cutting and pasting and never going to the library anymore and not bothering to read anything anymore. I hear these sorts of comments regularly and although I don’t usually do it, I’m tempted to remind my colleagues about the Renaissance practice of keeping commonplace books. Or Tacitus’ complaint 2000 years ago that the children of his day were too busy playing games to learn true eloquence. Under the heading of delivery there is also an interesting return to the sophistic model of discourses constructed out of disarticulated interchangeable parts. Inscription is a mortifying process. Once the text is inscribed, it is hard to reanimate it. Inscribe a stone and change your mind and you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. Publish a book and it’s out of date. But electronic communications, even multiple instances of the same information can be updated instantaneously, making electronic inscription as portable as writing but as dynamic as speech. Because form and content are separate, and because it is possible to know something of your reader based on information provided passively from their server or actively by way of feedback forms, it is possible to deliver the same information in different ways to different readers. You can also have the information change without disturbing the presentation—updated stock quotes, a weather forecast. Also, because the information is contained within a database,

What is the New Rhetoric?

27

it can be filtered for individual reader’s needs. To be able to modify both the content and its disposition on the fly is something we’ve done without since the advent of inscription. I’m not saying we have a return to orality here; there’s more to it than that. We can communicate with people in different parts of the world simultaneously and asynchronously. So the restrictions of traditional orality, dependence on recall, connection to the immediate audience, physical limitations—none of those things necessarily or materially influence online delivery. At the same time, we are less hampered by the limitations of inscriptive rhetorics also because we can separate the content from the way it’s delivered. We can permit the viewer to carry his or her own context and still communicate effectively. We don’t have to ensure the organic model of arrangement Plato insisted on (Phaedrus 264C) because viewers tune in and out, read with the idea of re-using what was written or with the idea of communicating back to the writer in the form of asynchronous dialogue. My point ultimately is that for years we have assumed that rhetoric changes as the times do. I’m not so sure that that is entirely accurate. If you know the tradition well, you can readily see contemporary applications of classical techniques. Moreover, you don’t have to know the tradition at all to replicate at least some of those techniques. We might argue that if that tradition is inescapable, it is because it is so engrained in our educational systems. But I think the rhetorical tradition is inescapable because rhetorical practice is atemporal and not culturally specific. There is nothing new or old as far as rhetoric goes.

Works Cited Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica Ad Herennium). The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. Aristotle, E. S. Forster, and David J. Furley. On Sophistical Refutations [and] on Coming-to-Be and Passing Away. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955. Bernays, Edward L. Crystallizing Public Opinion. [New ed. New York: Liveright Pub. Corp., 1961. Bernays, Edward L., and Howard Walden Cutler. The Engineering of Consent. 1st ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. Bernays, Edward L., and Mark Crispin Miller. Propaganda. Brooklyn, New York: Ig Publishing, 2005. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition : Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Connors, Robert J., et al. Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

28

Chapter Two

Fogarty, Daniel John. Roots for a New Rhetoric. New York,: Russell & Russell, 1968. Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. 3rd ed. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2002. Johnston, Mark D. Ramon Llull's New Rhetoric : Text and Translation of Llull's Rethorica Nova by Ramon Llull. Davis, California: Hermagoras Press, 1994. Lipson, Carol, and Michael Day. Technical Communication and the World Wide Web. Mahwah, NewJersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Plato, Alexander Nehamas, and Paul Woodruff. Phaedrus. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. Powazek, Derek M. Design for Community : The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Riders, 2002. Reynolds, John Frederick. Rhetorical Memory and Deliver : Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Hillsdale, New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1993. Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York, London: Oxford University Press, 936. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and Michael Winterbottom. The Elder Seneca Declamations. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusett: Harvard University Press, 974. Sherman, William H. Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library, London: A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection. Marlborough, Wiltshire: Adam Matthew, 2003. Tacitus, Cornelius, et al. Agricola, Germany, and Dialogue on Orators. Rev. ed. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 2006. Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin : Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations. 1st ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998. Yates, Frances Amelia. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966.

CHAPTER THREE WHAT’S NEW AND HOW NEW IS IT? CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC, THE ENLIGHTENMENT, HYPERTEXT, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS BRUCE GARDINER

As a student of literature and language generally rather than rhetoric and composition specifically, I hazard these observations with the liberty and diffidence of an onlooker, in the hope that those wiser than I will part me from whatever ignorance I cherish. In the admittedly casual course of my reading, especially of accounts of hypertext, I came to be puzzled by several common assumptions, assertions, and omissions. They all address the question of what might warrant a new rhetoric – a new audience, new communicative machinery, or a new theory of mind. Have the social composition and intellectual constitution of the audience and the machinery of its public speech and writing changed enough, especially in the last fifty years (my lifetime), to render Aristotle’s conspectus of rhetoric and Quintilian’s curriculum for it seriously obsolete, incomplete, or incorrect? Much but not all of what I have read claims that they have done so. Analytical philosophers such as Toulmin and Perelman certainly see their rhetorics as reviving a neo-Aristotelian commonsense that logical positivism forsook. For them the relation between rhetoric old and new is akin to the continuous derivation of all modern geometry from Euclid’s. But proponents of postmodernity such as Lanham and Bender and Wellbery tend to see current rhetoric as an unprecedented departure from Enlightenment decorum. For them the relation between old and new is akin to the break between alchemy and chemistry. But a scientific analogy is less apt than an aesthetic one – such as the difference between naturalism and surrealism – because Lanham and Bender and Wellbery sketch an anti-scientific history in which a kind of verbal chemistry has been superseded by a kind of verbal alchemy. Because

30

Chapter Three

Enlightenment speech and writing also responded to new audiences with new notions of mind and new communicative machinery, I think Lanham’s and Bender and Wellbery’s anti-Enlightenment prejudice unwarranted.

I Although impressed by the intellectual verve and pedagogical care of so much writing about contemporary students and audiences, I suspect they are not so new, albeit newly multitudinous. The beginnings of a socially and culturally diverse audience dominated the very age that Lanham, Bender and Wellbery, and others disdain, the Enlightenment. Literate middle-class women became a numerous and crucial audience. Literate working-class men and women, though neither numerous nor crucial, began to enter public debate. Orators from other cultures, especially in the Americas, first entered European debate on their own terms. A mixed, democratic, multicultural audience first emerged as a real possibility in the Enlightenment, as feminism, mercantilism, and colonialism enlarged the rhetorical franchise. Suggesting that the learned and the vernacular world court each other in essays and conversations designed specifically for the educated woman who epitomised their union, Hume noted that les précieuses and their successors were the sovereigns of reasonable debate in France (Hume 4-7). Mme de Scudéry’s rhetorical practice and advice influenced the Bluestockings. Although Hannah More modestly forbore to “weight [sic] the merits of every new production in the scales of Quintilian, or to regulate the unities of dramatic composition by Aristotle’s clock” (Donawerth 116), she insisted that intellectual passion and distinction consciously inform a woman’s every word. For Hume, Franklin, and Jefferson, such women were the guarantors of free and fruitful speech. Priestley’s and Cobbett’s grammars – the latter addressed to “soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and ploughboys” – sought to endow labourers with a rhetorical and political power even yet not fully realised. But Enlightenment radicals, as early as the Levellers conducting the Putney Debates, began this revolution in political language. The French and Indian Wars occasioned the first practical acknowledgment by an English-speaking people of the rhetorical and political autonomy of a nonEuropean people, the Iroquois. As long as the outcome of the war for what is now New York State remained in doubt, the Iroquois had to be treated with on their own terms, and their rhetorical decorum accepted and assimilated. The Iroquois orators impressed all the British American diplomats who dealt with them. Cadwallader Colden marvelled that

What is the New Rhetoric?

31

The People of the Five Nations are much given to Speech-making, ever the natural Consequence of a perfect Republican Government: Where no single Person has a Power to compel, the Arts of Persuasion alone must prevail. … They have, it seems, a certain Urbanitas, or Atticism, in their language, of which the common Ears are ever sensible, though only their great Speakers attain to it. (vol.1, xxxiv-xxxv)

William Smith is more explicit about the same sense of déjà vu, noting that: The Fierceness of their Countenances, and flowing Blanket, elevated Tone, naked Arm and erect Stature, with a half Circle of Auditors seated on the Ground, and in the open Air, cannot but impress upon the mind, a lively Idea of the ancient Orators of Greece and Rome. (40)

Sir William Johnson’s papers reveal how thoroughly he had to fit his speech to the decorum of the Iroquois’ constitutional Ritual of Condolence (O’Callaghan, Documentary History, vol.2, 632-7; Documents, vol.7, 131). In such practical ways, the exigencies of colonial adventure throughout the Americas generated an understanding of cultural difference that entailed, among many other elements, an anthropology of rhetorics that began as early as Sahagún. The Iroquois were shocked during the 1744 Lancaster Treaty proceedings by “that Pen-and-Ink Work that is going on at the Table (pointing to the Secretary)” (Colden, vol.2, 141) because they could not read. Not that writing was beyond the “rhetorical fray” (Bender and Wellbery 9), but the Iroquois, whose rhetoric was solely spoken, could not follow the interplay between speech and writing that British American rhetoric necessarily entailed. I belabour these details because they give the lie to Lanham’s and Bender and Wellbery’s gross misprision of the period. Bender and Wellbery contend that in the Enlightenment rhetoric “drowned in a sea of ink” (15) and Lanham likewise contends that “the Newtonian interlude banished rhetoric” (105). Lanham and Bender and Wellbery overlook the inherently rhetorical bias of the English empirical tradition. Explaining that “arhetorical tendencies” are “emblematic of the Enlightenment as a whole” (13), Bender and Wellbery cite Locke: Not only does the founder of modern empiricism unleash, in the fourth book (“On Words”) of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, one of the most virulent antirhetorical tirades on record, he also presents there a “semiotics,” or theory of language as sign, that is designed to eliminate the deceptions of rhetoric and to guarantee the transparency of discourse. Locke’s was not the first but certainly one of the most influential of a long series of attempts to free language and thought from the confoundments of rhetoric. In Germany, the Enlightenment ideal of linguistic transparency, of a purely representational medium, emerged in

32

Chapter Three Leibniz’s project of an ars characteristica, a philosophical calculus that would leave the deflections of human language behind in order to reproduce the language of things themselves. This dream, which in a variety of forms obsessed the entire eighteenth century, perhaps most fully exemplifies the removal of discourse from what we referred to above as the rhetorical fray. For, as Leibniz and later Herder well understood, such a perfected sign system would coincide exactly with the absolutely nonpositional mind of God. (13-4)

Serving as Lanham’s shorthand for the same claim is “Sprat’s famous injunction … that we should have one word for one thing” (229). Bender and Wellbery misunderstand Locke (whose fourth book does indeed propose a semiotics, but whose third book, not his fourth, is devoted to language). Locke’s denunciation of “rhetoric” (bk.3, ch.10) is specifically of the kind found in the scholastic and humanistic traditions of philosophy that Bacon also deplored, in The Advancement of Learning (bk.1, pt.4, paras 2-7). For Locke, language entails the arbitrary representation of arbitrary ideas communicated accurately only with difficulty. His theory of language is heroic. An arbitrary mental medium must strive to communicate an accurate empirical truth for which it appears constitutionally unfitted. All dreams of transparency must fail because of an irreducible haziness in the medium itself. Leibniz’s philosophy of language is bluntly opposed to Locke’s. And the inherently rhetorical theory of the origin of language that Condillac draws from Locke is completely contradicted by the inherently non-rhetorical theory that Herder proposes. Lanham and Bender and Wellbery, misinterpreting Foucault and Kuhn’s historiography, write in terms of epochal unanimity, deaf to the fundamental disagreement that animates Enlightenment debate. Conversely they insist on the fundamental discontinuity between epochs, alleging that our adoption of classical and Enlightenment terminology is fundamentally anachronistic (25, 38), the form of a word remaining as it was, yet its new significance owing nothing to its old. This notion of language as merely the desiccated chrysalis or atomised rubble of thought is at odds with the Nietzschean theory of language they endorse elsewhere, and has puzzled other readers such as Dyck (100-1). Differences between generations and their resolution proceed much as they have proceeded. Specifically, teachers, prepared to teach certain students in certain ways, find that those students are not as receptive as others they had not imagined teaching, and that those ways are not as helpful as others they have yet to discover.

II. Recent attention paid to the audience as such is far outweighed by that paid to the technological revolution in the machinery of writing. Lanham is not alone in

What is the New Rhetoric?

33

asserting that “the greatest change … has been the coming of the electronic word” (73). His claim and others like it are Millenarian. This general change is routinely analysed into a set of specific changes. Text recorded mechanically on paper is linear and material whereas text recorded electronically on screen is non-linear and immaterial and thus an ampler and more accurate reflection of language recorded in the mind itself (Lanham 214, endorsing Bolter). Argument recorded on paper or uttered in speech is fixed in a unique order controlled by the arguer whereas argument recorded electronically on screen is not fixed and is controlled by the screen reader and navigator (Lanham 78, 125). But argument recorded on screen is also more akin to argument uttered in speech than is argument recorded on paper because of the former’s superior mimesis of presence (Lanham 34, Bender and Wellbery 15). Most contributors to Snyder’s Page to Screen also subscribe to this set of beliefs. But I cannot see that the electronic word is accurately distinguished from the printed word or from speech in any of these ways. Every external vehicle of language is material: the sound waves in air that I hear as speech, the type printed on paper that I see as writing, the manual gestures that I see as signing, and the Braille embossed on paper that my touch discerns as writing. Type on a phosphorescent or iridescent screen that is ultimately recorded in binary digits on an electromagnetic chip or tape is no less grossly material than these other external representations of language. Each of them has a characteristic fragility or volatility that is inherent in their materiality. But even Derrida equivocates about this matter (Paper Machine 30, 56). The immateriality of the electronic word is supposed to ally it to the immateriality of the spoken word or the immateriality of the mental word. Though the precise material constitution of the mental word remains unknown, we must suppose it has one, if not more than one. The spoken word has in fact recently undergone a much more thoroughgoing change than the written word. The microphone, telephone, gramophone, audiotape, radio, film and television soundtrack, and voice synthesiser, now so variously combined, have surely altered our use and understanding of speech much more than the electronic textual media have yet altered our use and understanding of writing. Each machine transforms the material economy of our language but none of them necessarily alters the structure of our mental experience of language as such. Derrida is eloquent about this distinction (Paper Machine 9, 26) and about the complexity of the mind’s dealings with language that necessarily anticipate and surpass any mechanical prosthesis that we might press into service to facilitate them (Paper Machine 45, 189). I remain unconvinced not only by arguments for the immateriality of the electronic or the spoken word but also by arguments about the linearity and

34

Chapter Three

fixity of text printed on paper or of speech. Here is a recent version of the standard argument echoing Lanham and Snyder: The speech writer and paper writer are responsible for arranging their points to achieve the best effect, and that order can reasonably be expected to be adhered to. But the writer’s job of carefully arranging arguments shifts radically in a hypertext setting. For with the exception of the initial conditions (that is, the recommended starting point and the recommended path(s) through the argument), the author has no idea of how the reader will arrange the text. In other words, virtually the entire job of arrangement (dispositio, in classical rhetoric) now lies with the reader, not with the writer. The writer is now somewhat like the person who sets up the pieces in the proper order, then sits back and watches the chess players move pieces around until there is a draw or a victory. (Carter 7)

The antithesis is between a single path trodden in lock step and a combinatorial multiplicity of paths that crisscross or not at will. Perelman develops the same antithesis without reference to hypertext when he attacks Descartes (122). I shall acquiesce in Carter’s description of hypertext, but dispute his description of speech and print, which a listener and reader can follow only if responding in the way that Carter deems unique to hypertext. To understand the order of a printed argument, a reader must measure, in the very act of reading it, its difference from other possible orders, for without this sense of difference the argument’s peculiarity cannot be apprehended let alone evaluated. So the mental experience of reading a printed argument necessarily entails a sense of what it is not but may have been, no less like a chess game than Carter supposes the reading of hypertext. This mental experience is an element of the first reading as much as any re-reading. Because any such intertextuality alone renders the text readable, the author of a printed text can be no more prescient of the reader’s actual mental pathway through it than can the author of a hypertext. Indeed, the same claims must be made about the comprehensibility of speech. Language, in whatever material form, makes sense only because every element in it can be used otherwise and elsewhere. Derrida develops this idea into a doctrine of citation (Limited Inc). The possibility of recontextualising any element of a text or a speech underlies all linguistic comprehension, which derives from the mind’s compulsive play with different elements in different orders to different effect. I conclude that however accurately readers of hypertext usually construe the activity of reading it they quite incorrectly suppose that such activity is peculiar to it. When he plays with others’ printed statements about hypertext’s proclivity to decontextualise elements of an argument and printed text’s selfcontextualising coherence, Carter does not reflect that he decontextualises such printed statements in order to make a point that is falsified by his way of making it (19-20). The threat, or rather hope, of loss of context animates all language,

What is the New Rhetoric?

35

which the mind must ceaselessly cut into, cut out, and “cut off” (Derrida, Paper Machine 28) in order to shape it, whether rhetorically or hermeneutically. The consensus that printed text is more constrained than hypertext because the former tethers its reader to a single authoritative pathway whereas the latter unleashes the reader cannot be correct. Yellowlees Douglas laments that “the conventions governing the printed word make linear, singular, objectivist representations into arguments that we readers recognise as convincing” and that writers such as Locke, Kant, and Dewey must be read and interpreted according to this “relentless linearity” (Snyder 150, 153). Lanham concludes that the “Aristotelian categories of beginning, middle, and end … are based on fixed texts” (125) and that readers of hypertext not only can but must create for themselves whatever sequence and fixity they “want” (129). But printed texts are constrained by no such leash: readers such as Yellowlees Douglas and Lanham leash themselves. For instance, I began my own first reading of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding with book 3, because I was most interested in what he writes about words. I started with chapter 1, but could have started anywhere, for example chapter 6, the most extraordinary. I then read chapters from the other three books as I was minded to, following thematic threads as I picked them up and lost them, so that the sequence and evolving coherence of my reading of the Essay was in no obvious way in step with Locke’s own. But what is the actual order of Locke’s writing – its order of exposition, or composition, or logical deduction, or the order in which his ideas germinated, or the order in which he imagines his reader will rank each of them as more or less memorable and original? Every printed text, however single-minded and one-tracked, is intrinsically a network of many orders and cannot be read without a comprehensive grasp of their incessantly question-begging interweaving. I need not even have picked up Locke’s Essay at such a salient point, but could have started anywhere at all, and pursued my sortes Lockeanae just as I chose. Some printed texts concede this liberty by way of tables of contents, indexes, and introductions and conclusions that foreground certain elements. But all printed texts invite such readerly play at every syntactic hinge, every punctuation mark, and every semantic resonance whether intratextual or intertextual. This is true not only of arguments but also of stories, such as James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which figures in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You as a printed text that “doesn’t involve genuine interactivity” (187). I can jump into the story at any point and work outward from it in any way. I could begin with Isobel Archer’s shocked question to Madame Merle –“What have you to do with me?” – in chapter 49, and follow leads from it and to it until I understood who the two ladies are and why one has so unnerved the other. Perhaps this may echo the order in which the idea of the story germinated in

36

Chapter Three

James’s mind, perhaps not. Neither Johnson, nor Postman (on whom he depends), could even begin to read James if their theories of reading were accurate. Only because we need not begin at the beginning, read without a break, and finish at the end of a text, can we piece together fragments such as the tablets on which the epic of Gilgamesh survives, or unscramble scrambled texts such as the unbound fascicles of Kant’s Opus Postumum. All texts, by virtue of being texts, acknowledge that they are liable to be disassembled and reassembled mentally or materially. As many thematise this eventuality as take it for granted. Olson’s second Maximus book and Creeley’s A Day Book are among the former, having eliminated all page numbers and almost all sequential headings. If bound copies of other printed texts had not survived, especially novels with many subplots and arguments with many complications, it would be virtually impossible to rebind them with any certainty, such is the casual nature of much binding by writer or printer. Debate about hypertext often assumes that the allegedly unbreakable continuity of fiction or argument epitomises that of all printed texts. But it does not. Burbules characterises the World Wide Web as a: juxtaposition of apparently unrelated points of information and the reduction of all to the same superficial level of significance: a bricolage of elements, mixing the momentous with the trivial, the local and the global, the contemporary and the historic; inviting multiple – and frequently untestable – interpretations of significance that can be as personal and idiosyncratic as you like. (Snyder 114)

We can and do say exactly the same of a printed newspaper. Indeed, newspapers read as de Certeau proposes have always dominated our daily experience of the world of print much more than novels read as Poulet proposes. And anyone who reads a printed Bible critically or devoutly will and must routinely accomplish far more complicated feats of interlinking than any hypertext I can think of. Marginal cross-references, chapter headings, running heads, lectionaries, chronologies, maps, gospel harmonies, keyword concordances, and lists of miracles, parables, and prophecies – all often printed in study Bibles – attest to the traditional complexities of reading this printed book. Although hypertext evangelists often concede that avant-garde literary texts are prescient of hypertext, they overlook the oldest and most important printed book that is so. Moreover, the concession that any printed text demands the kind of reading that hypertext always demands must undermine the truth of such differentiation, the comprehensiveness of which is nevertheless everywhere proclaimed. Yancey, for instance, insists it is “a difference of kind, not degree” (317, despite Wysocki and Jasken 45). Snyder denies that we can “argue convincingly that books on disk, encountered on a screen, are not much different to printed books,

What is the New Rhetoric?

37

because the words do not change” (xxxiii). Yet that is precisely what I am arguing. Moreover, speech itself accommodates, even demands, the kind of response that hypertext alone is supposed to demand. I may not arrive on time to listen to a lecture or a broadcast from its beginning, so I begin to listen whenever I can, following the speech for any explicit recapitulation that it may offer and implicit inferences that it cannot avoid making about the part I missed. I then listen to hearsay accounts of the part I missed from other members of the audience and, if I can, from the speaker him or herself. In the same way, if my mind wanders or I fall asleep mid-sentence, once attentive again I can find my own way back into the speech. I can scrabble and assemble the elements of the speech in innumerable ways, engaged in the very pasting together and pulling apart that Socrates claims speech cannot be subjected to (Phaedrus 278e), which is also precisely the cutting and pasting that digital textual media facilitate. Merely by speaking to me, a speaker acknowledges that the speech he or she entrusts to me is interruptible, quotable, and thus interpretable. To respect the order in which a speaker or writer strings his or her words together in a speech or text is to make a judgment about a figure that personifies the coherence of that speech or text – possibly in relation to others like it produced by him or her. To come to this judgment we have already restrung his or her words differently. We have mentally mapped a hypertext-like web of interrelations to elicit the coherence of the speech or the text, whether we personify that coherence or not. We have “vexed” the text in a way that Lanham supposes only hypertext can efficiently vex it (20). We could not do visibly and mechanically what we do with a printed text unless we could do exactly the same mentally with a speech. Likewise, we could not do visibly and mechanically what we do with a hypertext unless we could do exactly the same mentally with a printed text. Each kind of text simply externalises certain mental operations, freeing the mind from the burden of having to perform and record them unaided. Writing excels in tabulating material that does not lend itself to mental or auditory mnemonics, freeing the mind from the burden of memory described by Carruthers and Yates. Hypertext excels in shuffling and sorting such material in a kind of tabular calculus. Derrida warns against reducing hypertext to a realisation of the potential of printed text (Paper Machine 47). I argue that hypertext externalises some of the mind’s play with language that printed text and speech could not. Its tabular calculus is materially distinct from printed text’s tabulation as such. But the mind continues to do what it has always done with language, albeit with a novel economy, facility, and visibility. Thus, Lee discovers in his investigation of timed essay writing that handwriting is punctuated by pauses in which writers mentally revise their words and ideas before writing them down on paper,

38

Chapter Three

whereas writers at word-processors draft their ideas on screen without delay and then revise them as they review them. Different machines prompt different economies. It is remarkable how frequently hypertext theorists praise it for precisely the features that Plato deplored in writing as he knew it, and damn printed text for precisely those features that Plato cherished in speech. Yellowlees Douglas even cites Phaedrus approvingly (Snyder 149) just before making the comment I quoted earlier, even though the citation and the comment flatly contradict each other. The speaker of a speech or the writer of a printed text admittedly strings together the elements of a story or argument in a particular order, but so does the composer of an electronic text string its elements into an invariant web of various elements. And the complexity of any line that a speaker or writer-printer has decided to follow is the same complexity that a web-writer has decided to schematise. Hypertext helps to unravel with new and fairly rudimentary machinery what the listener’s mind unravels only mentally and what the bookreader’s mind unravels with even more rudimentary but nevertheless immensely helpful machinery of linguistic, paralinguistic, and bibliographical hooks. Hypertext unfolds some of the complications of printed text, just as writing long ago unfolded some of the complications of speech, the linear integrity of which has always been like that of a densely woven thread. When Lanham describes a “movement into nonlinear hypertextual space where the classic oration cannot follow” (78), his metaphors of space and time mislead. He confuses the line of words with the arrow of time, whereas innumerable and simultaneous memories and anticipations free the former from the latter. And he misconceives the line of words as lacking anything like thickness, whereas its one dimension is more accurately pictured as a dense tangle of many dimensions folded up economically into one. The fundamental confusions of hypertext theory seem to be two. First, it seldom distinguishes carefully between four different processes: signification itself (language), its representation (visible writing), the mechanisation of such representation (printed or electronic text), and the socialisation of such mechanised representation (rhetorical and hermeneutic decorum and the institutions which mandate it). A change in the processes of socialisation or mechanisation does not necessarily imply a change in the processes of representation or signification. Second, hypertext theory often takes an eccentric kind of printed text – the naturalistic novel or the deductive argument – as the epitome of all printed texts. A quest romance or a newspaper might be less eccentric, but generalisations based on them must likewise remain doubtful. The set of all printed texts and the set of all hypertexts are both miscellanies, and

What is the New Rhetoric?

39

neither can be represented accurately by one or two uniform subsets. When Lanham protests that “Print invites us to forget all these tricks” (73), he misinterprets a local institutional mandate concerning the decorous use of certain kinds of textbooks as a constitutive element of all printed texts. Why such confusions are rife – or what the subtext of hypertext theory might be – is not entirely clear. The proclivities and capabilities of new writers, readers, and students may be confused with the capabilities of the new machines that appeared along with them. And Ong’s radical distinction between speech and writing seems still to persuade more readers than Derrida’s deconstruction of it (Ong 165-70).

III. Recent discussions about rhetoric and hypertext abound, but those about rhetoric and theories of mind do not, at least not as such, given that much of the debate about textual machinery begs questions about the mental machinery that it reflects or reorganises. I am reminded of Feyerabend’s analysis of Galileo’s perturbation of astronomy. Feyerabend wonders why so much controversy about the telescope was attended by so little controversy about the eye, the physiology of sight itself (ch.9). As our current notions of the irrational and unconscious elements of human cognition and motivation are so different from those of the Enlightenment, I would have expected more commentary than I found on Freud and Darwin. Admittedly, neither Freudian nor Darwinian principles that describe our constitutional recklessness can be translated easily into rhetorical principles that prescribe this or that kind of linguistic thoughtfulness. Billig invokes Freud to argue that: If conscious thought is shaped by rhetoric, then so might the dynamics of dialogue provide the resources for repression.… As we talk about one topic—or think about a particular topic—so we are not talking or thinking about others. It could be that the directing of dialogic attention onto one set of topics, [sic] becomes a way of avoiding others [,] and that there are conventional rhetorical devices for achieving this outcome. If so, rhetoric enables us, not only to open topics of conversation, but also close them down. Moreover, the necessary rhetorical devices can be internalised so that we might use them in our internal, silent conversations, employing rhetoric to censor the drift of our own internal dialogues. (206)

But the verbal field that renders meaningful the syntactic and semantic choices entailed in such talk remains speakable even though unspoken, more or less suppressed but not repressed. Billig’s thinking does not stray beyond the realm

40

Chapter Three

of the Freudian preconscious. For Freud, the unconscious is quite “incapable of reaching consciousness” in the first place (406). We cannot manipulate it; it manipulates us. Likewise, Brand invokes Darwin to explain that “In composition studies choice is often called Style; in evolutionary theory choice is called Natural Selection” (294). But this likens something that one chooses to something that befalls without any choice. Brand adduces Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection as the mechanism driving the evolution of such stylistic idiosyncrasy (295ff), but her claim nevertheless confuses the deliberated with the inevitable. Burke’s “Definition of Man” eloquently acknowledges Freud’s influence. In section 6 Burke refers explicitly to Freud’s thesis of repetition compulsion and throughout the text Burke’s own compulsive repetition of the words “sheer” and “sheerly” evokes the terrible power of the involuntary elements of human experience. Burke’s fascination with “sheerly biological motions,” “a sheerly physical dimension,” “sheerly empirical development,” “sheer symbolicity,” “the sheer linguistic trick,” “sheer animality,” and so on, attests to the neverending threat of being absorbed by one’s immediate needs, impulses, and circumstances. Our capacities to abstract, negate, define, systematise, dramatise, joke, reflect, and view matters ironically all counter this threat through a laborious and circumspect rhetoric that tries to break the spell of such fascination. But if Burke’s rhetoric is spell breaking then Perelman’s must be spell binding. Although Burke’s debt to Freud is obvious enough to prompt analyses such as Pettegrew’s and Quandahl’s, it strikes me that Perelman’s debt may be deeper albeit disavowed. Whereas Burke transforms Freud’s psychological theories into logical theories, most notably his theory of the logical unconscious (Quandahl 647), Perelman psychologises logic. His theory of adhesion to a thesis by means of its impressive presence in the mind’s eye sounds as uncannily Freudian as it is flagrantly anti-Platonic. Adhesion involves overcoming initial resistance, yielding, then sticking to a thesis that has somehow been transformed from someone else’s into one’s own. The vehicle of this transference is the establishment of the thesis in the mind by its impressive power to mesmerise, which depends solely on the rhetorical skill of its proponent. Both Karon and Long analyse the process carefully. Goodwin prefers to liken adhesion to glue, but she also mentions magnetism (216), which seems a better comparison because it involves not only the surface but also the substance of something that can be magnetised or demagnetised. The transference of thought by a sympathetic magnetism generated by verbal magic is precisely what Plato deplores in Ion and The Republic as a mimetic pretence to real knowledge, which is dialectical. It is also precisely what Freud deplored in hypnosis yet could not avoid in the mechanism of transference, an “hypnosis

What is the New Rhetoric?

41

without a hypnotist,” as Borch-Jacobsen explains in his acute critique of Freud (Bender and Wellbery 136). Perelman occasionally cites Freud (as on 15) but does not and perhaps cannot acknowledge how deeply his own very reasonable rhetoric depends upon the kind of irrational appeal that Freud spent his lifetime puzzling over. If Freud specifically and psychoanalysis generally have prompted discussions in the field of rhetoric and composition much like those in other fields of the humanities, then Darwin specifically and evolutionary biology generally have not. A search through many databases – MLAIB, ABELL, LLBA, CCC Bibliography, ERIC, PsycInfo, Philosopher’s Index, and Web of Science – for rhetoric and composition studies that explicitly address Darwin, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, or cognitive science yields only a modest number of them. I can do little more than echo Jones’ plea twenty-nine years ago that: What is still needed … is that ideal scholar … who can fully correlate [a conceptual] theory of rhetoric to evidence of the nature of thought processes from at least biology, cognitive psychology, psychoneurology, and psycholinguistics. (333)

It would be especially useful to know what the rhetorical ramifications of the biological theories of logic developed by Piaget and Cooper might be. Both Jones and Boniolo look to Piaget for guidance. Cooper’s thesis that strategy mixing, coin flipping, and “mental muddiness” are all perfectly reasonable because they work to our evolutionary advantage (153, 157) seems most suggestive. In the light of his derivation of logic from population biology, we might wonder whether several kinds of argument traditionally regarded as logically flawed might not be so flawed after all. I am thinking of those sociable errors of argumentation that entail our arguing in a certain way because others have argued thus – ad hominem arguments as signs of distrust or contest; ad verecundiam arguments as signs of trust or acquiescence. And I am also thinking of the delusions of prejudice, commonsense, and custom generally that Gadamer seeks so strenuously to rescue from the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice” in Truth and Method (270). Having insisted so strongly to begin with that we are still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment, it seems apt to end by insisting just as strongly that Darwin above all separates us from it. Whereas so many presume that social and technological matters separate us from the Enlightenment, I am convinced that they keep us tied to it. It is our theories of mind that cut us adrift.

42

Chapter Three

Works Cited Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. Trans. H. C. Lawson-Tancred. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. —. On Sophistical Refutations. Trans. E. S. Forster. In Aristotle [Volume] III. 1955. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. —. Topics. Trans. E. S. Forster. In Aristotle [Volume] II. 1960. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004. Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. 1605. Ed. G. W. Kitchin. 1861. Introd. Jerry Weinberger. Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2001. Bender, John, and David Wellbery, eds. The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990. —. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” In Bender and Wellbery, eds. The Ends of Rhetoric. 3-39, 209-13. Billig, Michael. “Rhetoric and the Unconscious.” Argumentation 12 (1998): 199-216. Bolter, Jay. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 1991. 2nd edn. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001. [Bolter revises, on 191, the passage that Lanham cites.] Boniolo, Giovanni. Review of William Cooper, The Evolution of Reason. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (2002): 335-7. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Analytic Speech: From Restricted to General Rhetoric.” In Bender and Wellbery, eds. The Ends of Rhetoric. 127-39, 2268. Brand, Alice. “Values: Understanding Writing through Brain Biology.” Rhetoric Review 16.2 (Spring 1998): 290-309. Burbules, Nicholas. “Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy.” In Snyder, ed. Page to Screen. 102-22. Burke, Kenneth. “Definition of Man.” In Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966. 3-24. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990. Carter, Locke. “Argument in Hypertext: Writing Strategies and the Problem of Order in a Nonsequential World.” Computers and Composition 20 (2003): 322. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1974. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984. Cobbett, William. A Grammar of the English Language … for the use of soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and ploughboys. 1818. Ed. Charles Nickerson and John Osbourne. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983.

What is the New Rhetoric?

43

Colden, Cadwallader. The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada. 1727. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1904. Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. 1746. Trans. Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. Cooper, William. The Evolution of Reason: Logic as a Branch of Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001. Creeley, Robert. A Day Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber, Alan Bass, and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988. —. Paper Machine. 2001. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005. Donawerth, Jane, ed. Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Dyck, E. F. “On the Return of (the Repressed) Rhetoric.” Mosaic 34.1 (March 2001): 93-105. Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. 3rd edn. London: Verso, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1899. Trans. Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 1960. Rev. 1986. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. 1989. New York: Continuum, 2003. Goodwin, Jean. “Perelman, Adhering, and Conviction.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23.3 (1995): 215-33. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Treatise on the Origin of Language. 1772. In Philosophical Writings. Trans. Michael Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Hume, David. “Of Essay-Writing.” In Essays, Moral and Political. Volume 2. Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1742. 1-8. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Robert Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1995. Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good for You. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Jones, David. “Evidence for a Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 28.4 (December 1977): 333-7. Kant, Immanuel. Opus Postumum. Trans. Eckart Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. Karon, Louise. “Presence in The New Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9.2 (1976): 96-111. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993. Lee, Young-Ju. “A Comparison of Composing Processes and Written Products in Timed-Essay Tests across Paper-and-Pencil and Computer Modes.” Assessing Writing 8 (2002): 135-57.

44

Chapter Three

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. New Essays on Human Understanding. Written 1704-1705. Trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Rev. 1694. Ed. Peter Nidditch. 1975. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Long, Richard. “The Role of Audience in Chaïm Perelman’s New Rhetoric.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 4 (1983): 107-17. O’Callaghan, E. B., ed. The Documentary History of the State of New York. Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1849. —., ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Procured in Holland, England and France. Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1856. Olson, Charles. Maximus Poems IV, V, VI. [The Maximus Poems: Volume Two.] London: Cape Goliard, 1968. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Perelman, Chaïm. The Realm of Rhetoric. 1977. Trans. William Kluback. 1982. Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pettegrew, Loyd. “Psychoanalytic Theory: A Neglected Rhetorical Dimension.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 10.1 (Winter 1977): 46-59. Piaget, Jean. The Essential Piaget. Ed. Howard Gruber and J. Jacques Vonèche. 1977. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. 1963. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985. Poulet, Georges. “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority.” In Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984. 56-88. Priestley, Joseph. The Rudiments of English Grammar. 1761. New York: Garland, 1971. Quandahl, Ellen. “ ‘More than Lessons in How to Read’: Burke, Freud, and the Resources of Symbolic Transformation.” College English 63.5 (May 2001): 633-54. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. 1920-1922. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996-1998. Sahagún, Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain. Trans. Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble. Santa Fe NM: School of American Research, 1970—. Smith, William. The History of the Province of New-York. London: Thomas Wilcox, 1757.

What is the New Rhetoric?

45

Snyder, Ilana, ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1997. —. “Page to Screen.” In Snyder, ed. Page to Screen. xx-xxxvi. Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. 1958. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. Wysocki, Anne, and Julia Jasken. “What Should Be an Unforgettable Face ….” Computers and Composition 21 (2004): 29-48. Yancey, Kathleen. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication 56.2 (December 2004): 297-328. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Yellowlees Douglas, Jane. “Will the Most Reflexive Relativist Please Stand Up: Hypertext, Argument, and Relativism.” In Snyder, ed. Page to Screen.

CHAPTER FOUR RHETORIC AND TEXTUAL CULTURE: CONSTRUCTING A TEXTUAL SPACE IN THE CURRICULUM CLAIRE WOODS

Is there a case for a new discipline called “Textual Culture”? What is the New Rhetoric? In 2005, participants at two conferences discussed these questions. The organisers of a conference held at Stirling University, Scotland, proposed that there is an area to be defined within English Studies which “is situated within the interstices between intellectual history, literary criticism, critical theory, discourse analysis, history of the book, and publishing-as-process.” They noted that there is an agenda to be explored relating to “textual culture” and '”iterature and technology”—thus involving consideration and problematization of “text,” “circuits of production,” and “technologies.” A little later in the year, at the conference from which the papers in this book emerged, the organisers asked “What is the New Rhetoric?” and suggested that there was something to be gained from “revising the classical art” as it relates to language study and the scholarship of writing for contemporary times, taking into account new technologies as well as applications of rhetorical theories and premises to communication practices in diverse contexts. In this paper, I seek to link these two propositions, suggesting that there is a Rhetoric for today (post—but including aspects of—the New Rhetoric proposed for the 1990s, as captured for example, in Professing the New Rhetorics, Enos and Brown, 1993). This Rhetoric for today, I suggest, is centrally concerned with understanding textual culture and significantly driven by a notion of tekhne—essentially the art and craft of making—in textual practice. But further than this, I want to propose that such a notion of practice, when tied to eclectic yet systematic use of theoretical perspectives for analysis and interpretation, and indeed for generation of new artefacts (whether verbal, visual, textual, electronic, digital or challenging hybrid forms), that is, praxis, can define the rhetorical project within the new humanities. Thus, I suggest that in the

What is the New Rhetoric?

47

academy a discipline centrally concerned with writing and textual culture but bold and creative yet pragmatic in its theoretical eclecticism defines rhetorical studies for today. What does this proposition acknowledge? First, it points to the changing face of English or English Studies, influenced inter alia by Communication and Cultural studies and bumping up against variously Writing/Composition programs (in the U.S.), Creative Writing programs/ Multimedia studies/the Creative Industries (e.g., in Australia), and everywhere responding to the impact of new technologies on the nature of text and on the practices of producing and responding to texts, as well as the impact of global media and communications technologies and processes on text users throughout the world. Second, it points to the consequent demise or reconfiguration and renaming of what was once the English Department, or the Literary Studies/ English Literature program. The naming of the discipline English Studies, no matter how capacious the title might be (as Pope suggests) scarcely acknowledges the scope possible in relation to textual studies in the 21st century (2002). Pope, however, despite his argument for capaciousness, states pertinently: So any talk of 'the subject' (definite article and singular) can be misleading if it obscures the fact that English (sometimes controversially dubbed 'englishes' is a fundamentally plural and constantly changing series of subjects (Studies). 'It' often turns out to be 'they.' (1)

Might we also read this and substitute Finnish/ Norwegian/ Russian/ Spanish and acknowledge that the literary and language disciplines of education in any mother tongue are under the same pressures namely, the emergence of new technologies, global communications, a focus on cultural context and on the critical theoretical perspectives that have challenged the once assumed and accepted narratives of being, identity, social order and so on. The phrase from W.B Yeats comes to mind: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.” Is there a disciplinary center? Or are interdisciplinary forces creating an unwieldy and amorphous practice in curriculum and research in the area of study devoted to texts, their production, reception and distribution? Third, it refers to the rise in Australia of writing programs and courses, both creative and professional writing and business communication, as well as courses in academic literacy/ academic writing/ writing for academic purposes or the various names by which such subjects focussed on writing and reading skills for academic and professional purposes are known. Do these courses with a primary focus on writing knit together or not? And is there a case for them to reside in the same disciplinary and institutional space? This paper recognises with Enos and Brown that, “Rhetoric is a history of New Rhetorics, a history of changes, inventions, formulations, extensions, and

48

Chapter Four

rediscoveries. … It is a history of plurality” (vii). So too, the disciplines of the mother tongue such as English/English Studies have continually been reformed and reshaped theoretically and in curriculum practice. This is certainly the case at the University of South Australia, which some thirty or more years ago established one of the first Schools of Communication Studies in Australia and disestablished its English department and Literature programs in favour of a range of programs at undergraduate and postgraduate levels broadly based in the 'new humanities' and with interdisciplinary emphases derived from communication, cultural studies, creative writing, professional communication, media studies, multimedia, rhetoric and more recently media arts and performance and the creative industries. The thought of claiming an even more capacious title for a discipline that can be used as an umbrella descriptor for text focussed studies in the mother tongue, and that might allow for the study of texts (generated and circulated by whatever means) as they function in society and cultures across the globe, is compelling. There is a comprehensiveness, and yet also a specificity that needs to be accommodated in any title for an emerging discipline. Is Rhetoric a useful ‘hold all’ for the various areas of writing? But if the world of teaching writing and writing curriculum encompasses much more than the specifics of putting pen to paper and developing the finer skills of constructing a sentence (I am being deliberately reductionist); encompasses reading critically, working with the available electronic and digital tools to produce texts for distribution in many forms, then what term might best capture the textual universe as practised within and outside the academy? Is Textual Culture perhaps a useful word as a substitute for what Pope has labelled English Studies, that is, a study of texts allowing for the “literary, linguistic and cultural”? Or is there a need for an even more specific name with which to designate the study of the production and reception of texts with an emphasis on the “book” (as metaphor for the textual artefact, hard copy or electronic), no matter how generated and distributed? Such a study would allow for a specific focus on text production, the history and evolution of the artefact that is the text, of the receiver/maker interaction, of the impact of technologies over time, and the thus the location of the artefact – print/ electronic/ multimedia – in cultural context. Is this Textual Culture, a discipline committed to an interdisciplinary study of textual artefacts and the making and the receiving of the same? On the other hand perhaps the title should reflect the processes in which we engage as writers and speakers, producer and receivers of texts? After all we write and speak to engender a response in our readers or audience. Do we not use words (or images or graphics or media arts of all kinds, often in combination) to persuade in some way? And here I think of persuading in the

What is the New Rhetoric?

49

widest sense – not just to argue a case, but perhaps also to persuade about a character or the credibility of the situation in a novel; or the veracity of a description in travel writing; or to convince the stakeholders in a business document; or to report convincingly the results of a research project. Such writing emerges in a creative writing class, a business communication course, a workplace, and a laboratory – indeed in any place where words are used and where form and function work together to get the business of the world done. However, it may be that a title is not important but rather that there be an acknowledgement of informing principles that shape curriculum and pedagogy. Is there a “New” Rhetoric that encompasses the study and skills of a broader range of discursive forms and functions, influenced by the technologies and exigencies of today’s media culture? A “New” Rhetoric that might frame or hold together the work of teachers and students whose concerns are with words, texts, performance and practice in getting things done with discourse, across the disciplines, in the workplace and in the world? Is it a discipline or a set of informing principles and theoretical frames? Can we think of this work as a discipline labelled “New Rhetoric”? In the Australian context this is of course new territory since the disciplinary area of rhetoric/composition has no named place in the academy. It is to this I now turn, by asking first, “How do new disciplines emerge?” I suggest that they emerge out of “practice.” But the question then is, whose practice? We can see what has emerged from the work of many scholars, who have pursued the issues of text production and the influences of technologies on cultures and society and the issues of rhetoric – theory practice, pedagogy in all its forms. Thus a discipline perhaps named “Textual Culture” might emerge from the practice (evolving and changing) in programs such as the Masters of Publishing at Bologna about which Umberto Eco has spoken, or the Master of the History of Book (University of London) or from the academic debates between scholars about digital texts, electronic libraries, possible decline in writing, changed reading practices such as those Dan Sperber, Roger Chartier and others. Or it might emerge out of the work of U.S. scholars in Composition who have theorized the territory over the past forty or more years. Or it might emerge from the practices of teachers of Creative Writing as has occurred in Australia in the last twenty years (see for example, Kevin Brophy 1998, 2003; Paul Dawson 2005; Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady 2006), and contributions to and debates represented in TEXT , the journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs (http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/).

50

Chapter Four

English or Rhetoric – What’s in a Name? How something is named is one thing. Who does the naming and the proclaiming is another. And whether there is an audience receptive to the suggestion is yet another. Can a new discipline or a re -worked version of an old discipline take hold? Pertinent to this discussion is the proposal made by several scholars in the 1980s and 1990s that English or English Studies be renamed Rhetoric, or that Rhetoric (a new rhetoric) might re-emerge as a discipline. Of course today Rhetoric operates in the U.S. as a focus for the work of writing scholars and teachers, and certainly for Ph.D. programs aimed at those who would focus on writing and composition studies. Yet the name has never caught on as a 'catch all' for the work of English teachers and curriculum in either the U.K. or Australia where it has been discussed; for example in the U.K. by Terry Eagleton and Richard Andrews, and in Australia by Ian Reid, Ian Hunter and John Frow. These scholars proposed that it would be a useful way to think about the changing discipline of English given the impact of the new theoretical and disciplinary perspectives of the latter half of the 20th century and as a way of accommodating the impact of communication and cultural studies on literary studies. Let me present these propositions in brief, noting as well that the chronology of the statements reveals the on-going and evolving debate. Terry Eagleton argues for a way of reframing the study of literature, of literary theory and literary criticism as the study of discourses and discursive practices in society: It (Rhetoric) saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded. (206) … it was, as we would say today, a 'creative' as well as a 'critical' activity: the word 'rhetoric' covers both the practice of effective discourse and the science of it. (207)

Eagleton concludes with the argument that literature departments are doomed because of “their implicit and actual dislocation of ‘literature’ from other cultural and social practices” (213). The vehemence of his attack and his suggestions in the conclusion of the first edition of his book are instructive as we discuss the domain of textual culture and perhaps the need for a “new” rhetoric. He argues for a focus on cultural practices (this is now accepted and not a matter of argument) and thus on the issues of power and political action –

What is the New Rhetoric?

51

and therefore on discourse. He zeroes in on issues of exploitation of peoples throughout the world, on feminist criticism and the relocation of 'discourses of the body' as political, on the “culture industry” and the need for a constant critique of the media and its power and effects, and finally on the emergence of “working class writing,” which he argues, “… is one sign of a significant break from the dominant relations of literary production.” He continues: Community and cooperative publishing enterprises are associated projects, concerned not simply with a literature wedded to alternative social values, but with one which challenges and changes the existing social relations between writers, publishers, readers and other literary workers. (216)

At the time he wrote this, Eagleton, like the rest of us, could not have foreseen the impact of the internet and digital media on the ordinary citizen, the academy, the publishing industry, viz. the capacity of any person to create a web diary – a blog or a personal webpage; and the capacity of any individual to “publish” and engage in the world via the texts of the web and other media tools. Has the academy really caught up with this to the extent that it can reformulate and reconsider the way it describes and constructs its disciplines and practices of research, teaching and learning and thus the curriculum in relation the culture of texts and the pedagogies of writing and media arts? Andrews argues that despite its reputation as a “pockmarked term,” rhetoric embodies “the way discourses are framed at the' text' level, the way they are shaped by their context and the differences between them” (2): Underneath the pockmarked skin, as it were, we see a frame that is alive and strong. The cardinal points of the frame are the speakers(s) or writer(s) or maker(s) (e.g. film-makers, fashions designers); the audience (a term that describes theatre-goers, television-watchers and so on, but whose etymology is aural) or reader; and the subject-matter, the ' world' that is to be communicated, however 'real' or fictional or selective that 'world' is. Mediated by these three agencies and central to the whole business is the 'text', however tightly or loosely that is defined. (2)

Andrews concludes: … rhetoric, while on the one hand providing a meta-disciplinary unity for the arts of discourse and indeed a necessary unity at a time when the arts and humanities are from time to time having to defend their patch, at the same time is a pragmatic, modest art concerned with both the production of appropriately framed, clearly expressed messages and the reception of such messages. (18)

Chapter Four

52

We might ask, does rhetoric serve to replace an English studies still focussed primarily on literary theory and criticism or can it also be the capacious designation for an area of study and curriculum in the practice of ‘messaging’? Andrews himself answers the question in a later article: First I must make it clear that I do not think changing the name of the subject [English] to Rhetoric is either possible or desirable. The important thing is to forge a new identity to the subject we all love, and the name will take care of itself. (53)

Andrews reasserts his position that in placing the focus on language and discourse rather than on literature, rhetoric can “… act as an overarching theoretical formulation for our field.” (47). Reid poses the question 'What's in a name?' and proceeds to examine the place of English as a discipline in Higher Education. He notes that English has always been subject to, and has cultivated, the influences of other disciplines. He comments that its “emergence has never been securely definitive'” as reflected in the renaming of English departments as Communication, Cultural Studies, Textual Studies, Literary Studies—“all new labels reflecting new conceptions of the object of knowledge,”(97). Such renaming he suggests is symptomatic of “an irresolution that goes back many decades.” He cites first Frow, who proposed that “the scope of the discipline of English has become more like that of a generalised rhetoric” (qtd. in Reid 105); then Culler, who proposed rhetoric as a special topic in a liberal education, namely a study “of the production of meaning in various types of discourse” (qtd. in Reid 107); and Hunter, who suggests unpacking English as the components rhetoric, criticism and ethics, to allow a “renovated rhetorical curriculum' to emerge” (qtd. in Reid 108). Reid concludes: Certainly English is and always has been a hybrid; but that, precisely remains its potential strength and value. Its very impurity ensures that ethical and aesthetic and linguistic competencies are preserved in strategic alliance. The cohesive principles can be found in an enlarged conception of rhetoric – not something to be extricated from the study of literature and culture, but an inclusive rhetorical education in which there is an important place for the study of how 'selves' are constructed through sociolinguistic practices. (111)

Reid's essay is an exercise in rhetorical analysis of the discourse by means of which the discipline of English is formulated, in order to examine the 'basic disciplinary assumptions' with which English and Literature is or has been concerned (112).

What is the New Rhetoric?

53

Rethinking Rhetoric: The U.S. and Australia This brings me back to the discussion in which we are involved. A name for a discipline has to operate as a sign under which scholars and teachers can see their teaching, writing, research, and related activities operating. But it also has to be a name that can be used to explain and proclaim to the rest of the world why studies in the area matter. The name, Rhetoric, for this hybrid with a focus on texts, did not take off in either the U.K. or Australia and what little debate or discussion there was soon petered out. In the U.S., where the name continues because it has been tied to the teaching of composition it has been reinvigorated by scholars claiming for example a 'new rhetoric' (e.g., Enos and Brown) or an “epistemic rhetoric” (Berlin). These propositions clearly allow for integrating the understandings and theoretical perspectives derived from cultural studies and critical theory. The essays in Enos and Brown’s Professing the New Rhetorics and Berlin's Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies, reflect the debates about the disciplines most centrally concerned with texts, with writing and reading. The former confesses the lack of unity in rhetoric as a discipline but suggests that the diversity within contains the seeds of possibility for a rhetorical approach to texts studied in social and cultural contexts. Berlin approaches the need for rapprochement between rhetoric/ composition and literary studies—or in the U.S. context, between the Composition and the Literature departments—by means of a focus on critical literacy, thus: English studies refigured along the postmodern lines of social-epistemic rhetoric in the service of critical literacy would take the examination and teaching of reading and writing practices as its province. Rather than organizing its activities around the preservation and maintenance of a sacred canon of literary texts, it would focus on the production, distribution, exchange and reception of textuality, in general and in specific cases, both in the past and present. (104)

With a renewed emphasis on power, ideologies, signifying practices and the location of texts produced, distributed and consumed, and on reading and writing practices within socioeconomic contexts, Berlin proposed an interdisciplinary and newly-focused English studies, a discipline with capacity to affect political and social change. That was 1996, and now with the obvious impact of digital technologies and new media environments Sheridan, Ridolfo and Michel would extend this call for a transformed rhetorical education to include what they term a “multimodal public rhetoric.” Thus, rhetorical education must be transformed to take into account the possibilities now available to ordinary citizens to engage with the world:

54

Chapter Four Educational sites designed to prepare students to produce multimodal public rhetoric need to help student negotiate the material processes associated with effective rhetorical intervention … in order to make kairotic assessments of mode, media, and the technologies of production, reproduction, and distribution associated with them students need to confront such questions as, What modes and media are best suits to the kinds of change I am trying to effect and to my intended audience and purpose? How can I deliver my proposed rhetorical composition to my target audience? What material resources – technologies, knowledge, people, time – are available to me? What material limitations and affordances must I take into account? (818)

Again recently, and following some of his earlier work, Bill Green has reinvigorated the debates about English teaching and curriculum in non U.S. contexts (Australia and the U.K.), by examining “… on the one hand, a shift from ‘literature’ to ‘ literacy,’ as organising principles for the field, and on the other, from ‘language’ to ‘rhetoric’” (7). At the same time he points to the impact of new technologies on the work of English. Acknowledging the many different versions of English, the plurality of Englishes, Green is bold in his assertion of the possibilities for Rhetoric as a core concept and central organising principle in what he says is a project “… to help shape a radicalized, socially critical, productive agenda for English teaching, one for which difference is a resource” (11). His point is that an English curriculum tied too closely to notions of “literacy”—that is, “English–as-Literacy” might in fact deny the possibilities for a rich curriculum in the ways that Andrews, Frow, Hunter, Reid and others have proposed in the past. Green pertinently for this paper defines rhetoric as “doing things with texts –increasingly multimodal texts” (16): In such a view, English classrooms become ‘textshops’: workshops for learning how to do things with texts, through experimentation, play, trial-and-error, etc. This involves self-consciously working with texts of all kinds to create effects in and on the world: effects of power and persuasion, effects of pleasure, effects of learning, etc. And important feature of such work is … the development of agency. (16)

Can we draw on these discussions about the nature of English Studies/Rhetoric/ Composition, and the discussions of its place in the academy? Might we take something from the questioning of the manner and nature of disciplines in an academy under threat from all manner of corporate influences, as well as from the imperatives of the market, and indeed from the impact of new technologies on the delivery of information and communication?

What is the New Rhetoric?

55

Rethinking the Discipline as a Permanent Question of Disciplinarity Such a questioning was the focus of Bill Readings' University in Ruins (1996), in which he specifically reviewed the position of the Humanities and its attendant disciplines at the turn of the 21st century. Readings rejected what he saw emerging as a “generalised interdisciplinarity” as lacking usefulness and proposed a more considered approach to the nature of thought and “knowledges”: What I am calling for, then is not a generalized interdisciplinary space but a certain rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment, which is designed so as not to let the question of disciplinarity disappear, sink into routine. Rather, disciplinary structures would be forced to answer to the name of Thought, to imagine what kinds of thinking they make possible, and what kinds of thinking they exclude. Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. (176)

He continued: …the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. … to keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past. This keeps open the question of disciplinarity at the heart of any proposal for the group of knowledges such as "Modern Art History" or "African-American Literature". Only by being constrained periodically to reinvent themselves can such groupings remain attentive to the terms of their production and reproduction. (177–178)

Thus those of us in English departments or writing programs teaching perhaps Creative Writing or Business Communication, or English for Academic purposes or core communication courses, find ourselves perhaps reinventing ourselves as scholars and teachers with an interest in texts and text production and all that this entails. We engage therefore with the “permanent question” of disciplinarity. We also find ourselves grappling, as Readings' book amply attests, with the issues of the place of the Humanities in the academy and the ways in which Universities have been forced to redraw curriculum offerings as part of the need to demonstrate the usefulness of their work and education on offer. How we think about the “knowledges” of the area with which we are centrally concerned – writing, reading, discourses and texts and the impact of

56

Chapter Four

media and technologies on these – is core to any reformulation of an area, which we might call Rhetoric or Textual Culture or English Studies or Writing or … What ? Yet there is another twist to this tale of a search for a core concept to draw together myriad disciplines, traditions, theoretical perspectives and applied approaches to text. It comes with a proposal from Wayne Booth as he reviews the situation with regard to Rhetoric as a field within the U.S. context—the home of Composition and Rhetoric. He, as do so many scholars in the U.S., proclaims himself as ‘a rhetorician’—certainly not a title that scholars and teachers in the U.K. or Australia might ascribe to themselves. Booth wants to assert a territory for Rhetoric that rescues it from the pejorative attributes laid upon it in the media and in everyday discourse. He wants the field also to be clearly seen as the locus for fostering “effective communication” and thus the antidote to violence, deception and misunderstanding in society. He is interested in the quality of rhetoric as central to the quality of lives (x-xii). His definition is broad: … rhetoric will be seen as the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another: effects ethical (including everything about character), practical (including political), emotional (including aesthetic), and intellectual (including every academic field). (xi)

Andrea Lunsford, adopting a wide notion of what constitutes the field suggests that “Rhetoric is the art, practice and study of all human communication” (qtd. in Booth 8). Booth himself puzzles over the “ambiguity” inherent in the term if it is used to encompass so wide a domain; “…it muddies the distinction between the art of rhetoric and the study of the art. The practice of rhetoric is not the same as the systematic effort to study and improve that practice” (9). Yet, as Lunsford suggests, surely the activity of the academy is to do both. Just as Booth expresses concerns about the future of Rhetoric as either art or study, Zebroski in a recent paper puzzles his way through the theory/practice divide that he senses is emerging in Composition and English studies in the U.S. academy. The catalyst for his remarks is a review by John Rouse in College English (March 2004) of three books on pedagogy and English and titled, “After Theory: The Next New Thing.” Zebroksi reacts to Rouse’s proposition that with the decline in literary studies and thus of “theory,” “the next new thing” in English Studies is the teaching of writing. What he sees this leading to is a focus solely on the pedagogy of composition to the detriment of important and useful theoretical work. He asks:

What is the New Rhetoric?

57

So which is it? Is theory over? Are we watching the end of theory? Or are we on the verge of new theory wars in English? Surely, these two views differ; one might say they are even opposite interpretations of the same disciplinary landscape. There seems to be some evidence for both views. There appear to be elements in both views that describe our current predicament, but is there another way to conceptualise the place of theory and the future of the profession? (654)

His questions reflect the continuing revision, reformulation, re-conceptualising that is part of the history of English Studies broadly speaking and specifically of the teaching of writing. Zebroski’s claim then is that there is a need for theory; “that theory is both present and absent, in a decentralized but no less powerful form, in what might be called the ‘diaspora.’” (655). In this proposition he is acknowledging that scholars in the different and dispersed areas of study adopt and work with a wide range of theory in vital ways. His concern is that such theoretical diversity and commitment increasingly is losing its place in Composition in U.S. academe. In any discussion we might have in the Australian context about ‘New Rhetoric’ or English Studies or Writing, we ignore the implications the relationship between theory and practice at our peril. Indeed we might talk to heart Zebroski’s words (aligning himself with Gary Olson and Worsham): … it is not a matter of theory versus practice but of theorizing practices – that is understanding in a deeper, more intellectually rigorous way the daily acts of teaching, writing, administration, even of feeling. (661)

Zebroski’s article is a useful one in that it suggests categories of theory that reveal the “map of the discipline and the current and active theoretical communities in its diaspora” (667). More than this, however, it serves as an illustration of how we in Australia might continue the discussion about the related disciplinary and curriculum areas in which we teach—creative and professional writing, business communication, writing for academic purposes, literary studies, technical communication and so on—and how we might focus on the diverse theoretical perspectives that support our pedagogical and curriculum practice as a way of conceptualising the work we do. The point being as Andrews (above) points out, that the name is less important than the framing principles and theories which might guide our work and thus demonstrate an evolving new rhetorical approach to English studies—broadly conceived.

58

Chapter Four

An Evolving New Rhetorical Approach to English as Textual Culture To illustrate this in practice, I turn now to describe curriculum design, teaching, learning and scholarship at the University of South Australia in the past ten years, contributing to the proposition that there might indeed by a case for a discipline named Textual Culture or simply Writing, but more importantly an area of study framed by an eclectic but carefully considered use of theory—one that defines in practice a “new rhetoric” in the Australian context? My colleagues and I feel that what we have devised a program of studies that could fit comfortably under the name “Textual Culture” but which currently resides in its undergraduate program formulation as Professional and Creative Communication. It might also simply be labelled “Writing and Textual Practice” or “Writing and Creative Communication” (the new title for the undergraduate program as of 2008) or any number of other grab-bag titles. It does however, I suggest, illustrate an evolving discipline and one that demonstrates a version of a rhetoric for today in practice. The case can be made in terms of a dynamic interdisciplinarity as well as a focus on the kind of thought, knowledge, understanding and activity the curriculum makes possible, that is, what we see as central to the educational program we offer our students and which also marks our scholarly and research interests and output. In 1993, the University of South Australia revised its undergraduate arts and humanities program, the traditional undergraduate Bachelor of Arts. This was part of an institutional restructuring as one stage in the establishment of a new University, built on the backs of preceding long established higher education institutions. A mix of faculty drawn from different fields within the Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Education moved into the School of Communication. Driven by the external forces for change in the academy, both governmental and commercial, the University determined to create and market “niche” awards, being careful not to describe these as “vocational” but rather as awards with an “applied” focus – and this in the long established Communication Studies School where cultural, media and communication studies has been the bread and butter program for many years. One of the new programs was the BA (Professional Writing and Communication). The teaching team that created the new program professed specialties in linguistics and sociolinguistics, English and Australian literature and literary studies, English education, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, communication and cultural studies, ethnography of communication and qualitative research, professional writing including editing and publishing, and performing arts. The writing and literary practice program which emerged for approval and which has been in place since 1994 was framed by perspectives described as: an

What is the New Rhetoric?

59

ethnographic perspective; a rhetorical perspective; a perspective on literacies in context; a focus on discourse and the construction of knowledge; and a perspective drawn from language studies (linguistics and sociolinguistics, including the ethnography of communication). The team developed a range of courses, which provide for a critical and creative approach to production and reception of texts; a focus on students as researchers of texts or contexts; independent and collaborative projects; and links with the community and workplace. The major sequence taken over the three undergraduate years included courses such as Communication: Rhetoric and Reasoning, Writing and Text Workshop, Professional and Technical Writing, Literary Practice, Shakespeare Revisited, Creative Non-Fiction, Writing the City, Writing and Reading Poetry, Language and Society – courses which focused variously on broad academic skills, creative writing, literature, language studies, applied writing and professional communication skills and so on. However, the essential framing perspectives applied in the classroom processes and in assessment assignments in varying measure in every course. In one sense the combination of courses and the coherence derived from the framing perspectives can be seen as a version of English Studies made anew. Indeed, comments by Brian Doyle, a player in the debates about the nature of English within the past twenty years, capture the overall thrust of the program: English should be reconstituted as the study of how verbal and written fictions have been produced and used, socially channelled and evaluated, grouped together, given social significance, institutionalised, transformed. The study of English will then provide a creative base for active experiments with cultural production (verbal, visual and aural) which enhance, improve and diversify rather than narrow and homogenise our cultural life. (142 – italics mine)

While asserting the importance of an education for social engagement, Doyle mentions here an element that is particularly pertinent to the way the Writing and Creative Communication program operates, that is the notion of the creative, not just to “fictions” but to all text study. In the earlier summaries of the debates and proposals about rhetoric and English Studies, there is little mention of the “creative.” It is the dimension of the creative that can add to what is seen as “new” about the New Rhetoric when it is applied to all the constituent discipline or sub discipline areas in communication, particularly in Australian university education. It is not just about how the discipline of Creative Writing fits alongside Literary Studies (see Brophy 1998; Dawson 2006) or makes its marks as an independent discipline (Dawson 2005). It also relates to how the “creative” (or the “imaginative” as

60

Chapter Four

Anne Surma suggests) fits into pedagogy in the broad field of writing and communication, however it is parceled within the academy. Raymond Williams says: “Creative practice is thus of many kinds. It is already, and actively, our practical consciousness” (qtd. in Pope 12), and Willis et al write: ‘… we insist that there is a vibrant symbolic life and symbolic creativity in everyday life, everyday activity and expression—even if it is sometimes looked down upon and spurned. We don’t want to invent it or propose it. We want to recognize it—literally re-cognize it’ (12). It is a dimension that works within the University of South Australia curriculum with its approach to “textual intervention” and to diverse ways of involving students in design and production of texts of all kinds: this is creative practice aligned with daily textual activity as well as to research. What works for our teaching team and our students is to take these sentiments on board as an integral part of the work we do as writers and readers, text makers. The rhetorical practice of textual production and reception seen as tekhne—as more than simply the technical skill but the very art and craft of making the text—no matter whether a webpage, a brochure, a business report, a poem, a short story, a media board, a screen play, a novel, a research essay, is seen as creative within the context of the practical and even the functional in the textual activities of the everyday. Jen Webb has described writing as “an architectural act”; drawing on Annie Dillard’s words “When you write you lay out a line of words,” she captures well: When you write, you lay out a line of words. Lay one word, and then another, and another. Each must fit perfectly to its neighbor, and do the job for which it has been selected. This is the work of the laborer, and an artisan: one committed to the search for perfection, one prepared to work very hard indeed, one capable of infinite patience. … This approach to writing is the work of a person who can visualize the line in which the words are to be laid; one who can imagine how it should appear when it is done. An architect, perhaps. A person who designs, describes and crafts the idea of an edifice that is capable of being transformed into something that will exist in space and time. (211)

What is important is that such text construction aims to persuade a reader to act or respond in some way—these are rhetorical acts. Sharples says: There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between everyday scribbling and great creative writing. It is not only a matter of having original ideas, tough that certainly helps, but of being able to express them in just the right way, to communicate clearly or to excite passion. (3)

What is the New Rhetoric?

61

But he suggests a model that might begin to bridge that gulf sees “writing as creative design” and “the writer as a creative thinker and designer of text within a world of social influences and cultural differences” (6). Indeed as an architect of texts. It is this nexus that is important to the University of South Australia program. As the program evolved the focus on ways of creatively and critically interacting with texts of all kinds emerged. A concentration of activity on text production with students as editors and publishers of their own and others work, in newsletters, monographs, short story and poetry collections, as well as on multimodal texts, using electronic, computer, video and film technologies emerged. The capacity for students to command electronic media to create and interact with texts demanded a revisiting of the theoretical frames, which drive the curriculum. In short they had the opportunity to be part of the cycle of production, reception and distribution of texts; indeed to be given “agency” in ways not always allowed for in the past with the limited tools of pen and paper or typewriter and word processor. These activities are always framed by theoretical perspectives and tools of analysis and critique, drawn from the mix of disciplines available through the teaching staff and their scholarly and research interests. More recently the teaching team has reformulated the way it talks of the frames that guide the curriculum and their pedagogy. The categories also take into account the teaching team's constant rethinking and refining of its work within the changing contexts of academic debate and the exigencies of the social, economic, technological, cultural world in which students must live and work. We ask, “What will students have achieved at the end of the three year program with its focus on texts, and textual production, reception, distribution in complex and diverse cultural contexts?” Thus the innovation in what is currently a titled BA (Professional and Creative Communication) comes from the theoretically coherent framing of the award in terms of the intellectual content as well as in terms of the pedagogy and the reflective processes in which staff and students engage. Our students learn very early on that they are writers who are developing their skills in representing the world as ethnographers of their own situations (drawing on ethnography of communication and critical ethnography but also acknowledging the debates within anthropology about the writing of research that is, the issues of interpretation and representation). They also read novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, researchers, business writers as people who also observe, react and represent in order to persuade the reader of their account of the observed world or context (drawing on rhetorical theory, discourse theory). The rhetoric of representation in all its forms is the core of every course, whether Writing and Reading the Short Story; Professional and Technical

62

Chapter Four

Writing, Writing and Text Workshop, Professional and Creative Communication 1 and 2; Reinventing the Canon; Writing the City; Language and Context. The focus is on textuality and the practices of text production and reception and distribution, on matters of style and discourse, on the making and design of texts with whatever tools and technologies are at hand (drawing inter alia on literary theory, cultural theory, linguistics and sociolinguistics). Important to all the work in which staff and students are engaged is an orientation to work that links the creative and the critical and locates these in the work of everyday literacy and textual practice. We are interested in our students becoming particularly aware of what Ralph Cintron calls the “rhetorics of the everyday” (1997), or what Peter Elbow refers to as “the everyday, selfsponsored independent writing that ordinary people do” (2003). In a final year course, as researchers, ethnographers and as communication practitioners, invited to utilise skills of professional writing, qualitative research, discourse and rhetorical analysis and as appropriate creative communication practice, they explore the place of writing and their roles as writers in community and professional contexts. Unlike studies in English or Literature where the emphasis is on reading and responding to texts, the focus for our students is first on writing and the writer, the producer and performer of the text—no matter what the medium—print, visual, graphic, electronic, multimodel—and thence on the reader and receiver of the text. One way of keeping the focus on the writer is to ask students to engage with other texts as writers, that is, to adopt the headset of a writer reading other writers. A key means in this is what Pope has labelled as “textual intervention”—a way of engaging with original texts (a poem, an advertisement, a storyboard, a scene from play, a passage of a novel) by intervening in them, rewriting, reworking and playing with them in some way so that the discursive and stylistic elements or indeed the macro elements of text construction are exposed to scrutiny by virtue of the intervention (1995). The capstone course for Honours students in the fourth year of the program is titled Textual Cultures. It attempts to build on the preceding three years of undergraduate study while encouraging students to push out the boundaries of their skills and experiences as makers of texts and as receivers of the texts of others. They are able to take creative and critical approaches to texts. This really is a time of merging theory and practice as it relates to text, and the practices and processes of texts as they operate in cultural contexts—thus engaged praxis. From this course, students move into researching, developing and producing their Honours theses. Thus we might find that an Honours thesis project is the research, writing and development of a multigenre text exploring the diversity of local and ethnic food practices—including creative work (poetry, short story), ethnographic interviews (with local chefs, immigrant women), interleaved

What is the New Rhetoric?

63

photographs, family recipes, an exegetical analysis of the rhetorical practice involved in production of the book, and design templates for the possible publication of the book as a marketable text. Another student explores the issues involved in editing and publishing the diary of a Prisoner of War, including the theoretical exploration of the role of the editor, the mark up and design of sample pages for publication, and the development of the software tool as a resource for annotating and collecting data on the design and production qualities and details of other published volumes of similar ilk. A third student decides to explore “Chick Lit” and while reading widely in contemporary popular fiction, in nineteenth century women’s authors and a wide range of literary and cultural theory as she prepares an extensive critical analysis, she experiments with writing her own version of a “Chick Lit” story. Combining these elements in the final thesis, she produces a piece of writing which blurs the boundaries of the critical, the creative and the personal and reflexive to create a text of texts which speak back to each other, creating a dialogic exposition of her topic—a piece of “fictocriticism” that illuminates and entertains. A fourth produces a comprehensive website as a response to an investigation of a contemporary author who writes entirely in on-line mode. This student's seminar “paper” and presentation is a text as “digital portfolio” of critique, creative response and design, which aims to reveal the author to the rest of the class, and provide the documentation of the student's thorough investigation of a single author from an eclectic but disciplined use of literary and cultural theory. The notion of the “digital portfolio” is used to describe digital multimodal presentation of student work. It has been used, for example, by Hicks to describe multimodal compilations of data and documentation by teachers and in teacher education (2005). Hicks notes the importance of visual rhetoric and design in the development of digital portfolios and provides a useful guide to the issues of digital portfolio writing/ construction and reflective assessment by the writer and the teacher.

Towards a Rhetoric of Textual Culture The four students whose projects are summarized here are very much embedded in the tekhne and the rhetorics of text making and in developing their knowledge and creative/ critical understanding of textual culture in practice. Their university education has not been in a traditional English or Literature program, nor in communication or cultural studies, or in a creative Writing program. The eclectic but focussed interdisciplinarity of the program is effectively captured with the notion of textual culture but its framing principles are those of a

64

Chapter Four

redefined rhetoric of text making and representation for a digitally and media engaged world. This then is how we might think of a rhetoric for textual production and study today. The following perspectives might frame pedagogy and curriculum in any of the allied fields of professional communication, English for academic purposes, professional writing, creative writing, composition, literary practice, and text studies.

Rhetoric of Textual Culture: Framing Perspectives: • Rhetorics of the everyday (texts, discourses, language in social and cultural contexts) • Ethnographers of situation (The writer/ text maker/reader as a researcher, participant observer of texts at work) • Writing as Creative Design (the writer as creative designer, using the tools of media available to persuade/ elicit response/inform and so on) • Tekhne at work (the art and craft of making as a researcher, professional writer, novelist, poet, scriptwriter, editor and so on) • Textuality explored (the writer as reader/ receiver of texts in historical, social and cultural contexts; the production and distribution of texts of all kinds) The pedagogical and scholarly practice of the University of South Australian teaching team has evolved to allow for this within the undergraduate curriculum—and also in the postgraduate research projects team members supervise. At the same time, the proposition that we take an eclectic approach to the use of theory, analytic and interpretive perspectives, has merit. Pope suggests that: Hence, here, the argument for a kind of eclecticism the defining characteristic of which is precisely the attempt to gather a whole host of different approaches and synthesise them in ways that are significant and satisfying. (160)

While Pope proposes eclectic theoretical practice in textual study, John Trimbur suggests a postmodern version of composition whereby: “… composition studies situates itself in a nondisciplinary or postdisciplinary place where

What is the New Rhetoric?

65

multiple, heterogeneous, and polyvalent discourses, projects, and interests intersect” (136). A disciplinary and theoretical eclecticism operating in an evolving constantly unstable disciplinary space might make for a rich and dynamic field of study, a field in which scholars working in diverse but related areas have an interest. It is an area that needs to be identified as more than the sum of its parts, identified by an approach to pedagogy and scholarship which provides a unity of purpose, theory and practice while allowing for transdisiplinary praxis. Perhaps rhetoric reconceptualized allows for such intersections and such eclecticism. There is a “spaciousness in rhetoric,” suggest Enos and Miller (2003) and Lauer (2003). This, I propose, when grafted onto the transdisciplinary dynamics of communication/creative writing/literary studies/professional writing and research in the Australian university context as it has evolved in the past thirty or more years, should enable scholars to create a vigorous university education for the text makers and rhetoricians raised in today’s media environments whose skills must anticipate a dynamic digitally charged tomorrow. Sharples helpfully has this to say: But the arts of persuasion, of drama and of evocation in the new form of multimedia authoring, with written text drawn into a meld of media and interactivity that now includes video, animation, graphic design and music, and may one day embrace dance and sculpture. … As long as we retain our capacity for originality and continue to teach the skills of creative design, adapting them to the affordances and constraints of the new media, then people will continue to create great works of scholarship and the imagination. (205)

And we might add, to produce the scribble and texts of the everyday and the working world with social understanding, confidence and even flair! We might thus see a new rhetoric as both study and art of textual cultures firmly embedded in the everyday: a rhetoric of textual cultures.

Works Cited Andrews, Richard, ed. Rebirth of Rhetoric: Essays in Language, Culture and Education. London: Routledge, 1992. Andrews, Richard. “The Future of English: Reclaiming the Territory.” English in Australia 106 December (1993): 41 – 54. Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

66

Chapter Four

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of RHETORIC - The Quest for Effective Communication. Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Brophy, Kevin. Creativity – Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing.Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1998. —. Explorations in Creative Writing. Carlton South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2003. Chartier, Roger. “Readers and Readings in the Electronic Age.” Virtual symposium: screens and networks: towards a new relationship with text. 2001. 24 October 2001 . Cintron, Ralph. Angel’s Town – Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. Abingdon, Oxon; Routledge, 2005. —. “Writers, Critics and Literary Authority.” Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice. Eds. Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady. Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2006. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. Harper and Row: New York, 1989. Downing, David, Hulbert, Claude M., and Mathieu, Paula, eds. Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Portsmouth, New Hampshire.: Heinemann/ Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2002. Doyle, Brian. English and Englishness. London: Routledge, 1989 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 Eco, Umberto. “Authors and Authority.” Virtual symposium: screens and networks: towards a new relationship with text. 2001. 1 March 2002 . Elbow, Peter. “A More Spacious Model of Writing and Literacy.” Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism – Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric. Eds. Theresa Enos and Keith Miller. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003. Enos, Theresa, and Brown, Stuart, eds. Defining the New Rhetoric. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1993. Enos, Theresa, and Miller, Keith, eds. Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism – Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003. Frow, John. “The Social Production of Knowledge and the Discipline of English.” Meanjin 49.2 (1990): 353-67.

What is the New Rhetoric?

67

Green, Bill. “English, literacy, rhetoric: changing the project?” English in Education 40.1. (2006): 7-19. Henry, Jim. Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing. Carbondal and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hicks, Troy. “Beyond the "Bells and Whistles": Toward a Visual Rhetoric for Teachers' Digital Portfolios.” English Education 37.3 April (2005): 200-222. Hunter, Ian. “After English; Towards a Less Critical Literacy.” Constructing Critical Literacies. Eds. Peter Freebody, Allan Luke and Sandy Muspratt. New York: Hampton Press, 1996. Kerr, Heather, and Nettelback, Amanda. The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1998. Lauer, Janice. “Rhetoric and Composition Studies: A Multimodal Discipline.” Defining the New Rhetoric. Eds. Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1993. 44-54. —. “The Spaciousness of Rhetoric.” Beyond Postprocess and Postmodernism – Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric. Eds. Theresa Enos and Keith Miller. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2003. Pope, Rob. Textual Intervention - Critical and Creative Strategies of Literary Studies. London: Routledge, 1995. —. The English Studies Book: An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2002. —. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006 Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996. Reid, Ian. Higher Education or Education for Hire: Language and Values in Australian Universities. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1996. Rouse, John. Review of “After Theory, the Next New Thing.” College English 66 (2004): 452 – 465 Ryan, Alyssa. “Connecting Two Research Strategies: A hybrid model.” TEXT. 9.1 (2005). 11 May 2005 < http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text>. Sharples, Mike. How We Write – Writing as Creative Design. London: Routledge, 1999. Sheridan, David M., Jim Ridolfo and Anthony J. Michel, “The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric.” JAC 25.4 (2005): 803-844 Sperber, Dan. “Reading without writing.” Virtual symposium: screens and networks: towards a new relationship with text. 2001. 1 February 2002 .

68

Chapter Four

Surma, Anne. Public and Professional Writing: Ethics, Imagination and Rhetoric. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Trainor, Jennifer. “Critical Pedagogy's "Other": Constructions of Whiteness in Education for Social Change.” College Composition and Communication 5.4 (2002): 631-650 Trimbur, John. “Writing Instruction and the Politics of Professionalization.” Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Eds. Lyn Z. Bloom, Donald D. Daiker and Edward M. White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. 133–145 Webb, Jen. “Something to Live Within: Writing as an Architectural Act.” Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice. Eds. Nigel Krauth and Tess Brady. Teneriffe, Queensland: Post Pressed, 2006. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd ed. London: Flamingo, 1983. Willis, Paul with Simon Jones, Joyce Canaan, and Geoff Hurd, Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Zebroski, James T. “Theory in the Diaspora.” JAC 25.4 (2005):651-682 *All URLs are listed with original access dates, however all URLs have been accessed on 11/5/05.

CHAPTER FIVE NEW RHETORICS IN NEW SCIENCES: FIGURATION AND KNOWLEDGE MEDIATION JOAN LEACH

Introduction Classical rhetorical terminology of figuration, with its reliance on the antiquesounding acyron, acolouthio, and even the evocative abusio is a fine location for considering “new rhetorics.” It is rhetorical critics and theorists’ stance on the antique, more specifically—on figuration—that frequently divides them; some critics calling for a sell-off of the old terminology, others advocating a revision of terms, yet others discriminating among tropes and figures to apply to our contemporary exigencies. There are, of course, those who still revel in the antique terminology and advocate its relevance. But, particular fields of application, it is claimed, strain the old terminology and call for the “new.”1 Science, it is asserted, is centrally one of these fields. After all, how can the discourses of a field of inquiry alive only since the 17th century usefully be analysed with terms from the 5th century BCE? This chapter reviews key arguments about the continued relevance of figuration and thematizes figuration as an analytic practice (as opposed to an application) for generating theories of meaning in and about scientific texts. More specifically, I follow a particular cluster of classical figures as they appear in the contemporary context of postgenomic biology, arguably among the “newest” of new sciences. I argue that this cluster of figures helps us chart textual, conceptual and institutional practices in this new science. This cluster of figures and its associated textual, conceptual and institutional work helps us to understand knowledge mediation and in so doing, points to the continued theoretical power of figurative analysis in its classical, enlightenment and postmodern moments. 2 Two critics in the rhetoric of science have carefully shown the rhetorical power and relevance of classical modes of analysis, leaning heavily on figuration. Jeanne Fahnestock’s Rhetorical Figures in Science and Leah Ceccerelli’s Shaping Science with Rhetoric both argue that rhetorical figuration

70

Chapter Five

is not only about what appears on the page but about patterns of argumentation, patterns of thought. So, the science of electricity in the 18th century is illuminated in terms of ploche and polyptoton, the interdisciplinary success of arguments during the molecular revolution in biology are credited to a kind of conceptual chiasmus, aided and abetted by the rhetorical styles of the principle rhetorical actors. In Fahnestock’s words, “arguments offered to support a claim are likely to follow certain standard patterns of argument or of common topics, and the common topics can be epitomized in certain figures of speech” (9). Ceccerelli concurs by pointing out that rhetorical figures such as chiasmus, metaphor, and analogy do cognitive as well as textual work (181). So, both critics give an account of figuration that ties figures to classical patterns of reasoning. Reasoning and its expression in figures, on their view, can be analytically considered to be one and the same rhetorical move. This is complementary to another view of figuration, a conception in which the rhetorical agent “thinks with” the figure. This view is common in theorists and critics who point to the role of standard and imaginative figures in aiding scientists to articulate something that has not previously been articulated.3 This moves figuration away from its role of helping to produce evidence or evidentiary structure and into its role in the context of discovery. Debra Journet, a rhetorical critic and theorist, and Evelyn Fox Keller, a philosopher of science, put this in terms of the “conceptual productivity of ambiguity (or semantic polysemy) in scientific texts” (Keller & Lloyd 3). Keller claims that in contexts where phenomena or processes are ill-defined or previously undescribed, scientists use the “imprecision and flexibility of figurative language” to begin the process of description and analysis while leaving open possibilities for future revision. Journet concurs and concludes her analysis of W.D. Hamilton’s construction of the “Gene’s point of view” by pointing out that “Hamilton’s metaphors present an extraordinary productive sociocognitive resource—a kind of disciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking tool that helps scientists “grope” toward new understandings of the natural world” (411). These two overlapping views of figuration in the sciences, and here one must be specific and point out that much work on figuration in the sciences has been done on twentieth century biology, helpfully raise and leave open other possibilities for the role of figuration. These two positions: where rhetorical actors in the sciences use figuration to reason with, as a representation of that reasoning, and as a rhetorical tool to begin the process of representation and explanation in new conceptual fields, map roughly onto the classical rhetorical tradition of describing figures in terms of their use as figures of speech or figures of thought. As such, they might be identified as a “classical” rhetorical approach. This is not to say that any of these interpretations of figuration stop at the classical; Journet invokes Kenneth Burke to probe the use of ambiguity,

What is the New Rhetoric?

71

Ceccerelli counters contemporary approaches to reading audience by challenging Stanley Fish and Stephen Maillioux, and Fahnestock points to contemporary cognitive theory to ground her discussion of figuration. The point, rather, is that the classical tradition of attention to figuration has continued analytic power and shows evidence of being adaptable to the “new rhetorics” presented in comtemporary scientific texts. Journet even brings scientists on-side to champion the analytic power of figuration when she quotes Stephen J. Gould’s appreciation of textual exegesis to “deepen our understanding of history and procedure, but [exegesis] would also help us to judge and analyze such contemporary issues as the logic of selectionist theory” (Gould in Journet 381). Even some scientists, if Gould is to be taken as an exemplar, might not be inimical to the study of figuration and its work in scientific texts in order to trace the textual and conceptual practices of working scientists. The discussions of figuration in the work of Fahnestock, Ceccerelli, and Journet are not those envisaged by authors of the”‘new rhetoric” of the 1960s who suggested that we might need “new figures for new times” or even by some contemporary theorists who wonder at the relevance of rhetoric to new media, new technologies, new ways of thinking “the social” (Gaonkar in Gross and Keith 27).4 Instead, these discussions point to the continued relevance of using figures in an analytic practice to discern the rhetorical appeals in the texts. More importantly, these discussions show that, as an analytic practice, rhetorical analysis centered on figuration is also remarkably flexible. Ceccerelli easily modifies the figure of chiasmus to do the analytical work she requires for interdisciplinary texts. She writes “I propose ‘conceptual chiasmus’ to indicate a rhetorical strategy that reverses disciplinary expectations surroundings conceptual categories, often through metaphor, to promote the parallel crisscrossing of intellectual space” (5). While the classical figure of chiasmus, she acknowledges, is a rhetorical figure where the order of words is reversed in parallel clauses, her “new” version allows the analysis of words and concepts and is analytically more productive for the historical and rhetorical contexts she follows. Similarly, Fahnestock’s analysis of the preservation of arguments between research reports and their accommodations in popular media, focuses on the issue of core arguments and not solely on finding common figures in each genre. One feature of figuration in Fahnestock’s analysis is to show that using a variety of figures does not necessarily produce distortion in scientific texts or their accommodations. Instead, she sees figuration as one of the “necessary steps in making knowledge useful to wider communities.” An implication of this approach to figuration is that thinking about the end to which figures are used is crucial to rhetorical analysis. As Fahnestock reminds us, there still exists

72

Chapter Five

an attitude about the use of figuration where it suggests an “artful insincerity rather than scientific accuracy” (23). Thus, in scientific reports and papers, one might expect to find that a persuasive end is disguised, and as Fahnestock shows, figural core arguments absent. However, the point I take from this study of research reports and their accommodations is that rhetorical theorists and critics should have license to ask about the persuasive ends of figurative language (illustration, the consolidation of argument, pedagogical ends, and even clarity) and not only about the means (metaphor, synechdoche, metabasis, antithesis and so on). To go one step further, some figuration, then, might be seen as implicit, disguised, or, in Fahnestock’s language, not fully epitomized. So in a classical inversion, an examination of the rhetorical ends of a discourse may clarify the rhetorical means. It may also be the case that a cluster of figures does the work that one figure could do. Fahnestock claims that in some contexts, “researchers…readily produce phrasing of which a Renaissance-style master like Erasmus would approve. So it is not the case that they are incapable of producing these forms” (23). It is also not the case, on this reasoning, that researchers are capable of both disguising their rhetorical mastery (indeed, they must if they associate figuration with artful insincerity) and producing rhetorical effects that are the result of a cluster of related figures. These approaches to figuration in the sciences suggest several ways forward for considering figuration as an analytic practice of a “new rhetorical” sort. First, figuration in scientific texts is a representation of the reasoning or evidentiary process of rhetorical actors. This is not to say that rhetorical agents are naïve in their use of figures or even accurate in their representation of their own cognitive practices, but figures remain a textual trace of writer’s persuasive choices. As such, rhetorical analysis reveals this representation of reasoning, if not reasoning itself, and discusses the work it does in larger arguments. This treatment of figuration is clearly aligned with classical rhetorical approaches to analysis. Second, figures can be seen as more straightforward rhetorical tools that rhetorical agents use to leave open multiple readings, discourage certain interpretations, encourage consensus, or otherwise appeal to audiences to make particular leaps. This view of figuration is “new” in the sense that it is more sensitive to audience and the rhetorical positioning of audience through figuration. Both of these orientations, however, build in a considerable amount of flexibility into using figures as part of analytical practice and formalize the audience as a relevant theoretical consideration for discerning how figuration works. With these two analytic trends in mind, I will propose a figural move in contemporary scientific rhetoric that challenges rhetorical analysis to be yet more flexible. My challenge is not altogether unprecedented; Journet suggestively ends her essay on metaphor in evolutionary biology with a summary of what metaphors can do. “In particular,” she notes “metaphors can

What is the New Rhetoric?

73

facilitate the ability to mediate between physical and symbolic planes—a task vital to many disciplinary texts” (411, my emphasis). Following Fahnestock’s lead to look to the rhetorical ends of figuration as well as the means, it is to “mediation” that I now want to turn.

Mediation I. Metabasis and the Mediation of Knowledge There is no one term that encompasses, or could encompass, the range of things we might mean by mediation. The sense of mediation that I use in this paper is the ability of a text to present a range of arguments (about the object of study, methods, techniques, equipment, the role of the researcher, or interpretations) that might be seen to come from different domains, but to rhetorically present its relevance in such a way that readers can see the relationship between these previously disparate claims. To highlight this sense of mediation, I turn to two texts of a particular genre, that of research journal “front matter” to show the existence, function, and integration of strategies of mediation. The two journals I examine are Cell (a leading genomics journal), and Science (a leading interdisciplinary science journal publishing genomics research). I choose only one article in each journal, and although these are fairly representative and high quality, they are selective. The key issue is not “representativeness” per se, but cohesive examples of knowledge mediation at work. In the analsyis of these two articles, I am most interested in the cluster of rhetorical figures that can aid in the work of knowledge mediation and that we might expect to see in knowledge areas that are being synthesized. There are several candidates to help us understand the classical, even formalist roots of a series of figures that get at a contemporary sense of “mediation.” First, the figure of “metabasis” gives a good introduction to seeing things “in the middle” of a discourse. Metabasis has its roots in Aristotle and is also discussed in the ad herennium and other notable formalisms including those by Ockham and Peacham (Wilson 17, Livesy 127-31). Aristotle’s treatment of metabasis, perhaps, is the most straightforward for my purposes here. For Aristotle, each subject matter had its own principles or causes. It was for Aristotle a serious fallacy to transport techniques germane to one subject matter to another subject matter. Aristotle’s concern (and thus the appellation “fallacy”) is that one would bring the standards of one subject matter to bear on another subject matter, in effect doing a form of cross-disciplinary proof. His writings on metabasis are incorporated into his work on proper bodies of knowledge whereby proper disciplines have their own modes of proof and do not rely on importing them from other fields (Livesy 129). But we find this

74

Chapter Five

“fallacy” of moving conceptual resources between disciplines, if indeed it is one, a common rhetorical move in contemporary science.5 Indeed, it might be credited with much of the so-called genomics revolution. It is the transportation of standards from chemistry and methods from fields as diverse as computational mathematics and field ecology to DNA that allows the “listing” or “ordering” of nucleotide sequences into patterns of information that we call “the genome.” These conceptual moves are made, abetted and disguised in rhetorical moves that even Aristotle might have grudgingly admired. I do not mean to suggest that genomics is based on a fallacy; instead, I am pointing to the power of this conceptual move to mediate knowledge from one field to another in productive ways as well as to initiate new disciplinary configurations—the field we are coming to know as “genomics.” Metabasis also is not a straightforward application of techniques from one field to another. The “mediation” alluded to here is both the practice of accommodating these techniques in the laboratory as well as rhetorically accommodating these techniques in the scientific paper, report or review article. The emergent field of “genomics” presents an excellent case for examining mediation of various methods, disciplines, and modes of scientific narration, justification, and presentation of evidence. The most common and straightforward metabasis in the field of genomics is the move between the yeast, Drosophila, mammalian, and human genomes. While authors frequently acknowledge key differences among these genomes, movement of standards and techniques across these genomes has been important to defining as well as solving key questions in the field. For example, it is not unusual to find in review articles comparison of work across genomes such as in this example in Cell: “In Drosophila, in which homologous chromosomes are paired…the odorant receptor system of mammals provides and ideal case…” This leads to occasional ambiguity about which study was done in which organism or to rhetorically questionable conclusions of the analogical variety— if it happens in yeast, it happens in mice. The way that this occurs in texts is sometimes quite stark. In the Cell summary above, a long paragraph describes genomic work on Drosophila, mice, and artificial gene constructs before beginning the second paragraph with the view that mammals may indeed be the perfect test case for the issue in question (Savarese and Grosschedl). Reading further, we find the mammal in question to be the mouse. The point is not that there is something wrong with this reasoning, that it does not reflect common practice, or even that the particular organism is important. It is, rather, that the disciplinary matrix of “genomics” is defined by this move. Once a “genome” is identified, comparison becomes possible and comparative questions become meaningful.6 The genetics of the odorant receptor system in the mouse can be called upon to answer questions raised by studying the genome of yeast. This is

What is the New Rhetoric?

75

the importance of the metabasis—it reveals an argument structure in which comparisons among organisms is proper, normal, and elucidating of key genetic processes. Because genomic data was produced at such a rapid rate at the end of the 20th century (and it continues apace), techniques and methods of interpreting the data and “working with it” have been rapidly borrowed or appropriated from other fields of biology and chemistry. Many papers have a metabasis like that in the rhetorical sequence following: “The recent completion of several eukaryotic genome sequencing projects now provides an opportunity to use comparative genomics to study homologous genes in multiple species. Multiple sequence analysis has been used … but recent interest has focused primarily…We now see the import of expanding this approach by…” This version of metabasis provides a framing narrative for the import and modification of techniques. It acts as an important temporal framing and transition from what was done before to what can now be done in research and as such, it hearkens to the classical rhetorical tradition where transitions were given great weight. But this transition acts not only within the frame of the particular text or argument, but also extratextually. This form of metabasis is a reflection of the changing nature of research in genomics. It marks not a radical break, but a continuous evolution of applying accepted techniques in new areas and the expansion of the new paradigmatic concerns of genomics. These short examples are suggestive of the epistemic and rhetorical machinery that the figure of metabasis represents. It is no less than the ability to mediate the knowledge and techniques of multiple fields (genetics, microbiology, molecular biology) and present it in a rhetorical frame of “nothing out of the ordinary.” It is also a concurrent rhetorical shifting of evidence, citation, and the creation of mini-histories in literature reviews to justify applications in new areas.

II. A Decorous Mediation Second, there is the notion of mediation as reconciliation, a move away from the agon of a discourse. Where do we note such rhetorical moves and how do we understand these? Much ink has been spilled about the attempts of scientific discourse to remove pathetic appeals, to create a Mertonian universal space of discursive norms offensive to none (Montgomery). Indeed, rhetorical objectivity is a stance that authors take to sift through competing claims in scientific texts and orient their work, and their arguments, in a particular direction with reference to others. This is achieved in cohort with the imagined community of researchers represented in the text through references, the subject position “we” and miscellaneous grammatically hidden members of the audience and research

76

Chapter Five

community. This last group figures in rhetorical structures such as “…it remains to be determined wither the sub-nuclear localization of interacting gene loci influences the frequency of associations” (Savarese and Grosschedl) and “Future real-time imaging of interchromosomal interactions, combined with biochemical analysis, will help…” (ibid). Both of these structures leave out the possible agents who will do the “determining” or the “future real-time imaging.” Such structures can be seen as straightforward attempts to suggest future research directions and to eliminate the subjects who will go down these future trajectories in standard scientific passive voice. However, they also are positioned as a mild criticism of what the current research lacks. Such civility of tone and criticism is well-taken in new areas, or more to the point of this case, fast-moving areas where data production is in overdrive and a range of interpretations is on offer simultaneously. The narrative structure of the review articles in Cell and Science are good cases to probe when looking for the rhetorical function of figures of mediation; indeed, part of their rhetorical function is to mediate among interpretations and thus review them. But also, review articles canonize certain interpretations and suggest the way forward given the current standing of knowledge in the field. The Savarese and Grosschedl article in Cell quoted above, for example, summarizes and reviews the state of play of cis and trans sequences in gene regulation. Importantly, it is flagging the unexpected results of a paper in the same issue that these authors figure as pivotal moment in understanding gene regulation; “Based on the study by Lomvardas et al. and those of others, our view of cis and trans gene regulation is beginning to change.” Indeed, while this sentence credits a range of sources for the change of view, earlier in the piece, the authors are more laudatory “In this issue of Cell, Axel and colleagues (Lomvardas et al. 2006) provide an exciting answer to the long-standing riddle of the choice of OR gene expression by olfactory neurons.” The logic of the Lomvardas discovery is carefully truncated and the key issues flagged for readers: “in their new work, Lomvardas et al examine the possibility…the authors show… together these data suggested a mechanism,” and “However, a major question remained to be answered…” This storyline follows an ideal logic of discovery where observations and examinations raised important questions that were then solved by experimental design. References to others in the field are provided to support the opening line, “A dogma of biology states that the expression of genes is regulated by DNA sequences that act in cis…” This dogma, then, is narratively troubled by complicating results that eventually are resolved by the Lomvardas study. The resulting rhetorical image is of a community at work in harmony while some members, crucially Lomvardas (Axel to the author), come forward with surprising results that will answer community questions.

What is the New Rhetoric?

77

A harmonious rhetoric may not seem so surprising until one considers the views, and the rhetorics, of major players in genomic science outside the pages of Cell or Science. The Human Genome Project revealed in most popular science outlets (The New York Times, New Scientist, Discover Magazine and on several popular news/entertainment programs) a group of researchers with strikingly different attitudes to research questions and the ends and means of research. Indeed, the end of the Cell article by Savarese and Grosschedl results in a claim that a specific approach to genomics is needed; “Future real-time imaging of interchromosomal interactions, combined with biochemical analysis, will help to gain insight into the dynamics of this process and further shift our view of cis to trans effects during gene regulation.” This careful conclusion is advocacy for a way forward, but it is also a final metabasis of the fields of imaging and biochemistry. Similarly, the “perspectives” article in Science by Snyder and Gerstein ends with an argument for comparison and a justification for the metabasis offered in the article itself; “only through large-scale systematic functional genomics experiments and through careful sequence comparisons against related organisms will we be able to convincingly arrive at a definitive annotation of the human genome.”

III. In Medias Res and the Review Article Third, there is the epic stylistic tradition of beginning in medias res. From Horace onward, epic begins in the middle of things, throwing the audience or reader into chaos or narrative confusion, only to unravel the proper order of things. The contemporary genomic literature is epic in scope and, perhaps, even in function. If the tradition of the secondary epic, the literary epic, is illustrative here, it is because the rhetorical function and importance of review articles as knowledge mediators are flagged by the feeling of beginning in the middle of things in the way that many reviews position themselves. “Defining Genes in the Genomics Era” displays the in medias res introduction and is a good start to understanding the organization of knowledge in the field of genomics. The authors begin, “A genome is defined as the entire collection of genes encoded by a particular organism. What what is a gene?” Perhaps this would not be disturbing in a textbook or a piece of journalism, but in Science, the reader finds themselves somewhat bemused by this opening question. The authors proceed to clarify and reduce this bemusement by giving an historical view of “the gene” and an ordered set of criteria that help to define a gene, even if applying those criteria is not straightforward. The Cell article is similar, creating that transition from chaos to order that the figure of metabasis had already begun. The authors start with a “dogma of biology,” which is in some disarray by the results of a range of studies. This disarray is put back into order by the results of the study

78

Chapter Five

that the authors are introducing in this issue of Cell. This rhetorical positioning of the audience “in the middle” of a conceptual problem is efficient shorthand; “you may have thought you knew the dogma, these results challenge that dogma, and this study explains why the challenge stands.” Used repeatedly, as is at least suggested by its use in both Science and Cell, it suggests a field in transition, and on in which central tenets are being reexamined. Readers, then, are being asked to see the field of genomics research as producing vast amounts of data, which in some cases yield theories that contradict “best knowledge” in the field. The view from “the middle” is, to be sure, a complicated picture. However, the epic rhetorical position of en medias res allows particular issues to be resolved quite neatly using a conceptual shorthand that associates a paper’s findings with the resolution of confusion caused by a glut of data. The word “decorum” is infrequently applied to scientific discourse.7 However, these figures of mediation suggest a heightened awareness of appropriateness in the review and “perspectives” genres. As Fahnestock points out in her work on accommodations of research articles, the “perspectives” papers in Science and the brief reviews in Cell serve both specialist researchers and nonspecialist readers. While these genres are closely related to the research report and the two are, as Fahnestock notes, “mutually accountable,” these shorter pieces orient readers to the importance, timing, and key contributions of the research paper, but in language that non-specialists can understand. Thus, Fahnestock notes that this genre serves “epideictic and deliberative purposes.” She continues: All of the pieces include some form of context setting, placing the new contribution in an ongoing field to establish its relevance. The reception of the new work is usually laudatory, and it is likely that one of the positive reviewers of the manuscript is recruited to write these pieces. Obviously, there has to be some payoff for praising someone else’s work, and that payoff, conceivably, comes in several forms. Some use the occasion to mention their own work, through rarely directly…Some write mini-reviews, aping another wellestablished science genre, to assess the progress in an area. Many use this privileged space to define ongoing issues or unsolved problems and unfulfilled promises in a field in a way that justifies continuing grant support. (13)

All of these features are present in the examples under examination. Their function, at least in the field of genomics, however, appears to also be one of knowledge mediation. The mini-review genre, the praise, and the definition of new issues, while justifying continued grant support, also can serve to create a raison d’etre of a more conceptual sort in an emerging field. I also see evidence of mediation of a decorous kind; authors attributing value to a range of studies, securing a kind of canonical status for certain studies and removing “dogmas”

What is the New Rhetoric?

79

that are found no longer true or useful. So, while Fahnestock points to knowledge “consolidation” among specialist and non-specialist groups, I want to point out the role of “knowledge mediation” within specialist groups. This knowledge mediation function is achieved rhetorically through the use of metabasis, and the rhetorical function of the in medias res introduction and complemented by the decorous attention to multiple audiences and interests in the text.

Conclusion: Knowledge Mediation and Rhetorical Figuration The quick analysis above is meant to be suggestive and to draw attention to the continued relevance of figuration. Indeed, I tentatively advance the claim that “new sciences” are pushing “new rhetorics,” “new” in the sense that the function of figuration serves different ends. And here, the important end that I flag is knowledge mediation. Similar to Fahnestock who optimistically argues that “core arguments” in research papers can be made more accessible to nonspecialists by the careful use of figuration, I would argue that figuration is also representing some of the epistemic work that researchers are doing to create hybrid fields of knowledge. By examining the function of that figuration, we see more clearly the epistemic configuration in new sciences like genomics. However, to fully substantiate this claim, rhetorical theorists and critics need to examine further exemplars, the role of figures of mediation (if there are any) in research reports and perhaps even the work of mediation in interpersonal and institutional interaction to establish a range of representations of epistemic work. These claims, however, are not without import for rhetorical theory. I have, perhaps, pushed the notion of a “figure” further than many critics would allow. Indeed, in including the rhetorical stance of “en medias res” and the issue of a decorous mediation, I might be accused of exiting the discussion of figuration altogether. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write: Theoretically, there is no structure incapable of becoming a figure by the way it is used, but the mere fact that a use of the language is uncommon does not justify our regarding it as a figure. In order that a structure be a possible object of study, it must be possible to isolate it, to recognize it as a structure; it is also necessary to know in what respect a use must be regarded as unusual. Exclamatory phrases, phrases that repeat words after a hesitation, are structures; but they would only be figures of speech outside their normal use, that is, only when they do not express real surprise or real hesitation. (169)

Their approach is clearly inimical to the one I take here. First, it is not the “uncommon” workings of language where I focus, but those workings of

80

Chapter Five

language that represent epistemic moves and commitments. Second, I do not accept that figures are only figures when they are outside their normal use. In this way, I follow Fahnestock, Ceccerelli, and Journet as they use figures as “epitomes” of thinking, and words to “think with.” Indeed, metabasis might be seen as a counterpart to Ceccerelli’s conceptual chiasmus. But I may depart their company as well when I freely group a set of figures into a new configuration that I call “mediation.” Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca would be happy with my functionalism, but not my use of figuration, but Fahnestock et al may be unhappy with my functionalism. This may be a useful debate to pursue in the contexts of “new rhetorics.” What is the goal of studying figuration? It is certainly not in line with the accusation that rhetoricians are “trope-counting.” If, indeed, it is the case that new rhetorics push our classical rhetorical categories, we may find that our goal is also more than discerning the rhetorical function of figures inside arguments. We may be looking more toward the epistemic ends represented in figuration and the rhetorical purposes to which their put. This seems promising, especially in areas establishing epistemic norms and synthesizing research traditions. Finally, it may be productive to look at figuration in clusters of terms and rhetorical moves, as here with metabasis, en medias res, and decorous mediation. These forms of knowledge mediation are important as they are traces of epistemic moves made at the boundaries of our knowledge, they imply that rhetorical acumen is not only crucial for persuasion at the level of the interpersonal, but at the level of the field, and they provide a counterpoint to the agonistic motivations of grant-getting, publicity seeking, and empire-building in the sciences. While these motivations also exist, there remains rhetorical space for the mediator at the edge of knowledge.

Notes 1. Chief among recent scholars to be seriously sceptical about classical rhetorical approaches to science is Dilip Gaonkar. His view and contemporary rhetorical critics response to it can be found in the collection edited by Alan Gross and Bill Keith Rhetorical Hermeneutics Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. 2. To follow the arguments outlined here into the postmodern arena, I recommend an article by Marie-Laure Ryan “Metaleptic Machines” Semiotica 150-1/4 (2004) 439-469. 3. To be clear, Ceccerelli also identifies her approach to figuration in this vein. She insists that the role of rhetorical figuration in the ‘new synthesis’ of biology was to open up multiple reading frames and leave texts open for polysemous interpretation. This underscores my point about figuration being used as an analytic practice that both finds meaning in the texts and represents ways of thinking and arguing in the text’s production. 4. Chaim Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteca in their important The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation allude to the demise of figuration when they break from the centuriesold practice of discussing each figure to a paired-down description of those that are important qua argumentation.

What is the New Rhetoric?

81

5. Livesy helpfully points out that Aristotle’s rigid and negative view of metabasis and disciplinary knowledge was already under threat in the Medieval period, so it should be no surprise that contemporary science does not see it as a problem at all (143). 6. Ironically, the emergence of a unit of research called the ‘genome’ has raised numerous questions about the previous ‘unit’ of genetic analysis, the ‘gene.’ For example, “A genome is defined as the entire collection of genes encoded by a particular organism. But what is a Gene” (Snyder and Gerstein)? Authors use this irony for particular rhetorical effect—to show that the field of ‘genomics’ has moved on from the analysis of genes and on to what Snyder and Gerstein call “large-scale systematic functional genomics.” 7. The key exception is Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth which aligns decorum with honesty and truth-telling in early science through the rhetorical category of testimony.

Works Cited Ceccerelli, L. Shaping Science with Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Fahnestock, J. “Preserving the Figure: Consistency in the Presentation of Scientific Arguments.” Written Communication 21: 1 (January 2004) 6-31. —. Rhetorical Figures in Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1999. Journet, D. “Metaphor, Ambiguity, and Motive in Evolutionary Biology.” Written Communication 22: 4 (October 2005) 379-420. Keller, E. F. and E.A. Lloyd, eds. Keywords in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Livesy, S.J. “William of Ockham, the Subaltern Sciences, and Aristotle’s Theory of Metabasis.” British Journal of the History of Science. 18 (July 1985) 127-45. Montgomery, S. The Scientific Voice. London: Guildford, 1995. Savarese, F. and R. Grosschedl “Blurring cis and trans in Gene Regulation.” Cell 1016 (7 August 2006). Snyder, M and M. Gerstein. “Defining Genes in the Genomics Era.” Science 300 (11 April 2003). Wilson, M. Aristotle’s Theory of the Unity of Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

CHAPTER SIX VOICE EMBODIED: RHETORIC AT THE INTERSECTION OF WRITING AND PERFORMANCE D. OHLANDT

Words are movement. Words are movement– whether it’s breath moving up through your body or what you’re doing with your mouth up here. So depending on how you’re moving, it’s going to change the way you speak... and it works the other way, too– if you speak very staccato, you’re going to change how you’re moving. (Actor, director, and professor Malcolm Tulip1)

Part I - This Voice, This Body: Intersections in this Essay This paper, like most of the others collected in this volume, began as a presentation for the international “What is the New Rhetoric?” conference at the University of Sydney, in September 2005. At this conference I gave a presentation titled “Voice Embodied,” which I self-consciously designed to emphasize the importance of considering the physicality of bodies–not just our students’ bodies but our own as well–when we scholars and educators think about voice in the context of the “new rhetoric.” After the close of the conference my presentation was selected for inclusion in this published volume of papers, which necessarily and more or less by definition presents my voice in disembodied form. There is no way around it; that is how the written word works. Of course, I can employ various strategies to mediate the disembodied effect– I can drop hints in “asides” (which is itself a term borrowed from theatre that refers to a specific mode of spoken delivery) to inform the reader of certain relevant characteristics of my body and my voice; I can repeatedly use first- and second- person pronouns to generate the feeling that “you” and “I” are physically present to each other; I can write in a style that is more

What is the New Rhetoric?

83

conversational than formally academic, as though I were speaking to you instead of typing silently alone in my office at home. In the end, though, I have to accept that there is something a little absurd about trying to write a publishable paper about "voice" as an embodied concept. It is important, I think, to point out this absurdity because in much of Western contemporary academia, “papers” and “presentations” are generally considered to be interchangeable. Particularly in the arts and humanities, and even in my own discipline of theatre and performance studies, the presentation of a paper at a conference too often consists of reading out loud exactly what the author has written, with painfully little attention given to the details of delivery. (Usually it is the author who does the reading, but I have attended conferences at which an author’s paper was “presented” by a colleague because the author herself was unable to attend.) It is quite a common thing for professional scholars and academics to be transforming papers into presentations and presentations back into papers. The process of transformation is never seamless, because language meant to be written/read is just not the same as language meant to be spoken/heard. In a body, words take on a whole different dimension from their disembodied existence on a page: the body can take a stance– be it ironic, sincere, reluctant, or devious– in relation to the words that come from and through it. In a body, the physiological and psychological processes of making words through speech or sign language implicate that body, require things of it that are specific to making words, constrain its otherwise typical activities such as breathing, paying attention, eating, or even (especially in the case of signed languages) lifting or carrying objects. And, as Malcolm Tulip put it so eloquently in the epigraph to this essay, words in a body have a way of making that body move in ways that disembodied words simply do not. The process of transformation for this particular presentation that must become a paper is especially fraught with complications, in part because my presentation included some self-consciously performative elements that will not have the same effect as printed description that they did as lived experiences. In an attempt to get my audience thinking about the differences between reading language and hearing it spoken, I began my talk with a series of slides that consisted of the first two paragraphs of a paper, which I did not read aloud but let the audience read silently. Also, midway through my argument I stopped presenting altogether and drew from my experiences as a stage director and acting teacher to lead my audience through an acting exercise that each of them could actually do with a person standing nearby. Each of these components departed from the typical conference presentation in specific ways that I hoped would increase the effectiveness of my presentation, but I cannot use them to the same effect in this paper.

84

Chapter Six

Then, too, it is difficult to reproduce in a paper the varied and complex effects that the more superficial, even mundane aspects of my physical voice and my present body impacted the ways the audience received what I had to say. In theatre and performance studies, physical voices and present bodies are as much a focus of analysis as are the ethereal notions of voice as style and body as identity. Who is speaking and how are as important– and sometimes more important– than what is being said. As I attempt to transform that presentation into this paper, I am aware that it mattered that what I have to say on this subject was, in its original form, delivered in a stage-trained voice, in an American accent, by a relatively young woman in a black suit jacket. When I speak out loud, I tend to project and enunciate, to make eye contact with my audience, and to pace myself more slowly than I do in conversation– all benefits of my theatre background that make it easier to listen and attend to what I have to say. To a certain extent, the strength of my physical voice offsets those reservations some audience members have about my youthful appearance– and my choice to wear a black suit jacket further increased this tempering effect. At this particular conference where almost everyone else spoke with an Australian accent, the fact of my American accent “marked” my voice in ways that both set me apart (as a foreigner2) and grouped me together with some very influential people with whom I really had no significant association– namely, the chair/convener of the conference and both of the keynote speakers, all three of whom also spoke with American accents. In this print volume, the contributors’ various native dialects are all but unnoticeable, perhaps with the exception of our differences in word choice or expression. Our ages, body shapes, and skin colors are literally invisible to our readers, as are the ways we present ourselves through our clothing. Our arguments have been revised and refined in conversation with others (including an editor) and our words are preserved in a fixed state, available to readers who are able to go away, reflect, and then return to engage with our rhetoric as often as they would like. All these are distinct advantages that written language has over speech, and they are all reasons that I was willing and even excited to transform that presentation into this paper, complicated as that endeavor may be. The rhetorical strategies I used to structure my presentation will not work as rhetorical strategies to structure this paper; I cannot just write down what I said that day and expect it to be convincing and effective in print. Similarly, your reception of my written argument will be based on quite different criteria than was the conference attendees’ reception of my presentation. Effective speech and effective writing require that two different sets of variables be considered in both presentation and reception. Both modes of delivery have advantages and disadvantages, and each operates in its own distinct rhetorical context.

What is the New Rhetoric?

85

The idea that practices of speaking should be included under the rubric of “rhetoric” is not, strictly speaking, “new”– after all, classical rhetoric has its roots in the art of oratory. My suggestion that a rhetoric of spoken delivery is distinct from the more traditional rhetoric of writing as it is commonly taught today is also not unfamiliar. Students of rhetoric and composition today are trained to write and to construct critical arguments, but they are rarely trained in the delivery of the spoken word. Professional actor training programs, on the other hand, require little if any formal training in the rhetorical analysis of written texts. What I would like to explore in the rest of this paper, however, is the idea that in a “new rhetoric” for a globalized, multimedia world, these rhetorics of writing and rhetorics of speaking that have been refined and developed in separate areas are intersecting in ways that are both frustrating and fruitful.

Part II - Persuasive Voices, Persuasive Bodies: Intersections in the Classroom In theatre and performance studies, I teach two rather different kinds of classes. In my theatre history and dramatic literature courses, I try to help students learn how to analyze texts and performances critically, and I try to help them learn to be persuasive when presenting their own ideas in writing. In my studio-based acting classes, I try to help students learn how to read and analyze scripts as an actor does, and I try to help them learn how to “play an action,” which is an acting term for the effort of persuading someone else to do something specific. Since I am trained in scholarly writing as well as in the fundamental skills of theatrical acting, I have to confess that, to me, the basic goals that guide the acting classes I teach don’t look all that different from the basic goals that structure my writing-intensive history and literature classes. If “rhetoric” is the art of using language to persuade or influence others, then the actor’s attempt to persuade a scene partner to perform a certain task is as much a rhetorical effort as the scholar’s attempt to persuade an audience that her argument is correct. Interestingly, I find that it is exactly these rhetorical principles of persuasion at the heart of both the actor’s craft and the scholar’s that students struggle the most to grasp. In writing-intensive classes, students can “get” the structure of a five-paragraph “thesis-point-point-point-conclusion” essay, but they resist the idea that their essays should be an argument, an expression of a desire to convince, not just a re-statement of memorized facts. In acting studio classes, they can grasp the idea that scripted lines are played “to” another person, but they resist the detailed planning and embodiment of a strategy to convince that other person to do something. Much of the energy of the so-called “new” rhetoric has been channeled into finding ways to help students get past their

86

Chapter Six

resistance to the idea of persuasion, ways to help students gain confidence in their own voices and believe in the worth of their own ideas. To this end, basic composition courses teach writers to identify an objective and to be sensitive to the audience that will be reading the essay, and these skills are often developed through exercises designed to help students practice taking a stand and presenting evidence to support a particular idea or interpretation. Various Western methods of acting also employ exercises to help students see in physical, embodied terms how the way that they say their lines can be used to influence or persuade a very specific audience. The method that I teach, called “practical aesthetics” and articulated in a very accessible little book titled A Practical Handbook for Actors,3 is just one of many methods available today derived from the early 20th century work of Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky was working with the Moscow Art Theatre at the same time that formally Realist drama was being developed as a style in Europe, and Stanislavsky’s system was explicitly developed to help actors perform in the new style, which called for acting that looked and seemed more like everyday life than had the previously-popular styles of declamatory delivery. Through the past century, Stanislavsky’s system spread through Europe and to the US, with some of his students emphasizing certain aspects of the system as they passed it along, and others emphasizing different aspects. Thus, although it looks quite different in its fundamental principles, practical aesthetics, developed by playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy, is a cousin of the acting method known generally as “method acting,” which was founded by Lee Strasberg and employed by actors such as James Dean and Dustin Hoffman. The “method” of practical aesthetics involves the conscientious development of habits to guide only the things under the actor’s control. Both talent and emotion are rejected as factors in the practical aesthetics method, because they cannot be controlled, while discipline and action are emphasized as central, because they are under an actor’s control. A central component of the technique is the idea that an actor approaches every moment of performance as an effort to achieve something, specifically an effort to get another person to do something in particular. Much of the discussion and many of the exercises in A Practical Handbook for the Actor focus on how to read and analyze a script in order to make interesting and appropriate choices about what action to play. For inexperienced actors, though, I find it is helpful to begin by getting rid of the words altogether and working just on the persuasion part of things. As anyone who has tried to teach both drama and prose fiction in the same course is probably aware, reading a play is rather different from reading prose, and reading a script for production (as an actor, director, or designer) is rather different again from reading a play as literature.

What is the New Rhetoric?

87

One of the key differences involved in reading a script for production is that the reader is self-consciously expecting (and expected) to contribute to the creative process of completing the play. For students trained to read fiction, criticism, and textbooks for comprehension, the idea that the reader can and should actively contribute both details and ideas that are not articulated in the text can be quite foreign. Even stranger is the concept that the details and ideas that the reader/artist contributes create a new “text” that others can “read” and respond to critically– the interpretations of actors, directors, designers, and other production artists are added to the printed text, and the resulting performance that audiences see and hear is a different “text” than that created by the playwright alone. Just as teaching academic writing involves developing students’ confidence so that they believe their ideas are worth arguing for persuasively, so teaching acting involves developing students’ confidence so that they believe they can contribute meaningfully to a production of a play, no matter how classic and formidable the printed text. The formidability of the printed text, however, is a rather large obstacle to topple in the first few days of an acting class, so I use an exercise that focuses on persuasion using bodies and physical voices, instead of using the meaning of the words that are said. I call this exercise the “number game,” because each partner in the scene is only allowed to say the counting numbers, in ascending order. Of course, numbers have meaning and, in the appropriate context, their meanings can be arranged to create very persuasive arguments and proofs. Even for mathematicians, though, numbers out of context are not very persuasive in themselves. The whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate for students how persuasion can be accomplished by manipulating the way things are said rather than by manipulating what is actually said. In the first iteration of the number game, two actors are given their “lines”: one is assigned even numbers, the other odd, and they are to count upwards in order, alternating lines as necessary. Then, the actor who is saying the odd numbers is told that her goal is to get the other person to sit down in a nearby chair. The actor saying even numbers is told that his goal is to get the other person to leave the room. There are two restrictions in the number game: 1) actors are not allowed to touch their partner physically, and 2) actors are not allowed to say any words other than numbers. In an acting class, I typically have two students at a time do this exercise in front of the class so that we can talk about what choices that the actors are making are most compelling to watch as an audience. The discovery that it can be quite interesting and even captivating to watch two people counting is almost always a significant revelation for acting students, even for those who have attended or performed in a number of theatrical performances. In my presentation of this paper at the conference in Sydney, I asked the conference attendees to stand up, pair off, and play this game all at the same time without

88

Chapter Six

an audience, so that they each could have the experience of trying to be persuasive using tools other than the linguistic ones with which, presumably, all of us were both skilled and comfortable. The discovery that persuasion can be quite effective even when words themselves are not available was, I hope, a significant revelation for my audience of scholars, rhetoricians, and teachers of writing. Unfortunately for readers of this essay, the forcefulness, the persuasive power of this particular revelation was derived from the experience of it as a participant, and my description here is unlikely to make my point as effectively. On the other hand, my description of the exercise here in print allows me the opportunity to analyze some aspects of the number game that I did not have time to explore in the conference presentation. In an acting class, I follow the exercise I have described above with some variations that move beyond getting students to recognize and practice what “playing an action” means and hopefully help them see how some actions are better or, as I say it in class, “stronger” than other actions. The point of playing an action is that it is a technique to keep the actor’s attention and imagination “in the moment”– it keeps the actor focused on the act of persuading. Players of the number game typically stop thinking about what they are saying– I have watched scenes in which numbers were skipped, repeated, or completely reordered without either participant being fully aware of it– because they are busy paying attention to how they are saying it and whether they are successful. I teach students in my beginning acting class that there are two things essential to a good, playable action: 1) there has to be some concrete, material sign in the person you’re talking to so that you are able to know without any ambiguity whether or not you’ve achieved your goal, and 2) it has to be something that, according to the words of the script, you don’t get before the end of the scene. Both of these are tricky, and choosing a good, strong action to play is as delicate a skill for a young actor to develop as choosing a good, strong thesis statement is for a young writer. Variations on the number game can help acting students experience the difference between playing a weak action and playing a strong one. In one iteration of the exercise, I assign goals for each partner that are abstract, emotional, or intangible. For example, when one partner is told to get the other person to feel comfortable, and the other partner is told to get the other person to feel nervous. In description, these goals seem perfectly “playable”– even I can imagine how it would be easy to “see” if my partner was comfortable, or nervous. In this version of the game, however, I would keep each partner’s objective secret from the other– in other words, each partner starts the game with no clue as to what the other person wants them to do. In practice, the interaction between the partners in a number game with these goals tends to

What is the New Rhetoric?

89

seem confused, unclear, and sometimes boring, not only for the audience but also for the participants. The problem, I try to point out, is that even though we all know what it means and what it looks like to be “comfortable” or “nervous,” it is difficult to tell exactly the point at which someone goes from being uncomfortable to being comfortable, or from not being nervous to being nervous. This is important because everything you do as you say the numbers– every gesture that you use, every variation you make in how you say the words– is directed towards reaching a goal, but the more confusion there is at any point as to whether or not the goal has been reached, the less focused the you will tend to be. Of course, it’s even harder to keep focused when you are playing an action and you “get” it before the scene is over. If the goal an actor has chosen to play is achieved, he may still have lines to say, but the life goes out of them because he’s done he was trying to do. For example, in Tennessee Williams’s play (or the movie) A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s the famous scene where Stella leaves and Stanley crumbles on the steps outside their house, crying “Stella! Stella! Stella!” A good action for the actor playing Stanley (Marlon Brando in the film) to play in that scene would be to persuade the actress playing Stella (Kim Hunter in the film) to come towards him– even just a little bit, even just a pause as she leaves. It’s concrete; both the actor playing Stanley and anyone watching can tell without a doubt if Stanley has or has not persuaded her. Imagine, though, if after the very first time Marlon Brando delivered his heartwrenching plea, Kim Hunter turned around and came back to him. The lines of the script dictate that Brando must still cry out “Stella!” two more times, but what is the point if he has already gotten what he was playing for? In yet another iteration of the number game, I assign both partners actions to play that are complementary, so that neither actor has to work hard or long to achieve her goal. For example, when I assign the two scene partners the following goals: partner #1 is trying to get the other person to give her a hug, and partner #2 is also trying to get the other person to give her a hug, then the game is both short and uninteresting, since both partners achieve their goal almost immediately. The problem here is not that they both have the same goal– if they both were trying to get the other person to leave the room, they would still be in conflict– nor is it that the goal of getting a hug is too easy– if one played to get a hug while the other played to get the other person to leave the room, the scene might be very interesting indeed. The problem with this scene is that each actor plays for something that she will almost definitely get. With the number game, they will each get the goal because they are both working towards the same purpose. With an actual play, the situation is similar but more complicated, in part because bringing the meaning of the scripted words once again to bear on the choices actors make can distract inexperienced

90

Chapter Six

actors from the fundamental effort of persuasion. Young actors will sometimes read a scene until they get a sense of what is happening, then choose to play an action that the script or stage directions already indicate will happen– for example, playing to get the other person to apologize, when later in the scene the other character is scripted to apologize– because it seems safe, not risky. I see a similar risk-aversion in my writing-intensive courses when students choose to write papers that pursue a relatively straightforward, “safe” argument that is so obvious it is already generally accepted. Undergraduate students just learning to write persuasively sometimes express surprise and hurt when I give anything less than an “A” grade to papers that are well-structured and wellsupported but do not offer any measure of creative insight in terms of the main argument. Of course, there is much more to good acting than just choosing a good action to play, just as there is more to writing good essays than just coming up with a solid thesis statement. I don’t want to read essays from my theatre history students that present a thesis and then say it again five times in different words. Instead, I want to read supporting points that complement one another and contribute to the convincing argument as a whole. Likewise, I don’t want to go to the theatre and watch Stanley yell “Stella” the same way over and over again. If that actor wants to convince that actress to come back to him, he has to use different tactics, just like essay writers have to use different points to make their case. Stanley can say “Stella” as a plea, as a demand, in a whimper, as an apology, in a mocking tone, in a seductive voice. Planning a sequence of tactics that is both effective and interesting is as complex as outlining supporting points for an essay that are both sufficiently supported themselves and relevant to the argument you’re making. The number game at least makes it fairly easy to point out what tactics are and how they are used, since players focused on achieving a goal while counting naturally make a number of separate and distinct attempts to get what they want. In the number game, you know when your strategy isn’t working and you try something else– just as a toddler at the grocery store knows when her attempts to get her parent’s attention aren’t working, and so she tries other tactics until she gets it. If changing tactics comes naturally to many of us in everyday life, though, it often does not come easily to inexperienced actors in the moment of performance. For one thing, the words an actor uses are written by someone else, so actors must learn to read dialogue for rhythm to find the places where they should change tactics. For another thing, once you get a certain way of saying a line in your lungs and in your mouth, it’s difficult to think of other ways to say the same words, so it helps to brainstorm all the possible tactics and practice saying the same line at different pitches, different tempos, in different tones, and with different interpretations.

What is the New Rhetoric?

91

Ultimately, it is not enough for actors to master playing an action, tactics and all. Mature actors have learned to align their body’s ability to persuade with the words’ ability to persuade. They have read the script carefully, analyzed the character, and conducted research on the historical period of the play– all skills developed more in traditional classrooms than in the studio. Most importantly, mature actors have mastered the difficult skill of making creative, interesting, strong choices about actions and tactics based on what the words do or do not say, and they have the confidence and the concentration to sustain a commitment to their own choices at every moment of performance. Although many people believe acting is primarily a craft of the body– of talent, instinct, and action more than analysis, strategy, and reflection– the skills of a mature actor are skills of both body and mind, of a rhetoric that is in and of the body rather than separate from it.

Part III - Voice in the Body: Intersections in the Curriculum The longer I teach studio-based acting courses and writing-intensive courses in theatre and drama, the more parallels I notice between teaching acting and teaching academic writing. I teach writers to direct their argument towards a specific audience; I teach actors to play to a scene partner. I teach writers to choose a creative, interesting thesis statement that is supported by the available evidence but also presents a new way of looking at it. I teach actors to choose a creative, interesting action that is relevant to the scripted text but also is different enough from the action that most other people would choose that it offers a new “life” to the scene. I teach writers to organize evidence under headings that support the main argument in different ways, and I teach actors to divide scenes into units and assign to each section a tactic that is distinct from other attempts but also appropriate to the scripted lines. With so many parallels between these two types of classes, what would happen if I let them actually crossover? Although I use the number game described above only on the first day of acting class, I return to it throughout the term and sometimes in formal rehearsals to “test” the actions that actors have chosen to play. Could I adapt it for a composition class in order to target what might be involved in the act of persuasion, or is the gulf between persuasive words on the one hand and persuasive bodies on the other just too wide for students to make a useful connection? Is it helpful for acting students to think of preparing for a scene as similar to outlining an essay, or would pointing out this parallel bring their insecurities about their academic writing into the acting studio and prevent them from doing their best? I do know that in general, students in my studio acting classes have resisted written assignments any more formal than journal entries, and students in my theatre history and dramatic

92

Chapter Six

literature classes have been reluctant to read texts out loud even informally, although they eventually give in. I know that many of the students in my acting classes take traditional classes, and that many of the students in my writing-intensive classes have acted before, so I believe that students’ resistance to "crossing over" from writing to acting and vice versa has less to do with their personal reservations about one type of persuasion or the other than it does with their expectations for the class. The fact that in most university-level curricula the distinction between writingintensive courses and studio-based courses reinforces the longstanding division of the rhetoric of writing from the rhetoric of speaking. However, as the label “rhetoric and composition” expands to include development of skills outside of writing that are in demand in the 21st-century workplace– skills such as multimedia composition, public speaking, graphic presentation, and even interpersonal skills– it may be time to rethink this separation between writing and acting, between “traditional” classrooms and “studio” courses. What I am proposing here is that, instead of simply adapting exercises such as the number game for use in otherwise traditional writing-intensive courses or assigning formal academic writing tasks in acting classes, we might instead design classes that develop writing skills in parallel with acting / speaking skills. Instead of a writing-intensive theatre studies “Introduction to Theatre” course during one term and a separate “Introduction to Acting” studio course the next, I would like to see an “Introduction to Theatre Practice” course that mixes critical reading, classroom discussion, script analysis, and studio exercises in equal measure. Even better, I can envision replacing traditional writing-intensive composition courses with an interdisciplinary course designed to develop “voice,” which is a central concern of both teaching writing and teaching acting. The concept of “a voice” implies an identity that is distinguishable from other identities but related to it; the concept of “giving voice” implies consciousnessraising, making known a fact or a concern that has otherwise been ignored or suppressed, or empowering individuals and groups to speak publicly on their own behalf. “Voice” can also refer to a body’s sense of status, position, identity, and general comportment in the world. When I teach, I try to cultivate opportunities for students to find or to develop their voices– that is, to gain some confidence in their senses of personal and social identity, in their opinions, feelings, and desires, and not least in their abilities to articulate all these things with a certain style. Of course, “voice” also refers to the physical elements of speaking clearly and with confidence. In short, the notion of voice is central to many of the values of the new rhetoric as it is taught in the context of contemporary university education. An interdisciplinary course that develops “voice” not just as an abstract,

What is the New Rhetoric?

93

disembodied term for personal style and perspective but also as a thing quite literally in a living, present body would allow students to experience words as movement. By using both traditional and studio exercises, such a course would bridge the traditional separation of language as it is written and language as it is spoken. Perhaps most importantly, it would open a space for students to make their own as-yet-unimaginable connections between word and action, between what is written, what is said, and what they choose to do.

Notes 1. Public roundtable discussion on the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, 7 November 2003, University of Michigan. 2. Some of my colleagues in Sydney who were not in attendance at this particular conference admitted to me at a later point that it was “positively strange” for them to hear me speak in academic settings because they still found it funny to hear technical terms and phrases spoken with an accent they usually heard only on television. 3. Melissa Bruder, et al. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. This book was written by a group of students from notes taken in acting workshops taught by David Mamet and William H. Macy.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE NEW ASSESSMENT AND THE NEW RHETORIC BETH KALIKOFF

The New Rhetoric rejects the idea of rhetoric as a universalizing “guess your weight” activity located on the carnival sideshow of academic activity. While generations of earlier teachers and scholars understood rhetoric as what James Berlin calls “the transcendental recorder or arbiter of competing ideological claims” (“Rhetoric and Ideology” 679), New Rhetoricians instead assume that rhetoric is context-specific, shifting, and interdisciplinary, “always already ideological,” as Berlin has it (679). Moreover, recent scholars understand rhetoric as core to academic work of all sorts, rather than intellectually isolated or professionally marginal. According to David L. Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, Freire and Hooks “implicitly argue for the centrality of rhetoric in the academy, recognizing that finding ways to speak is integrally bound up with the ability to take action” (1). In some ways the field of writing assessment has been a Cinderella stepsister to the study of rhetoric and composition, because, as Brian Huot and Michael Williamson note, assessment has always been about ideology, even and especially at its most “neutral.” Too, the history of assessment is the history of taking action, with the theorizing that underwrote such action emerging into the sunlight only comparatively recently. The last third of the twentieth century has seen the field of writing assessment become what I want to call the New Assessment. Like the New Rhetoric, the New Assessment is interdisciplinary and inevitably local, understood through multiple prisms of ideology, culture, and literacy. The New Assessment creates a mosaic, a single picture of many individual elements understood as a whole, a mosaic that requires a range of perspectives, rather than a single result carved in fossilizing stone. This essay, then, takes as its starting point Brian Huot's 2002 assertion that "writing assessment is the articulation of judgment. Because it's an articulation, writing assessment is always rhetorical." Articulating our judgments—whether about student writing, scholarly articles, or academic programs—is inevitably context-specific, shifting as our audiences and purposes change. Using an

What is the New Rhetoric?

95

interdisciplinary lens to examine instructional assessment allows us—indeed, requires us—to develop a nuanced and robust understanding of what we value. It also gives us the ability to articulate, and then to bridge, what Bob Broad calls the gaps between what we say we value and what we really do value (2003). I want to make three related points about assessment. First, the act of assessment is rhetorical. By “assessment,” I mean three kinds of evaluation. The first type is summative: a high-stakes evaluation, like an exit exam or an accreditation of a program. The second kind of evaluation under assessment’s umbrella is formative, meaning feedback on a work-in-progress, part of a negotiation between, say, the reader and the writer. Finally, assessment includes instructional evaluation, qualitative responses whose intent is to close the gap between teaching and learning. All three forms of assessment require the articulation of judgment and are, therefore, rhetorical. My second point is that the evolution of contemporary assessment as a scholarly field—housed variously in Education, Composition, Psychology, and elsewhere—mirrors in some ways the development of the New Rhetoric. Third, the New Assessment—interdisciplinary assessment that uses a mosaic of methodologies and emerges from shifting social, political, and cultural contexts—can play a valuable role in teaching and learning across the curriculum. My gaze will light on summative and formative assessment when discussing the ways that evolution of assessment as a scholarly field parallels that of the New Rhetoric. It will focus on instructional assessment when talking about teaching and learning across the curriculum. The act of assessment is invariably rhetorical because it involves written or oral articulation of a judgment. That judgment—whether at the classroom, program, or university level—is often but not always about a text or a collection of texts. For example, we assess student work, such as papers, tests, oral presentations. Grading is of course the most naked form of quantitative assessment, but our comments—whether spoken or written, in the margins or at the end of a paper—are also of course assessments, articulating our judgment. Students assess our teaching on end-of-term evaluation forms, in hallway conversations, and on burgeoning internet sites such as Grade My Professor and Rate My Professor. We assess academic programs in reports; in public schools, we produce documents that legislatures require in order to assess our work and justify the funding we receive. There are countless forms that the articulation of a judgment might take. Regardless of the form, such an articulation speaks of what we value and how we value it. The development of “The New Assessment” mirrors at times the evolution of the New Rhetoric, itself inherently interdisciplinary. Both respond to reigning assumptions about style, purpose, audience, as well as to reigning ideologies. (In that sense, as Christopher Burnham points out, all rhetoric is new rhetoric.) The

96

Chapter Seven

assessment equivalent of classical rhetoric dates back to imperial China, with the standardized civil service exam. This standardized evaluation is the first example of summative assessment, defined here as high-stakes end-of-the road gateway assessment: a grade, an end-of-the year law-school test, a test that determines whether the tested get jobs or not. By scoring highly on the Chinese civil service exam, men who were not of noble birth could get jobs. Indeed, it was the only way they could qualify. Anthropologist F. Allan Hanson argues in Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (1993) that this exam established the pattern for later high-stakes standardized tests, because it was the narrowest possible entry point to future success. The stakes were so high that there was a lot of cheating, despite the fact that the punishment for cheating was death. The rise of the middle class in eighteenth-century Europe offers another example of the use of summative assessment as a means of addressing new social and political exigencies, most particularly the problem of how to order a newly emergent meritocracy. The old rules no longer applied in the same ways. New rules had to be designed for the social good, so that people understood their purpose: “Measuring minds to determine one’s intellectual capacity and therefore one’s place in a new kind of society appeared to be the perfect technological solution” (Sacks 281). Indeed, the need for new rules, for public instruction on how to find one’s proper place in a meritocracy, dovetailed with Enlightenment faith in science and technology as sources of “answers to difficult public problems” (281). Summative assessment could use modern science and technology to enact social control that the emergent meritocracy seemed to require. As in imperial China, eighteenth-century European nations sought to narrow the entry point to professional success and prosperity. Foucault’s 1977 claim that testing systems monitor individuals while also fixing them in larger systems of paper, documenting them like insects in a case, builds a case for assessment as a means of ideological and practical control (Kalikoff 112). Compositionist Brian Huot draws on Hanson’s research for his own theorizing (with a small t, as he would put it) of interdisciplinary assessment in (Re) Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning and elsewhere. The discussion of summative assessment and democracy moves from imperial China and eighteenth-century France to America in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), Nicolas Lemann’s history of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Lemann’s political, cultural, and educational history argues that the SAT was born of a like socially progressive goal, one that today we find both idealistic and hubristic: that of identifying an intellectual elite to replace the old-money, Episcopalian, northeastern, white male ruling

What is the New Rhetoric?

97

class with the people that the SATs and their designers considered better qualified to rule. The New Rhetoric emerged (Burnham again) from a reaction against “Current-traditional” rhetoric—rhetoric “characterized by a positivistic view of language resulting in an emphasis on grammatical and mechanical correctness; algorithmic form exemplified in the five-paragraph theme and the modes of exposition; a redaction of the classical topoi; and a linear view of composing” (462). Similarly, the New Assessment was a reaction against Educational Measurement’s positivistic faith in standardized tests and increasingly “efficient” and “scientific” methods of achieving more robust reliability of results. Indeed, the New Assessment can be seen as a journey from a technological focus on reliability to a more holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of validity. Validity is what Pamela Moss calls “the test of a test” (Huot and Williamson 96), how assessments are used and to what end. For example, the rise of portfolios as an assessment strategy reflects the New Assessment’s turn towards validity as well as a determination to understand reliability in several contexts. Portfolios are collections of student work that, in many cases, a team of readers evaluates. Such a collection involves multiple assessments. First, the student assesses her own work and selects accordingly. Usually, she then articulates her judgment about these works, as well as about her trajectory as a learner and the portfolio as a whole, in a reflective introduction. At that point, a team of readers assesses the portfolio. Sometimes, as at Washington State University, a second reader or team assesses the portfolio again, if the first reader or team finds that the portfolio presents special evaluative challenges. So in addition to requiring multiple pieces and kinds of evidence, a portfolio requires multiple kinds of assessment involving additional perspectives. New Assessment’s emphasis on validity has fiscal and labor implications that university administrators find challenging. Assessing portfolios takes more time and labor than selecting, administering, and scoring tests or grading a single paper per student. Moreover, the single mathematical score that emerges from a student’s multiple-choice exam has the sheen of science: such a patina appeals to administrators and politicians alike in the contemporary North American culture of accountability. Assessment scholars tend to consider themselves “responsible” for evidence-based, purposeful, and ethical evaluation rather than accountable, a distinction that is perhaps coarser-grained that it appears. This emphasis on validity, linked as it is to understanding reliability in context, aims at assessment that is both more ethical and more authentic. There is, as Bob Broad argues, often a difference between what we say we value—in our rubrics, assignments, and programs—and what we actually do value while

98

Chapter Seven

we are assessing papers or programs. Interdisciplinary, contextualized assessment considers validity as a way to honor the ethical obligations we incur when evaluating student work. As Norbert Elliot concludes in On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America (2005): The flaws are not solely in the tests that we design but rather in the way the tests are used. To draw a conclusion based on a single assessment given on single day is an error. To make a high-stakes decision based on the single assessment is a tragedy. (355)

Portfolios have limitations as an assessment method, in addition to the administrative challenges they present, but they offer a useful example of the way validity and contextual analysis have become intrinsic to interdisciplinary assessment. In making a case for the New Assessment, I do not suggest that more traditional evaluative assumptions and methods have gone the way of the buffalo. They are clearly reflected in today’s writing rubrics, mandated in most U.S. public schools. Rubrics identify five or six simple criteria on which an essay is evaluated. These criteria might include, for example, purpose, audience, style, mechanical correctness, and format. Traditional assumptions about assessment are also evident in the use of standardized examinations such as the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests in writing, reading, science, and math. Thus, while the use of portfolios has increased, the faith in standardized tests and writing rubrics remains fairly religious. My point, then, is that “the New Assessment”—beginning for the most part in the 1960s and offering, by 2005, diverse theoretical assumptions and qualitative practices—became interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarly work in Composition, Rhetoric, Speech Communication, Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology, rather than only Educational Measurement. Rubrics offer useful information about the texts they assess, but, as Bob Broad argues (2003), they erase nuance and complexity. Broad’s study showed that faculty members use many more assessment categories (some textual and some contextual) when reading student work than any rubric could include. Moreover, rubrics do not value the reflective and formative elements of writing that classrooms, departments, and institutions usually claim to value. It behooves those who assess student work—meaning all of us—to close the gap between what we say we value and what we actually reward. Insights gleaned from the mosaic of interdisciplinary assessment have led some contemporary assessment scholars to conclude that we need to assess the things we value and teach, not merely or primarily the things that are easy and inexpensive to evaluate. Much current interdisciplinary assessment reflects the implications of Thomas Kent’s work on post-process theory. Post-process theory endorses the

What is the New Rhetoric?

99

idea that writing is not a generalizeable process or activity. Kent argues that “Most post-process theorists hold three assumptions about the act of writing: (1) writing is public; (2) writing is interpretive; and (3) writing is situated” (1). Similarly, interdisciplinary assessment usually assumes that writing is a social act and assessment itself is public, interpretive, and situated. While WASLs, SATs, and rubrics live and breathe, much contemporary work on assessment rejects the assumption that there are fixed and universal values in writing, regardless of genre, audience, and purpose. Scholarship has become more mindful of the social, cultural, and political contexts that inform writing and the assessment of writing. Brian Huot’s work articulates these newer values, arguing that assessment should be site-based, locally controlled, contextsensitive, rhetorically based, and accessible (178). In becoming more interdisciplinary, the New Assessment has focused on articulating judgments in ways that are more sensitive to pedagogical, social, and cultural contexts, while emerging more explicitly from the theories that underwrite it. As such, this kind of assessment reflects the insights of qualitative as well as quantitative research; it is also more inclusive, given that historically, ethnic minorities and multilingual students do not test well by traditional measures, because these measures are designed by a homogenous cultural elite. Braiding context, interdisciplinarity, and rhetoric has made assessment a richer site for teaching and learning across the curriculum, which is by way of being my third point. Instructional assessment is the articulation of judgments about writing in the service of student learning, faculty teaching, and closing the gaps between the two. It’s a kind of reflective pedagogy and practice that can transform the way we work. Kathleen Blake Yancey makes distinctions among three curricula: the taught curriculum (what teachers say and do); the experienced curriculum (what students hear and understand); and the lived curriculum (what students already know, what they bring to the classroom). Sometimes there are canyons between the curricula delivered and the curricula received: hence, the hallway plaint: “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.” Sometimes, too, we teach as though the lived curriculum doesn’t exist, as though students are blank slates waiting for us to inscribe, empty vessels waiting for us to fill, and other traditional metaphors for teaching and learning. Yet plenty of educational scholarship suggests that what students already know has a direct and ongoing impact on how and whether they learn what we want them to learn. Finding out who our students are and what they know—about the classroom subject area, about their beliefs regarding teaching and learning, about themselves as students—can help close the crevices between teaching and learning by informing our vision of the course and our daily pedagogical choices. For example, an anonymous information literacy survey on the first day of class allows a teacher to understand, in the aggregate, what the class knows

100

Chapter Seven

and what it needs to know. Similarly, an anonymous first-day-of-class demographic survey tells us about the mix of part-time and full-time students, returning students and first-time university students, majors and non-majors, first-year and senior-year students who make up the class. That information can make a surprising amount of difference to how we teach and how our mixed audience learns. For example, I was surprised a few years ago by learning, belatedly, that most of the students in a 300-level writing course were in their first quarter of university work, while a handful were graduating seniors. At first, this knowledge seemed irrelevant to our discussion of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, a discussion that made our ethnic biases transparent. These biases were problematized by gender assumptions but also, and this surprised me, by the fact that most of the students were new to college while a small but expressive knot of students were graduating. The experience underscored Tatum’s thesis that African American students support each other in the face of daily bias that white students don’t experience, recognize, or acknowledge; it also made me realize that I could have come to a teachable moment, and helped students reach one themselves, a lot sooner if I had understood from the beginning the diversity of university experience represented in the classroom. Who’d have guessed? Instructional assessment, like all assessment, works best when based on evidence rather than on guesses. One size of teaching doesn’t fit all in any course. It is not the imp of the perverse who determines the success of one learning activity and the failure of another or, more tellingly, the success of a learning activity in one section of a course and its failure in another iteration of the same course. It’s the students: their experience, goals, knowledge, abilities, identities, preferences, and beliefs. We design courses from a combination of experience and guesswork. Our experience has value and inflects our guesses. But, once the course begins, gathering and interpreting data helps make pedagogical decisions based on evidence. Instructional assessment helps us hold our classroom work to the same standard of evidence we require of our scholarship. Moreover, students themselves can, if asked, help us solve pedagogical problems. The middle of the academic term provides a startlingly useful opportunity to gather data from students on their learning in the course. This data, and its analysis with the students, helps fine-tune the course activities and assignments so that they are more effective. The data collection and analysis focus on student learning, not faculty teaching. The distinction is important, especially amidst public and administrative cries for accountability. It’s not a performance review. Instead, it’s a way to practice our practices, to learn from our students. We have

What is the New Rhetoric?

101

disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and methodological expertise. But they know something about whether they have learned and why or why not. A midterm class interview, also called a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID) is a twenty-to-twenty-five-minute anonymous and voluntary classroom discussion on two questions: what elements of the course support your learning? What elements of the course do not support your learning and how could they be improved? Best facilitated by someone other than the faculty member in her absence, someone who doesn’t know the students, the midterm class interview provides rich and robust data about student learning (“Midterm Class Interviews”). Faculty members willing to invite someone to their course for an SGID are those willing to adjust a course for a particular group—and every group is heartbreakingly particular—based on evidence. Of course, the faculty member exercises her own judgment about how to understand this evidence, what pedagogical changes to make in response, and what issues simply require a clearer rationale. College professors often find the prospect of voluntarily soliciting additional student feedback alarming, an invitation to a beheading (their own). But there is a huge difference between inviting students to complete a performance review (or a customer satisfaction survey, as one of my colleagues calls it) and asking them to participate in a learning assessment. Moreover, students tend to be fairminded in this exercise: they are grateful to be asked their opinions and see their suggestions taken seriously, whether or not each idea is adapted for classroom use. Certainly, though, instructional assessment is not for the faint of heart. It calls for an openness to new ideas that humans find easier to ask of other humans—students, say—than to demonstrate. Yet making pedagogical decisions based on evidence helps us hold our classroom work to the same ethical and intellectual standards we value in our research. Similarly, creating a culture of evidence in which to assess programs and universities rewards the effort, aligning our work as researchers, writers, teachers, and readers. The New Assessment has rich implications for teaching and learning, in part because assessment is always rhetorical and in part because the parallels between assessment and rhetoric as scholarly fields have significant instructional loft. Assessment by definition articulates judgments, and these judgments have considerable pedagogical, cultural, intellectual, and social influence. Assessment is, like the New Rhetoric, reflective, in Berlin’s sense, of the social and political contexts from which it springs. Finally, the New Assessment helps us to articulate previously unarticulated educational goals and close the gap between what we value and what we say we value. Embracing the challenges of interdisciplinary assessment moves us towards the articulated and shared values of communities within and beyond the university. In this move,

102

Chapter Seven

we temper the technologies of accountability with participatory knowledge of what Thomas Miller calls the civic imagination (41). *This essay benefited from the trenchant comments of Beverly Conner and Ann Putnam.

Works Cited Berlin, James A. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” Reprinted from College English 50:5 (September 1988): 477-94. Rpt. in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. 679-699. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. —. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Broad, Bob. What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing. Logan, Utah: Utah University Press, 2003. Durst, Russel K. You are Here: Readings on Higher Education for College Writers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Elliot, Norbert. On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. Ferry, Christopher. “Theory, Research, Practice, Work.” Under Construction: Working at the Intersection of Composition, Theory, Research and Practice. Eds. Chris M. Anson and Christine Farris. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998. 11-18. Huot, Brian. (Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning. Logan, Utah: Utah University Press, 2002. Huot, Brian and Michael M. Williamson. “What Difference the Differences Make: Theoretical and Epistemological Differences in Writing Assessment Practice.” Under Construction: Working at the Intersection of Composition, Theory, Research and Practice. Eds. Chris M. Anson and Christine Farris. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998. 93-107. Kalikoff, Beth. “Berlin, New York, Baghdad: Assessment as Democracy.” Journal of Writing Assessment 2:2 (2005) 109-124. Kent, Thomas. “Introduction.” Post-Process Theory: Beyond the WritingProcess Paradigm. Ed. Thomas Kent. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 1-6. “Midterm Class Interviews.” Center for Instructional Development and Research website. 7 November 2006: .

What is the New Rhetoric?

103

Miller, Thomas P. “Rhetoric Within and Without Composition: Reimagining the Civic.” In Shamoon et al., 32-41. Sacks, Peter. “Inventing Intelligence: The Origins of Mental Measurement.” In Durst. 65-284. Shamoon, Linda K., Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, and Robert A. Schwegler. Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Q Boynton/Cook, 2000. Wallace, David L. and Helen Rothschild Ewald. Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Class. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Villanueva, Jr., Victor, Ed. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997. Yancey, Kathleen Blake. Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Logan, Utah: Utah University Press, 1998.

CHAPTER EIGHT MEA MEDIOCRITAS: MARY SIDNEY AND THE EARLY MODERN RHETORIC OF MODESTY PATRICIA PENDER

The consciousness of defying a prescribed role prompts women to use the modesty topos with vivid intensity. As Virginia Woolf and many others have noted, the primary obstacle a woman writer (or speaker) must overcome is the societal norm which she has internalized. We may find a bitter irony in the way accomplished Renaissance women1internalized the commands to silence that were so prevalent in their culture. —Margaret Hannay, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (1985) Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation. —Francis Bacon, “Of Vain-glory,” Essays (1597)

Why are the most celebrated moments in the early history of women’s writing declarations of inadequacy, apology, and self-abnegation, and why have we regularly reproduced such judgments in our critical recovery of their work? Modesty tropes (“I am not an author”; “this is not literature”) constitute some of the most ubiquitous and misunderstood features of early modern women’s writing. Over the last 40 years in which this literature has emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry, women’s professions of modesty have routinely been read as literal evidence of their authors’ intentions and aspirations. In contrast to the complex ways in which we have learnt to appreciate men’s modesty rhetoric (as a cover for bravura or a statement of poetic ambition, for instance), women’s modesty rhetoric is usually read as a straightforward statement of ineptitude and illegitimacy. Yet as studies of the humility topoi employed by canonical male authors have established, the poetry of praise and the rhetoric of subjection are elaborately overcoded discourses in the early modern period. In this essay I argue that by reading early modern women’s modesty tropes literally we have

What is the New Rhetoric?

105

employed an untenable double standard – one that imposes an anachronistic uniformity on women’s rhetorical self-fashioning. Unpacking the gendered preconceptions we bring to the study of early modern women’s texts, I suggest that new rhetorical readings of women’s modesty tropes will help us not only develop more sophisticated and nuanced understandings of their work, but will also illuminate their canny manipulation of, and contribution to, the broader currents of rhetorical theory and practice. Modesty tropes resonate in myriad manifestations throughout early modern women’s writing, constituting some of the most representative and anthologized moments in early women’s literary history. One of the most arresting features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s writing is surely the regularity with which such women disavow the role of author.2 From Anne Askew in 1547, to Aphra Behn in 1688, early modern women deploy the panoply of modesty tropes, the most striking of which being that species of occupatio or apology in which the woman writer denies her own authorial agency.3 Famous examples include the prolific Margaret Cavendish’s disclaimer (placed at the conclusion to her enormous first volume of poetry): “A poet I am neither born nor bred” (214), and Anne Bradstreet’s “Prologue” (to a volume that included her ambitious reworking of Sir Walter Ralegh’s The History of the World), where she writes: “To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings, / . . . For my mean pen are too superior things” (15). A bravura example of the formula occurs in Queen Elizabeth I’s “Latin Oration at Oxford University” (1566), where her opening gambit is a peculiarly regal variant of the line “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” (87). These modesty tropes mobilize an extreme form of self-cancellation and have come to occupy a prominent role in scholarship that seeks to document patriarchal oppression in the early modern period. As my first epigraph above suggests, the early modern woman writer’s denial of authorship is frequently read as evidence that she has “internalized the commands to silence so prevalent in [her] culture.”4 Mary Ellen Lamb notes that for early modern authors, “publishing by either sex was considered somewhat plebian at this time, and editors often claimed to publish a work without the knowledge of the author.” She argues, however, that, “for women, this modesty topos was especially acute” (117). Cheryl Glenn argues that “[f]rom Roper to Askew to Elizabeth, each Renaissance woman writer confronted major obstacles, from the moment she entered the male-dominated world of writing and literature until she apologized for having written and for being a woman” (171). The logic behind the critical tradition that reads women’s modesty tropes literally is understandable; in fact, it has fuelled the development of the discipline: early modern women writers claim they are unworthy and we assume they have internalized the misogynist mores of contemporary conduct literature.

106

Chapter Eight

Early modern women claim they are not really authors and we see them as submitting to patriarchal definitions of literary merit and authority. The very agenda of the first feminist scholarship in this field makes this hermeneutic almost inevitable: the concern to document the patriarchal oppression of the past and the desire to establish a genealogy of feminist forbears both inform the practice of reading women’s conventional expressions of humility as literal evidence of their oppression. But while there are strong reasons for this critical tradition to have developed and indeed flourished, there are also strong reasons to subject it to scrutiny. Literary histories that focus on the woman writer’s passive internalization of patriarchal mores – particularly the injunction to silence – create certain problematic legacies for feminist scholarship, most crucially in the priority they place on “original” composition and “self-expression” and in their concomitant commitment to authorial intention. The early agenda of feminist literary history informed the desire to read women writers’ conventional expressions of humility as literal evidence of their oppression, and to read their expressions of anger as participating in a seamless continuum of feminist defiance. However, the result is often a criticism which, in its insistence on the autobiographical transparency or truth-value of the woman writer’s self-representation, denies her texts the condition of literature and which, in its monolithic and hegemonic construction of patriarchal power, rewrites the statements she does articulate as “silence.” I suggest that reading women’s modesty tropes literally robs them of individual particularity and historical specificity. If we read early modern women’s modesty tropes primarily for their “truth value” they will inevitably yield to us a fairly repetitive, familiar story of women’s gendered oppression (“I am unworthy, I am unworthy, I am unworthy”). Ironically, to read early modern women’s modesty tropes literally is – effectively – to overlook the ways in which they signify rhetorically, as literature. Moreover, the first self-consciously feminist scholarship on early modern women writers tended to rely on causal model of the relationship between patriarchal cultural scripts and women’s lived experience. In his 1582 Monument of Matrons, for instance, Thomas Bentley writes “[t]here is nothing that becometh a maid better than sobernes, silence, shamefastnes, and chastitie, both of body & mind. For these things being once lost, she is no more a maid, but a strumpet in the sight of God.”5 Margaret Hannay claims that, “the fact that Bentley was writing clichés exemplifies the way in which a woman’s desire for godliness was habitually used to silence her.”6 In such comments, feminist scholarship establishes a direct link between conduct literature and women’s oppression: Thomas Bentley adjured women to silence and consequently they kept silence. There is surprisingly little room in this model for women’s engagement with or resistance to cultural norms, nor is there adequate

What is the New Rhetoric?

107

recognition that while conduct manuals are pedagogical treatises designed to police certain behaviors, they do not necessarily, or only ever partially, succeed in this ambition. As Elaine Hobby reminds us in Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-88 (1988), “Law guidebooks, conduct books, sermons and other explicitly ideological texts can only tell us about the limits of femininity – about what women were meant to be like, according to these dominant ideas” (8). In illustration of her point, Hobby argues that John Ray’s 1670 assertion that “England is the paradise of women” cannot tell us anything about the factual existence of women in the period, but rather that “the existence of this assertion suggests a need to assert it. It does not tell us much about whether readers then would have agreed with it” (8). Ironically, the logic of causality employed in literal readings of women’s modesty tropes contains the potential to endow misogynist discourse with an authority it scarcely claimed itself. It is doubly ironic that the source cited here as evidence for the silencing of women is itself an enormous compendium of women’s writing. Thomas Bentley’s Monument of Matrones is not a book debarring women from literacy and learning but on the contrary a book explicitly designed to foster and encourage these pursuits. Furthermore, by reading women’s modesty tropes literally we subject them to a gendered critical double standard. We do not, for instance, read Milton’s expressions of modesty literally. In the Invocation to Book IX of Paradise Lost, where Milton presents himself as “Nor skilled nor studious” and wonders if he will be able to find an “answerable style” for his “celestial patroness,” the image that we get is not one of Milton’s deep-seated insecurity. Instead, it is one of his colossal ambition.7 After all, he is presenting himself as unskilled in precisely the kind of genre he disdains – “Not that which justly gives heroic name/ To person or to poem” (IX. 40) – and he is testifying to the nightly visitation of his celestial muse, who dictates to him in his sleep and “Inspires easy” his “unpremeditated verse” (IX. 23-24). What in a woman writer would be read as an admission of her inadequacy and an apology for her presumption is here read as the masterly claim to vocation it actually is. Instead of sympathizing with Milton’s insecurities, literary critics have been more readily astounded by his temerity. While I do not claim that there exist a multitude of women writers (or male writers for that matter) who possess half of Milton’s audacity, I do believe that we can read the works by women we do have access to in more interesting and productive ways if we grant to them a modicum of the complexity that we routinely ascribe to Milton. As these examples demonstrate, the modesty topos occupies a privileged position in the critical tradition that seeks to document early modern women’s patriarchal oppression. Modesty has assumed an almost phantasmatic character in early modern women’s studies – to the extent that almost all women’s self-

108

Chapter Eight

representations can ultimately be read as deployments of this trope. I would argue, however, that in the theoretical frameworks examined here the modesty topos is employed to silence women, not by early modern patriarchs or even by women writers themselves, but by a critical tradition that, however inadvertently, continues to underrate women’s rhetorical sophistication. In what follows I offer a revisionist rhetorical analysis of the modesty tropes employed by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke in her dedicatory poems to the Psalmes of David. I am less interested in the political subtexts of the dedicatory poems (which have been well-documented by Margaret Hannay and others) than I am in the contradictory implications of their modesty rhetoric – an understanding of which promises to shift our understanding of early modern modesty from the general and generic to the gendered particular. Reading Mary Sidney’s modesty as a “doubled discourse” uncovers the unexpectedly broad spectrum of suggestion and insinuation afforded by one exceptional woman’s rhetorical repertoire. In contrast to the critical tradition that reads Sidney’s modesty topoi as a literal sign of her gendered subjection, I uncover the surprisingly competitive and ambitious subtexts of her own self-representation and the relationships she depicts with her queen, Elizabeth and her brother, Philip.

Mea Mediocritas: “My Muse Offends” Much of our understanding of Mary Sidney’s sense of herself as an author comes from her prefatory poems to The Psalmes of David, “Even now that care” (a poem that has also been anthologized as “To the Thrise Sacred Queen Elizabeth”) and “To the Angel Spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney.”8 If twentieth-century scholarship has tended to perceive Mary Sidney’s religious translation of the psalms as an appropriately unassuming activity for a woman writer, attention to early modern literary tastes alerts us instead to the ambitiousness of her undertaking. In his Defence of Poesie, Mary’s elder brother Philip had identified the psalms as “the highest matter in the noblest form” and sometime after 1578 had embarked on a translation of the Old Testament material into English metrical verse. At the time of his death in 1586 he had completed 43 of 150 poems. Mary Sidney continued this project after Philip’s death and throughout the 1590s, translating another 107 psalms and incorporating and revising her brother’s selections. The “Sidneian Psalms,” as John Donne called them, circulated widely in manuscript during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and survive in seventeen different manuscript copies.9 The prefatory poems, however, survive in only one extant copy, known as the Tixall manuscript. The Tixall manuscript is an elaborate presentation copy, transcribed by John Davies of Hereford in an elegant secretary hand with

What is the New Rhetoric?

109

gold flourishes. It is thought to have been designed as a gift for Elizabeth to commemorate her proposed visit to Mary Sidney’s Wilton estate in 1599. However the queen postponed her visit and, for reasons that have been lost to us, the manuscript was never presented. In the opening lines of her dedication to Elizabeth, Mary Sidney presents herself in the humble guise of her sovereign’s “handmaiden.” The poem begins with an elaborate apology in which the weight of Elizabeth’s public duties casts Sidney’s poetic offering as an impertinence: Even now that Care which on thy Crowne attends and with thy happy greatnes dayly growes Tells me thrise sacred Queene my Muse offends, And out of respect to thee the line outgoes. (EN 1-4)

The anthropomorphism of the final line suggests that even the poem registers the offense entailed in the poet’s act of writing. In a convoluted conceit, Sidney endows the poem with an agency beyond her own, and her poem’s very meter falters in deference to Elizabeth. Representing the poem’s obsequious agency both as an internalization of the poet’s respect for the queen, and as a force outside her control, Mary Sidney offers us, on the one hand, a microcosmic model of the relationship between cultural norms and literary works that this essay is at pains to interrogate, and on the other, a glimpse of a relationship between text and subtext that I am equally eager to uncover. While the asymmetry between author and poem that this conceit sets up offers Mary Sidney the opportunity to present her work as doubly deferential, it simultaneously opens up the possibility that her poem might say something other than that which the poet herself professes. It is precisely this asymmetry between intention and effect, between text and subtext, which this essay in concerned to uncover. If this meta-textual move is not just imposed on Sidney by later critics, but actually thematized by her at the start of her poem, it behooves us to read between the lines as it were, in the spaces she has opened up for subterfuge. In her second stanza, Sidney endeavors to exonerate the offense of her writing by an appeal to the queen’s grace and wisdom: Yet dare I so as humbleness may dare cherish some hope they may acceptance finde; not waighing less thy state, lighter thy Care, but knowing more thy grace, abler thy minde. (EN 9-12)

110

Chapter Eight

Sidney offers her own humility as the passport that would safeguard the poem’s passage, but it is Elizabeth’s virtues that will more effectively excuse the poet’s offense. The modesty trope of authorial hesitation is augmented by a compliment that presents the poem’s ultimate acceptance as proof of Elizabeth’s bounty. However, the rhetorical figure of chiasmus embedded in this display of modesty conveys a more manipulative message; not only do the queen’s grace and wisdom guarantee her acceptance of the book, but the queen’s acceptance of the book also guarantees her reputation for grace and wisdom. In her dedicatory poem to Philip, Mary Sidney’s self-representation is similarly self-deprecating at the surface level and subversive at the level of subtext. In the opening stanza, she provides what can be read as one of the quintessential disavowals of authorial agency in early modern women’s literature. She writes: To thee pure sprite, to thee alone’s addres’t this coupled worke, by double int’rest thine: First rais’de by thy blest hand, and what is mine inspird by thee, thy secrett power imprest. (AS 1-4)

In these lines Mary Sidney presents her brother Philip as the true author of her text.1 While the Psalmes is a “coupled worke” – a notion that initially seems to offer the prospect of joint authorship – Sidney implies that in fact all parts of this coupling are Philip’s. The work was conceived by Philip, nurtured by Philip, inspired by Philip, and continues to be motivated by Philip. Mary Sidney’s disavowal of her own authorial agency is here apparently absolute; in a phrase that I will return to shortly, the work is Philip’s “by double int’rest.” Yet the emphatic self-effacement Mary Sidney enacts in these lines is, ironically, a direct consequence of power of her poetic persona and the subsequent authority of her own argument. Despite her protestations, what Gerard Genette calls the illocutionary force of the dedication – the performative power of the utterance – is Mary Sidney’s; is, in her own words, “what is mine.” In an emotive invocation to her brother, Sidney proceeds to apologize for what she construes as her presumption in attempting to complete the Psalmes: Yet here behold, (o wert thou to behold!) this finish’t now, thy matchlesse Muse begunne, the rest but peec’t, as left by thee undone. Pardon (oh blest soule) presumption too too bold: if love and zeale such error ill become ‘tis zealous love, Love which hath never done, Nor can enough in world of words unfold. (AS 22-28)

What is the New Rhetoric?

111

Negotiating and disavowing the authorial role, Mary Sidney deploys a multitude of modesty topoi: hers is the “mortal stuffe;” Philip’s is “divine.” His poems are “Immortal Monuments” inspired by a “matchlesse Muse;” hers are “sadd Characters . . . of simple love,” which are inspired neither by “art nor skill.” Sidney refers to the completed Psalmes as “this half maimed piece,” worries that in her “presumption too too bold,” her “Muse offends” and dares to present her poetic offering “as humblenese may dare.” She seems to disparage the originality of her contribution, implicitly constructing translation as a degraded literary activity, when she describes: “The stuff not ours, our worke no curious thing,” and she maintains that in translating the Psalmes, her aim was “to praise” rather than “to aspire.” Until fairly recently, literary history has been content to value Mary Sidney according to her own ostensible estimation, despite the fact that Philip was responsible for less than one third of the completed psalm sequence. Yet as a closer look at the dedicatory rhetoric suggests, and as the editors of Sidney’s Collected Works have tentatively suggested in their recent edition, “the apparent self abnegation of the speaker [in these poems] is somewhat illusory” (I: 108). At the simplest level, as Sidney’s editors have pointed out, the sincerity of the speaker – the extent to which we can read the prefatory poems as the expression of Mary Sidney’s “personal voice” – is compromised by the simple fact that there are two dedications (I: 108). In “Even now that Care,” Sidney presents the Psalmes to her “thrise sacred Queene” as the observance due to a sovereign: And I the cloth in both our names present, A liverie robe to bee bestowed by thee: small parcel of that undischarged rent, from which nor paines, nor paiments can us free. (EN 33-36)

However in “To the Angel Spirit” she dedicates the Psalmes soley to her brother, “To thee pure sprite, to thee alone addres’t,” thus revoking or at least redistributing the gift she had made to Elizabeth. Similarly, in her poem to Elizabeth Mary Sidney presents the Psalmes to her monarch on behalf of both herself and her brother: “And I the cloth in both our names present.” However when she apostrophizes Philip directly in her dedicatory elegy, “Receive these Hymes, theise obsequies receive,” she states that if the poems are to bear any name, they will bear his name alone: “if any marke of thy sweet sprite appeare,/ well are they borne, no title else shall beare” (AS, 86-87). Mobilizing competing discourses of public and private publication, in the first instance Mary Sidney evokes a royal audience for her text, and in the following poem, recasts this public offering as an intimate exchange between

112

Chapter Eight

brother and sister. To Philip she insists that her work is a labor of love; he will pardon her presumption in finishing the Psalmes because: . . . it hath no further scope to goe, nor other other purpose but to honor thee. Thee in thy workes where all the Graces bee, As little streames which all their all doe flowe to their great sea, due tributes gratefull fee: so press my thoughts my burthened thoughts in mee, To pay the debt of Infinits I owe. (AS 29-35)

Sidney employs the language of indebtedness throughout these poems, presenting her work to Elizabeth as “These Postes of Dutie and Goodwill / [that] presse to offer what their Senders owe” (EN, 18-20). The Psalmes are a tribute – in both senses of that word – and in each case, the magnitude of the debt the poet owes, to monarch or to sibling, authorizes the transgression implied in her act of writing. The notion of the Psalmes as “by double int’rest” Philip’s evokes the suggestive parallel of another famous narrative of textual generation – one that occurs in the prefatory material to Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. In his dedicatory epistle, “To my dear lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke,” Philip employs the rhetoric of parthenogenesis, describing his text as “this child which I am loath to foster” (57), and claiming Mary Sidney as the inspiration and motivation for his poetic project. In a neat reversal of authorial roles, Philip here identifies Mary as the inspiration for his text. Philip locates Mary as the key to the text’s conception, writing that “you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment.” Manipulating the modesty trope of the dedicatee’s request, Philip positions his sister as his text’s true owner and future guardian: the work “is done only for you, only to you.” In the 1593 edition of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and all subsequent early modern editions, Philip’s narrative of the Arcadia’s conception is augmented by an account of the countess’ role in bringing the text to print. In his epistle “To the Reader,” Mary Sidney’s secretary and co-editor Hugh Sanford defends the editorial choices of the 1593 edition against the negative precedent of the “unauthorized” 1590 Arcadia edited by Fulke Greville. He writes: The disfigured face, gentle reader, wherewith this work not long since appeared to the common view, moved that noble lady to whose honor consecrated, to whose protection it was committed, to take I hand the wiping away those spots wherewith the beauties thereof were unworthily blemished. (59)

What is the New Rhetoric?

113

Sanford credits Mary Sidney as the authority behind the 1593 Arcadia, stating that it was completed “most by her doing, all by her directing.” Given Mary Sidney’s “honorable labor” to produce the text, “it is now,” Sanford argues, “by more then one interest The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia - done, as it was, for her; as it is, by her” (60). The gendered assumptions that underwrite our current understanding of Renaissance literary history have meant that when Philip ascribes the authority of his text to his sister, we have read this gesture as a metaphorical flourish, but when Mary assigns the authority of her text to her brother, we have assumed that she was in earnest. However, the convoluted constructions of authorship and ownership that preface both the Arcadia and the Psalmes allow us to rethink such simplistic ascriptions of agency. In each of these prefaces, the Sidneys strive to delineate the contours of their collaborative project, and in doing so they generate a complex dialogue about the terms of authorial agency, originality and authority. To return to Mary Sidney’s terms in her dedicatory poems, each text is “a coupled work,” which “once in two, now in one Subject goe.” Both more and less than one, the authorial role in these prefaces is multiple and fragmented. There is no autonomous individual author, but rather a dynamic transference of debt and license between a variety of authorizing agents: God, David, Elizabeth, Philip, and Mary.

“But Soft My Muse”: The Exigencies of Inexpressibility One of the recurring modesty topoi of Mary Sidney’s prefatory poems is the “inexpressibility topos” that is a standard feature of early modern encomia. Sidney is unable to describe Elizabeth because Elizabeth’s virtues are beyond description: But soft my muse, Thy pitch is earthly lowe; forbeare this heav’n, where only Eagles flie. (EN 79-80)

She is similarly unable to do justice to Philip’s legacy because that legacy is beyond compare: How workes my harte, my sences stricken dumbe? that would thee more, then ever hart could showe, and all too short who knewe thee best doth knowe There lives no witt that may thy praise become. (AS 60-63)

114

Chapter Eight

In a logical extension of this self-effacing gesture, Mary signs the Tixall version of “The Angell spirit,” “By the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney,” a deferential move which seems to insist on her humble anonymity and on the incommensurability of the siblings’ literary labors. Yet Sidney also uses this signature at the conclusion to several rather peremptory business letters: “It is the Sister of Sir Philip Sidney who yow ar to right and who will worthely deserve the same.” 10 In this context, such a signature is more grandiloquent and impressive than submissive. Mary Sidney signs herself thus, not to imply her subordinate relationship to a male sibling, but to impress upon the reader her credentials as one of the most important and influential figures in Elizabethan England. As Margaret Hannay notes, “far from abasing herself as merely Sidney’s sister,” in this inscription “she proudly claims both family connections and personal worth” (“Bearing” 13). Mary Sidney manipulates Philip’s name and fame in order to establish her own authority; in such claims, Philip is very much her creature. The “incomparable” motif, like the inexpressibility topos, relies on what I am calling the doubled discourse of early modern modesty rhetoric. In his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), a popular early modern rhetorical handbook dedicated to Mary Sidney, Abraham Fraunce illustrates different schemes and tropes by reference to Philip’s Arcadia. In doing so he identifies several species of irony that duplicate the structure of the inexpressibility topos. Praeteritio, he writes, is “a kind of pretended omitting or letting slip of that which indeed we elegantly note out in the very shewe of praetermission, as when we say; I let this pass; I passe over it with silence.” Praeteritio is related to aposiopesis or “Reticentia,” which is “when the course of speach begun is in such sort staid, that some part thereof not uttred is nevertheles perceived.” By referring to herself as “the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney,” Mary Sidney seems to foil any attempt at comparison between herself and her brother. However, if we read Mary Sidney’s modesty tropes rhetorically – specifically through a handbook that, as its dedicatee and author’s principle patron, she is likely to have read – we can see that this comparison is precisely what she “elegantly note[s] out in the very shewe of praetermission.” In this sense, it is the very designation Mary Sidney chooses to efface herself with that invites comparison with her more famous brother; by referring to herself as “the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney” she effectively makes such comparison inevitable. In depicting her relationship with her brother, Sidney frequently foregrounds the crisis of comparison that underwrites early modern tropes of inexpressibility. Mourning Philip’s loss in her poem to Elizabeth, Sidney presents a text that: . . . once in two, now in one subject goe, the poorer left, the richer reft awaye: Who better might (O might ah word of woe.)

What is the New Rhetoric?

115

have giv’n for mee what I for him defraye. (EN 21-24)

The syntax here is complicated and ambiguous and allows for a variety of responses. The primary sense of this verse is that Philip might have better given for Mary what Mary now gives for Philip. Had Mary died and Philip completed the Psalmes, she suggests, we would have been left a much-improved text. And yet the potential ambiguities of the syntax, combined with the metrical rhythm of the stanza, recast the final lines of the stanza as a rhetorical question: “Who better might have given for me what I for him defray?” Readers might answer this question in one of several conflicting ways. “Who better?” might refer to the task Mary Sidney has undertaken. To the rhetorical question “who better might have continued Philip’s project” the obvious answer is no one; there is none better than Philip himself to continue this project. However, since by the time of the dedicatory poem’s composition the project was to a large extent complete, the question might be seen to ask “who better to have carried on his legacy, than I?” Alternatively, Mary Sidney might be asking, more boldly, who will venerate and continue her project as she has venerated and continued Philip’s? In either case, professions of modesty at the literal level give way to more subversive subtextual assertions in which Mary Sidney establishes her claim to ownership of the Sidney Psalmes. Sidney’s dedication to Elizabeth employs the same technique of embedding an implicitly subversive modesty trope in the form of a rhetorical question. In an analogy familiar to Elizabethan audiences, Sidney describes the English nation as a metaphorical extension of Elizabeth’s body: There humble Lawrells in thy shadowes growne To garland others woold, themselves repine. Thy brest the Cabinet, thy seat the shrine, where Muses hang their vowed memories: where Wit, where Art, where all that is divine conceived best, and best defended lies. (EN 43-48)

Representing Elizabeth’s England as a veritable paradise for poets, Mary Sidney once more invokes the “incomparable” comparison, demanding: Which if men did not (as they doe) confesse, and wronging worlds woold otherwise consent: Yet here who minds so meet a Patrones for Authors state or writings argument? (EN 49-52)

116

Chapter Eight

In these lines, Mary Sidney’s modesty discourse veils the sort of covert challenge to Elizabeth’s self-image that, following the new historicist scholarship of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, we have come to appreciate in the poetry of Elizabeth’s male courtiers.11 In contending that all men find Elizabeth preeminent, Sidney simultaneously raises the possibility that they might potentially withhold that judgment. And again, rhythm and syntax conspire to present the last two lines of this verse as a rhetorical question. In demanding “Here who minds so meet a Patrones?” Mary Sidney seems to be asking where in England one might possibly find a literary patron to rival Elizabeth. Given the evidence of Mary Sidney’s own patronage activities, and the contemporary reputation of the rival court-away-from-court that she established at Wilton, the question seems decidedly disingenuous. The answer must surely be: in Mary Sidney herself, the poet who writes this now. What I have identified as the undercurrents of competition that pervade Mary Sidney’s dedication to Elizabeth culminate in the concluding stanzas to the poem. Sidney’s immediate subject in the following stanza is not her queen but her own role as a writer, and the probable fortunes of her literary labor. Foregrounding the asymmetry between the poem’s author and the construction of the poet as a figure in the poem that we have been examining, Mary Sidney addresses herself in the second person singular: Thy utmost can but offer to hir sight Her handmaid’s taske, which most her will endeeres. (EN 89-90)

It is, specifically, the representation of herself as “handmaid,” and the construction of her literary work as a dutiful “taske” that most “endeeres” her to Elizabeth. Mary Sidney proceeds to present herself in abject guise, petitioning for Elizabeth’s favor: “And pray unto thy paines life from that light/ Which lively lightsome Court, and Kingdome cheeres” (EN, 91-21). However, the specter of rivalry hinted at in the allusion to Sidney’s own literary “court” at Wilton lends a potenitally pejorative cast to her portrayal of Elizabeth’s court as “lively” and “lightsome.” Moreover, in referring to her own literary labor as “paines,” Mary Sidney counteracts previous representations of her contribution to the Psalmes as insignificant or negligible. Sidney goes on to praise Elizabeth by comparing her to the subject of the Psalmes themselves, King David: What wish shee may (farre past hir living Peeres And Rivall still to Judas Faithfull King) In more then hee and more triumphant yeares, Sing what God doth, and doo what men may sing.

What is the New Rhetoric?

117

(EN 93-96)

Elizabeth, outstripping her earthly “Peeres,” is upheld as an honorable rival to “Judas Faithful King,” and while the Davidic analogy is outwardly complimentary, it is also, in the context of ongoing Elizabethan religious controversies, explicitly political and implicitly Protestant. As Margaret Hannay has argued, the subtext of Protestant advocacy that is at work in the poem as a whole places Mary Sidney’s address to Elizabeth firmly within the tradition of admonitory dedication.12 In this context, the final line of Mary Sidney’s dedication to her queen reads as a resounding, almost triumphant, imperative: Elizabeth is exhorted to “Sing what God doth, and doo what men may sing.” The complexity of the relationship Mary Sidney forges with Elizabeth is drawn into sharp relief when the poet foregrounds the fact that the “subject” of her dedication is the monarch whose “subject” the poet is: a lexical opportunity Sidney manipulates to the full in the following lines: Let subject be of some inspired stile, Till then the object of her subjects joye. (EN 87-88)

In the context of the preceding analysis, Sidney’s address to Elizabeth acquires a distinctly didactic cast: as long as Mary Sidney’s object is to praise Elizabeth, Elizabeth must grant that her subject, Mary Sidney, and indeed her subject’s subject, the Psalmes, are of “some inspired stile.”

Exercises in Subjection: Modesty Rhetoric as Counter Discourse As we have seen, Mary Sidney’s dedicatory poems deploy a range of modesty tropes, from conventional expressions of dedicatory decorum to abject postures of self-abnegation and effacement. These poems have had a strong impact on the way twentieth-century scholars have reconstructed Mary Sidney’s sense of vocation, or lack thereof, producing Mary Sidney as the example par excellence of the woman writer who felt that she could not, or should not, call herself an author. While Mary Sidney’s modesty rhetoric has been read as paradigmatic of a pervasive crisis of confidence affecting early women writers more generally, the very centrality of these poems within this critical tradition offers us the opportunity to question its underlying assumptions. We have seen how, from a position of ostensible humility and powerlessness, Mary Sidney is able to command Elizabeth what to “sing” and how to “doo,” and to claim authority for and ownership of a text that she simultaneously presents as her brother’s. In

118

Chapter Eight

doing so she deftly manipulates the paradoxical logic governing relations of power between the praiser and the object of praise in early modern encomia. Attending to the doubled discourse of modesty in Mary Sidney’s dedicatory verse allows us to challenge homogenizing, monolithic, and anachronistic assumptions about women writers’ access to and facility with the resources of early modern rhetoric. The final third of “To the Angell spirit,” for instance, concerns the fate of Philip’s “incomparable” literary works, and by extension, it simultaneously examines Mary Sidney’s role in perpetuating those works. Sidney describes Philip’s works in an interesting variation of the conventional monumental analogy: As godly buildings to some glorious ende cut of by fate, before the Graces hadde each wondrous part in all their beauties cladde, Yet so much done, as Art could not amende; So thy rare workes to which no witt can adde, in all mens eies, which are not blindly madde, Beyond compare above all praise, extende. (AS 64-70)

Mary Sidney presents Philip’s works as “godly buildings” whose completion was interrupted by their architect’s untimely death. As a result, these monuments are paradoxically unfinished and unfinishable: they have been “cut of by fate,” and yet they are also such edifices “as Art could not amende.” In the clothing metaphor that recurs insistently throughout these poems, Sidney presents her brother’s works en deshabillé: Sidney died before the Graces could clad each wondrous part of his works in all their beauties, and yet he had simultaneously “done so much” as to render any attempt at completion an impertinence.13 Sidney’s works are thus left in a rather titillating state of perpetual undress. Or are they? If we refer back to the historical record, we find that completing Philip’s works is precisely what Mary Sidney has done. By 1599, Mary Sidney had completed not only her brother’s Psalmes, but also his Arcadia, the 1598 edition of which also included for posterity her preferred versions of Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesie, and Certaine Sonnets. The inexpressibility topos is employed in this instance to foreground the difficulty of a task Mary Sidney has already successfully accomplished. Philip’s literary legacy might be composed of “rare workes” to which “no witt can add,” but that is only because they have already been taken in hand by his sister. When Mary Sidney demands for her brother’s works praise from “all mens eies, which are not blindly

What is the New Rhetoric?

119

madde,” she thus demands respect “beyond compare” for literary works that she was largely responsible for. Moreover, Mary Sidney might claim, in her dedication to her brother, that their book will not bear a signature unless Philip’s “sweet sprite” animates it (AS 86-87), but the material object of the Sidney Psalmes teaches us otherwise. The title page of the Tixall manuscript describes the work in the following terms: The Psalmes of David Translated into Divers and Sundry Kindes of Verse More Rare and Excellent for the Method and Varietie than ever yet hath been done in English. Begun by the Noble and Learned Gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt. And finished by the Right Honorable The Countess of Pembroke, His Sister. Now First Printed from A Copy of the Original Manuscript Transcribed by John Davies, of Hereford, In the 14 Reign of James the First.

Not only does Mary Sidney sign “To the Angell spirit” with the authorial signature, “By the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney,” but the presentation copy of their joint work bears an authorial inscription in which Mary Sidney’s name features prominently. Finally, in propounding the argument that she is not the author of the poetry that follows, Mary Sidney authors two highly complex dedicatory poems, poems that have in fact received more attention in twentieth-century criticism than the Psalmes they set out to frame and introduce. The material nature of Sidney’s literary labor is one of the strongest impressions left by her poem to Philip. She presents her text as: . . . theise dearest offrings of my hart dissolv’d to Inke, while pens impressions move the bleeding veins of never dying love: I render here: these wounding lines of smart sadd Characters indeed of simple love. (AS 78-82)

Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, her elaborate strategies of selfeffacement, Mary Sidney foregrounds the inescapable fact of her material authorship of the Psalmes. These lines present the act of writing – its ink, pens, lines, and characters – as dramatically physical. As grief transforms the poem’s very lines to “bleeding veins of never dying love,” the elegaic context of occasion highlights the indelible presence of the grieving poet. Mary Sidney’s strongest statement of authorial agency is also her most simple: “I render here.” As these examples illustrate, even at their most abject, it is a mistake to read Mary Sidney’s modesty tropes literally. In her dedication to Elizabeth, the chaistic contract Sidney forges with the queen (“the best proof of your grace is your acceptance of my book”) alerts us to the agon and aspiration embedded in

120

Chapter Eight

early modern encomia. By downplaying her role in the completion of the Psalmes in her dedication to her brother, Sidney presents her own contribution as a “natural” extension of her brother’s work, rather than an “artistic” imposition. In doing so, she makes an embedded bid for the organic nature of her intervention under the guise of a roundly disingenuous plea for her work’s simplicity. Moreover, in establishing her hagiographic project, and staking her claim as the self-appointed custodian of Philip Sidney’s canon, Mary Sidney endows her own literary endeavors with considerable license. In the very lines where she famously denies her literary agency, autonomy and originality, she simultaneously articulates and defends the terms of a unique authority. Casting her literary activity as a labor of love designed to honor Philip’s memory, she nevertheless represents this labor as an “endlesse work” of . . . zealous love, Love which hath never done, Nor can enough in world of words unfold. (AS 27-28)

In a dramatic apotheosis of the inexpressibility topos, Mary Sidney intimates her intention to continue in her “presumption too too bold,” and to blaze Philip’s fame ongoingly. If any early modern woman was in a position to realize, and capitalize on, the fact that An Apologie for Poetry could also be The Defence of Poesie, it was the sister of the author of this text (and who decided on The Defence as the title most appropriate for inclusion in Philip’s Collected Works). My larger point, of course is that it was not only Mary Sidney who was cognizant of this ruse, that many women were able to exploit the doubled discourse of early modern modesty rhetoric. While we have traditionally read women’s assumption of authorship in the early modern period as hesitant, apologetic, compromised, and compromising, I suggest that closer attention to the rhetorical convention will alert us to the confident, self conscious, and often-contradictory positions such authors assume in relation to literary tradition. Focusing on the complex moment in which early modern women disavow their own authorial agency, we can uncover the ways in which this gesture has been interpreted, ironically and paradoxically, as a sign of their “silence” and their complete submission before a hostile masculine literary culture. Reading women’s modesty tropes rhetorically arrests this silence: It is, after all, a vastly different thing for a woman to write: “I am not writing” than it is for her to abstain from writing altogether. To say “I am unqualified to speak” is not at all the same as being silenced. Against a critical tradition that decodes the early modern women’s strategies of self-effacement as the straightforward signs of their subordinate, then, I suggest we pursue readings that examine the emphatically rhetorical nature of

What is the New Rhetoric?

121

their authorial disavowals. Women’s modesty tropes are best understood less as the acknowledgement of exclusion and the literal assertion of ineptitude than as the very marks of literariness as they circulate among the gendered early modern protocols of textual modesty and authority.

Notes 1. Disavowals of the authorial role occur insistently throughout medieval and early modern women’s writing. Examples can be found in the work of Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Lady Jane Grey, Anne Askew, Margaret More Roper, the Cooke Sisters, Anne Locke Prowse, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Tyler, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth Jocelin, Dorothy Leigh, Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth Cary, Katherine Philips, Rachel Speght, and Mary Wroth, to name some of the most prominent. 2. Occupatio, also known as occultatio, is a rhetorical stategy related to paralepsis and praeteritio. It is a form of suggestion that works by concealment or insinuation, and which emphasizes something by seeming to pass over it. A species of apophasis, or denial, it operates by negatio, or the pretended denial of what is actually affirmed. See Lanham, 19, 104, Kelly, and Fisher. 3. For my purposes, the scholarly practice of reading women’s modesty tropes as evidence of their subscription to patriarchal mores is best exemplified by the essays in Margaret Hannay’s 1985 collection, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Hannay’s collection has broadly influenced the development of early modern women’s studies as a field, and has largely established the terms through which early modern women’s authorship has been reconstructed in twentieth-century scholarship. Similar critical assumptions inform the contemporaneous collection, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, as well as later contributions to the field such as Tina Krontiris’ Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance, Barbara Lewalski’s Writing Women in Jacobean England and Kim Walker’s Women Writers of the English Renaissance. The continuing influence of these assumptions can be discerned today in the editorial choices informing anthologies such as Randall Martin’s Women Writers in Renaissance England (1997); S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies’ Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (1996); and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright’s Women’s Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588-1688: An Anthology (2002). In what follows I take the theoretical framework outlined in Hannay’s 1985 introduction as a model of criticism that has become practically paradigmatic. Its importance for me resides also in the irony that while this framework continues to provide an important model for early modern female authorship, it cannot be held as representative of Hannay’s own subsequent scholarship. Indeed, in her more recent work on Mary Sidney, Hannay revisits and substantially revises the master narrative that her anthology continues to foster. Nevertheless, it is with the broad and generalizing story, the anthologized and anthologizing narrative, of early modern women’s literary history that I am concerned here. For examples of Hannay’s more

122

Chapter Eight

recent scholarship, see “‘House-confinéd maids’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke” (1994) and “‘Bearing the livery of your name’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Publication” (2000). For a brilliant account of the limitations of currently dominant approaches to reading early women writers, see Margaret J. Ezell, “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare” in Writing Women’s Literary History (1993). 4. Cited in Hannay “Introduction” 4. 5. Hannay “Introduction” 4. See also Betty Travitsky’s claim that “Women were literally muzzled by the stricture that “women keep silence in the churches . . . (1 Cor. 14: 3435)” xviii. 6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Scott Elledge ed., (New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1993), IX. 42; IX. 19-20. 7. “Even now that Care,” and “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney,” in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). All further references to these poems will be cited by line number in the body of the essay. 8. See “Manuscripts of the Psalmes” and “Relationship of the texts of the Psalmes” in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, II: 308-358. 9. In the Proem to Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser makes a similar claim about his poem’s debt to and dependence on Elizabeth, requesting the queen to: Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne, And raise my thoughts too humble and too vile, To thinke of that true glorious type of thine, The argument of mine afflcited style: The which to heare, vochsafe, o dearest dred a-while. 10. The phrase comes from a business letter, one in which she is seeking justice at the Star Chamber against jewel thieves and murderers. After a formal request written by her secretary, she adds the proud postscript quoted above. Mary Sidney Herbert, Dowager Countess of Pembroke, to Sir Julius Caesar, 8 July, 1603 in The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, I: 294. The editors of the Collected Works suggest that this usage clarifies her self-identification as Philip Sidney’s sister as not only a statement of love, but also of self assertion” (I: 11). 11. See especially Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (1980), and Louis Adrian Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship” (1977). 12. Hannay, “‘Doo What Men May Sing’: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication,” in Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word, 149-165. 13. In her analysis of what she calls Mary Sidney’s “poetics of display,” Wendy Wall provides a close reading of the stanza we have been examining, which, because of the complexity of its grammatical argument, is worth citing in full. Wall comments: The last verb hangs alone, demanding that the reader retrospectively apply a subject into the stanza that can govern these clauses. Although ambiguously related to the subject ‘rare workes’ (words that enact a moment of self-extension), this verb points as well to the subject ‘I.’ ‘I’ is never spoken, but it governs the act of poetic

What is the New Rhetoric?

123

extension and the stanza’s grammatical structure: I extend these works, which seem sufficient so as to need no aid, but only a mere expansion. The dislocated verb forces the reader to reconstruct the dense grammatical organization of the stanza to find that subject. The deftness of this stylistic erasure and disclosure paradoxically serves to foreground her poetic presence. (318) Wall suggests that, by virtue of being stylistically dramatized, Mary Sidney’s selfabnegation in this poem takes on new meaning. In dramatizing the erasure of the poetic “I,” this stanza finally “artfully reveals, rather than renders invisible, [Mary Sidney’s] place in the building of Philip’s corpus” (317). 14. S. W. Singer, ed., The Psalmes of David Translated into Divers and Sundry Kindes of Verse More Rare and Excellent for the Method and Varietie than ever yet hath been done in English. Begun by the Noble and Learned Gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt. And finished by the Right Honorable The Countess of Pembroke, His Sister. Now First Printed from A Copy of the Original Manuscript Transcribed by John Davies, of Hereford, In the Reign of James the First (London: The Chiswisk Press, 1823).

Works Cited Bradstreet, Anne. “The Prologue.” The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 1967. Bacon, Francis. The Essays. Ed. John Pitcher. London: Penguin, 1985. Cavendish, Margaret. “A Poet I am neither borne, nor bred.” Poems and Fancies. London: Printed for T. R. for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1653. Cerasano, S. P. and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. London: Routledge, 1996. Elizabeth I. “Latin Oration at Oxford University, September 5, 1566.” Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Eds. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002. Ezell, Margaret J. “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare.” Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Fisher, William N. “Occupatio in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Verse.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24.1 (1972): 203-222. Fraunce, Abraham. The Arcadian Rhetoricke. London: 1588. Ed. Ethel Seaton. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

124

Chapter Eight

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Hannay, Margaret, ed. Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985). —. “‘Doo What Men May Sing’: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication.” Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word. 149-165. —. “‘House-confinéd maids’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke.” English Literary Renaissance 24:1 (Winter 1994): 44-71. —. “‘Bearing the livery of your name’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Publication.” Sidney Journal 18:1 (2000): 7-42. Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-88. London: Virago Press, 1988. Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie. Women’s Writing of the Early Modern Period, 1588-1688: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Kelly, H. A. “Occupatio as Negative Narration: A Mistake for Occultatio/Praeteritio.” Modern Philology 74.3 (1977): 311-315. Krontiris, Tina. Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge, 1992. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance.” Margaret Hannay, ed. Silent But for the Word. 107-125. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Lewalski, Barbara. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Martin, Randall. Women Writers in Renaissance England. London: Longman, 1997. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Scott Elledge ed. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1993. Montrose, Louis Adrian. “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship.” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3-35. Sanford, Hugh. “To the Reader.” The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1987. Sidney, Philip. “To my dear lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke.” The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1987. Sidney, Mary. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

What is the New Rhetoric?

125

Singer, S. W. ed, The Psalmes of David Translated into Divers and Sundry Kindes of Verse More Rare and Excellent for the Method and Varietie than ever yet hath been done in English. Begun by the Noble and Learned Gent. Sir Philip Sidney, Knt. And finished by the Right Honorable The Countess of Pembroke, His Sister. Now First Printed from A Copy of the Original Manuscript Transcribed by John Davies, of Hereford, In the Reign of James the First. London: The Chiswisk Press, 1823. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche. London: Penguin, 1987. Travitsky, Betty. The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER NINE RHETORICAL SEX: SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS AND MARY WROTH’S PAMPHILIA TO AMPHILANTHUS KATE LILLEY

In recent years, the Elizabethan vogue for Petrarchan sonnet sequences, started by Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and fanned by his “prestige as a martyred culture hero” (Marotti 397), has attracted renewed attention as a key moment in the discursive formation of a recognizeably modern, constitutively male, incipiently bourgeois subject. This subject construes and proposes reading and writing between men as properly double (literal and figural, public and private), via the figuration of woman as a principle of unethical, illegible duplicity or opacity (fair-seeming blackness).1 The rhetoric of self-consciously artful and effortful labour, “grasping submission” (Whigam 12), in these sequences written by “socially, economically and politically importunate Englishmen” (“Love is Not Love” 408) restages sprezzatura as the moving revelation of the truth of interiority, the expressive dilation of the secret, affect-laden self.2 The crossing of discourses of courtship and courtiership, and of genders, positions and desires, which grounds the habitually chiastic structures of the genre, has been interpreted by Whigham and others as instantiating “the networks of stress and opportunity “which shaped the courtier's life (Whigam 12).3 As a venue for the wilful assertion and demonstration of competitive, masculine textual presence, virtuosity and authority, the generic, pseudo-autobiographical subject of the sonnet sequence deploys a rhetoric which professes erotic disempowerment to effect aesthetic recuperation: I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they, But think that all the map of my state I display, When trembling voice brings forth, that I do Stella love. (Sidney 155)4

What is the New Rhetoric?

127

This pleasurably complex, strenuous and intimate contact between men as writing and reading subjects invests homosocial textuality with pathos and ideality, capitalizing on the shared privileges of gender to produce generic narratives of masculine desire and lack, ambition and failure, alienation and collectivity. Whatever their mournful variations and calibrations, Petrarchan sequences rehearse and seek to naturalize the prerogatives and precedence of commodified male signature.5 Both Shakespeare's Sonnets and Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus knowingly test and analyze the limits of the Sidneian paradigm with their explicitly metatextual and nostalgic engagement of the sedimented relations of rank, gender, genealogy and sexuality. Their differently motivated and situated sequences offer second-order, inside-out interrogations of Petrarchan poetics which privilege the perverse productivity of the hermaphroditic “mastermistress” and the “dark lady”: Ah! How unkindnes moves within the hart Which still is true, and free from changing thought: What unknowne woe itt breeds; what endless smart With ceasles teares which causelessly ar wrought. It makes mee now to shunn all shining light, And seeke for blackest clouds mee light to give, Which to all others, only darknes drive, They on mee shine, for sun disdaines my sight. Yet though I darke do live I triumph may; Unkindnes, nor this wrong shall love allay. (Wroth 90-91)

Oriented by an amplification of the negative spaces within Petrarchan poetics, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus offer exemplary counter-readings of convention and propriety. Reading them together teaches us to complicate our own protocols of interpretation, classification and lineage in ways that acknowledge the dialectical cross-coupling of part and whole, difference and sameness, primary and secondary, gender and genre, without simply reproducing the competitive disciplinary thematics and practices which engender canons and counter-canons, praise and blame, while deflecting attention away from their theoretical and political implications. Two of the most sophisticated and for my purposes apropos readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets - those of Eve Sedgwick and Joel Fineman - sugggest the limitations and rewards of a diagrammatic rhetorical analysis. Sedgwick reads the Sonnets as “a kind of floating decimal in male homosexual discourse” (28) and in terms of a classically reductive, indeed pedagogical, structuration of male

128

Chapter Nine

homosociality: “both the symmetry of the sexual triangle and the asymmetry of gender assignments are startlingly crisp in them” (29). The dark lady, as an index of disproportion, not only figures chaotic extremity, but upholds the propriety of men and their property rights in women. Insofar as the dark lady poses the threat of female agency, of her potential translation from ground to figure, she signifies the need to safeguard effective husbandry through heteropatriarchal exchange and control. Sedgwick charts a movement from the patrilineal, rhetorical “heterosexuality of the early poems” to a threatening and disruptive “heterosexuality that includes women” (35). Fineman's virtuosic rhetorical study draws a related conclusion, discoving in the Sonnets a founding instance of what he calls the “poetics of heterosexuality”: the supersession of a tropology of homoerotic self-sameness by “an alienating heterosexuality that...intrudes upon and interrupts the poet's homosexual ideal” (Fineman 21). These avowedly recuperative and teleological readings of the geometry of sex, gender and sexuality in the Sonnets, rely on the concluding position of the “dark lady” to contain and contextualize the far more copious and less schematic delineation in sonnets 1-126 of homoerotic affect and its improper generativity.6 According to Fineman, Shakespeare's Sonnets inscribe “a situation in which the poet experiences in his person the cross-coupling he observes” (321, n. 6), but that chiasmus is resolved in his reading by the narrative priority of heterosexuality. Indeed, in an extraordinarily canonizing and canonical move, Fineman praises Shakespeare's Sonnets for their “novelty” and prescient originality, attributing to them the epochal “invention” of what Goldberg calls “the misogynist masculinity of a protoheterosexuality and homophobia,” (Goldberg 173).7 As Stallybrass and others have shown, the explicit or implicit recognition of the Sonnets’ diffuse sodomitical potential has produced a long history of “straightening” Shakespeare's sequence, defending both it and him from the slur of homosexuality, or perversity in general.8 Stallybrass perceives in this labour an allegory of the construction of heterosexuality as “a backformation from the prior imagination of pederasty and sodomy.” He suggests that the perverse interest of the Sonnets, as “the great obstacle...in the smooth reproduction of the national bard,” lies in their critical implication in the discursive formation and contestation of both the history of sexuality, and of canonical value (Stallybrass 97-99).9 The genealogy of “queer” readings and readers of the Sonnets represents an anti-homophobic critique and perversion of that history, and an inverse investment in the Sonnets precisely as an “obstacle” to “smooth reproduction.” The anatomization of desire and sexuality specifically extrinsic to marriage in Shakespeare's Sonnets confirms the “dark” pleasures of shared privilege between men and over women, through the promiscuous cross-coding of the homosocial, the homosexual and the heterosexual under the aegis of sodomitical

What is the New Rhetoric?

129

perversity.10 As Lorna Hutson suggests, the speaking subject's “transition from generating arguments for marriage, to celebrating the generative power of the sonnet form itself,” converts the young man into “a store of analogical 'proofs'“or alibis - which demonstrate the generativity of “the communicative pretext of “friendship” between the two men (Hutson 76). This profitable discourse is not, however, without its anxieties, or Sedgwickian panic. The Sonnets' project of representing masculinity as undifferentiated, naturalized, self-reproducing privilege repeatedly founders, its profits “wasted” precisely by the “unthrifty” compulsion to defend against “corruption” or “fault” what should be unchangingly pure: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. (Sonnet 64)

Desire for self-evidence, for homology between one man and another, authorship and meaning, language and representation, paradoxically implicates the Sonnets in what Hutson calls “the impure motives of a comparative rhetoric” which “discredit[s] the operations of similitude”, “figuring their own negotiations of value through similitude as the 'dark' or 'black' space of the sonnet mistress, whose value is always conferred, never intrinsic,” (Hutson 15). In this sense, the dark lady serves as the ground of masculine figuration even, or perhaps especially, when she is absent. Shakespeare's overlapping triangles and recursive pairs allegorize courtly writing as an eroticized arena of mobile, ad hoc and experimental negotiation, libidinous and meritocratic by comparison with the strictures of alliance and patrilineal obligation. If the sonnet sequence offered a formally appropriate venue for complaint and speculation, it also rendered acute the potential dangers of authorship: on the one hand the threat of anonymizing convention, a too successful generalization of a generic masculine subject indistinguishable from “every alien pen” (Sonnet 78); on the other, the possibility of unfavourable comparison: My name be buried where my body is, And live no more to shame nor me nor you. For I am shamed by that which I bring forth, And so should you, to love things nothing worth (Sonnet 72)

The reproduction of heteropatriarchal lineage depends on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring, and on the hierarchical and

130

Chapter Nine

temporal ordering of gender. By contrast, the Sonnets swerve away from legitimacy to stage an inconclusive contest between varieties of illegitimacy. The issue of this miscegenated cross-coupling is, of necessity, a text of bastard affinities, “heterogeneity” (Marotti) and generic “novelty” (Fineman), figurally committed to the hermaphroditic and oxymoronic. Against the diagrammatic readings of Sedgwick and Fineman, Bredbeck argues that Shakespeare's sequence “demands a gendered reading, but each poem also frustrates attempts to find the determinants that would make such a reading possible”: the “turn from homo- to heteroerotics” leads back to a “hermaphroditism”which “disrupt[s] all sexual meanings”(Bredbeck 173-180). This is true to the extent that the ratio of homo and hetero cannot simply be stabilized by its overdeterminations - overdetermination underlines instability - but to claim that such an economy “disrupts all sexual meanings” seems overly optimistic. Given the generic meanings of the Petrarchan sequence, and especially its overdetermined associations with the narrative of Philip Sidney's courtly, erotic and genealogical disappointment, Wroth's acute figuration of misfortune, misalliance and negativity in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (“I only ame the store for ill” [Song 2; P14]), seems simultaneously decorous and scandalous, old and new. Published midway between the Thorpe and Benson editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Wroth's Sidneian sequence narrates her own interpolation in writing as an aristocratic subject of dynastic romance, readable through its thematics of misrecognition and deferral, displacement and recuperation, the truth of lineage and the lineage of truth.11 As the type of “constancy to inconstancy,” Pamphilia's interrogation of her own emblematic meaning or truth forms the discursive and meta-discursive matter of the sequence, framing Pamphilia's solitary engagement of and by “the discource of Venus” (103) as intensely pedagogical and actively tropological: Then kinde thought my phant'sie guide Lett mee never haples slide; Still maintaine thy force in mee, Lett mee thinking still bee free: Nor leave thy might untill my death Butt lett mee thinking yeeld up breath. (Song 3; P21)

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is indeed a strange thing and a “boundary transgression” (Jones and Stallybrass 80-111, 102) disturbing by its very existence the axiomatics of both gender and genre, writing and reading. Coming after, and paying homage to, her familial lineage, Mary Wroth's revisionary engagement of Elizabethan and male-identified genres can, in a sense, be read as obeying the “usual sequence of genders,” (Parker 191) most specifically by

What is the New Rhetoric?

131

emulating the sophisticated secondary textual labour of her aunt and godmother, the Countess of Pembroke. But to the extent that Mary Wroth can be seen as recapitulating the simultaneously recuperative and incendiary tactics of the Countess, she is also guilty of presuming or claiming iterability - lineage where no legitimate claim can be established. As the self-declared textual “heir to all the Sidneys, male and female,” (Lewalski 314) her authorial position is wittingly “preposterous”, “a marker of the disruption of orders based on linearity, sequence, and place”(Parker 188). Wroth's assertion of exalted rank purposefully misreads the purely instrumental value of women in the reproduction of patriarchal lineage, and in so doing openly challenges the presumed isomorphism of sex and gender. In her failure to hierarchically discriminate between illustrious female and male forbears - they, with her, are comprehended by the singularity of the patronymic, “Sidney” -, or between herself and them, Mary Wroth inscribes her sense of dignity, access and mobility as a Sidneian female subject. She traverses “masculine” and “feminine” positions and genres, soliciting both praise and blame on the basis of “what my blood calls mee to be, and what my words have said mee to be”.12 The scandal of Wroth's entry into print as a masculinized, secular author is forcefully rendered in Sir Edward Denny's often-cited contemporary attack: “Hermophrodite in show, in deed a monster/As by thy words and works all men may conster.” Wroth returned Denny's charge of indecorum, line for line, turning aside the formula of masculine proposition and feminine answer through parodic repetition. Wroth's ironic, baiting response does not answer Denny's accusation, but returns the complaint to the complainer with its marks of gender reversed, marking the asymmetry of gender ideology through a belittling technique of symmetrical inversion. By mis-repeating Denny she not only reproduces and enlarges the fault for which she has been censured, but produces an allegory of the writing woman as a just mirror to expose the fraudulent truth of masculinity as narcissistic overvaluation: How easily now do you receave your owne Turnd on your self from whence the squibb was throwne... By which you lively see in your owne glasse How hard it is for you to ly and pass Thus you have made your self a lying wonder13

Although Wroth engages the rhetoric of birth-right and purity of blood, her deployments are necessarily, and perhaps wittingly, contaminated by more than gender alone, for the genealogy on which she calls concatenates merit and rank in such a way as to suggest their potential asymmetry. The very project of advancing the (historically arriviste) name of Sidney to the company of monarchs, suggests its implication in, and dependance on, discourses of

132

Chapter Nine

promotion and reward. By proclaiming the singularity of her lineage, Wroth installs another familiar chiasmus, that of patron and client, which contravenes the singularity of the monarch. In doing so, she is drawing on the rhetoric of Protestant election so thoroughly associated with her family name and the posthumous cult of Philip Sidney. Wroth's hand, her signature, and its genealogical freight, is thus crucially implicated in the cross-fertilization of politico-religious and sexual critiques of mystified power already evidenced in the textual strategies of Philip and Mary Sidney.14 It might be argued, then, that Wroth's withdrawal from public circulation following her experimental and substantial excursion into print in 1621 and Denny's subsequent attack, makes good Pamphilia's final promise to “leave off”, consolidating the elite circle of aristocratic “saints” and “angels”, transcending the polemical arena of print in favour of the coterie. Mary may well have had in mind the posthumous issuing of her works and the retrospective construction of her career, not as a professional author but a born Sidneian poet in the double-edged sense of “unelected vocation”.15 Sonnet 22 (P25) of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus compares the female speaker to “scorched” Indians in an allegory of the corporealization of desire which renders illegible a before and after of colonization: Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne, The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore Soe ame I us'd by love, for ever more I worship him, less favors have I wunn, Better are they who thus to blacknes runn, And soe can only whitnes want deplore Then I who pale, and white ame with griefs store, Nor can have hope, butt to see hopes undunn;

Pamphilia's simile proposes the shared alterity and reification of women and Indians, recalling tracts like Overbury's A Wife (1614), which describe a virtuous wife as “a man's best movable, a scion incorporate with the stock, bringing sweet fruit...the hyacinth follows not the sun more willingly” (Keeble 165). But Pamphilia traffics in the equivalence of the far-fetched and the close to home, the distant and proximate, only to reinstitute differences of kind and degree profitable to her. Pamphilia, “us'd by love,” aligns herself with the obscure pathos of invisible suffering and reversal of fortune (“hopes undunn”) while the Indians “who thus to blacknes run” represent the clarity of fixed place, of seeing and being seen. They are emblems of inferiority rather than of slighted or fallen - and hence changeable - status. The discrimination of “adore” and “worship” confirms Pamphilia's refined paleness and whiteness as proof of her

What is the New Rhetoric?

133

virtuous, stoical heart; what she copiously has, the Indians “deplore” the lack of. Pamphilia appropriates and cross-couples black and white as signifiers of honorific internal complexity, the play between surface and depth, secreting and disclosing, remarking her own ambiguous profit: “griefs store”, “worthles rite”. Simile - comparative rhetoric - becomes, in this sonnet, a technique of internal distantiation and hierarchical division. Pamphilia dismantles the likeness of women and Indians, and of Pamphilia and other women, finally “wearing” and hermaphrodizing the generically masculine, courtly “marke” of the Petrarchan servant of love : Then lett mee weare the marke of Cupids might In hart as they in skin of Phoebus light Nott ceasing offrings to love while I Live.

Wroth produces Pamphilia as “movable” and tropological in the reciprocal senses of affective and rhetorical agency (to move and be moved), alluding to her own role in the Masque of Blackness. Pamphilia's transvalued blackness is worn on the inside as the insignia of constancy. As Hall argues, Wroth uses tropes of blackness “to refigure her own estrangement” and to critique essentialized oppositions (Hall 178-194, 183-186).16 Wroth explicitly estranges and redeploys conventions of gender, in order to reinscribe the privilege of rank and colour, drawing women and (ungendered) Indians together in order to hold the terms apart. Without equivalizing, she rhetorically signals the possibility - or necessity - of a persuasive, tropological practice which can distinguish and order undifferentiated “movables,” as differently embodied, distinct and rankable subjects. If Shakespeare's Sonnets require the dark lady, Wroth's resort to a more ambiguous but ultimately equally self-serving comparison between the “darkness” of women and the “blackness” of Indians. Unlike the paper-white muse of paradigmatic (Sidneian) Petrarchan poetics, Wroth's Pamphilia is figuratively aligned with the heterogeneity and illegitimacy of the dark lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the muse of what Fineman calls “praise paradox” and “chiasmic reduplication” (Fineman 86). By writing and publishing a well-motivated and well-connected Petrarchan sonnet sequence Mary Wroth offered a critique of the “inconstant” narrative of masculinized generic fashion cognate with Pamphilia's committment to the retrospect of “wonders past” (Sonnet 4) and the prospect of nostalgic memorialization: “wittnes I could love, who soe could greeve” (Sonnet 30). Wroth eschews the claims of timeliness and modernity, in favour of an ingeniously applied aristocratic logic of transhistorical dynastic and aesthetic succession. In so doing she rhetorically rehearses her transcendance of the arbitrary vicissitudes of Fortune, “Whose favors ficle, and unconstant reele;/Drunk with delight of change, and sodaine paine” (P63), and projects

134

Chapter Nine

herself into a narrative of foredestined completion, punctuated only by death or the end of time: “love I will till I but ashes prove” (Sonnet 48). As Ann Rosalind Jones argues, Pamphilia “claims to have exiled herself rather than to have been exiled against her will”, but the sequence naturalizes its “permanent ambivalence” through the conventions of seasonal variation and return, and the divisions of night and day (Jones 148, 153). Even at her most triumphalist, Pamphilia's “constancy to inconstancy” grounds inscriptive possibility in double reading and the equivocations of the lyric present.17 Though she cannot trace a way out of the circuit of (feminized) constancy's fidelity to (masculinized) inconstancy, Pamphilia refigures the sonnet sequence as the scene of active female pedagogy and tropology, endlessly posing the question: “In this strang labourinth how shall I turne?” (P77). In her final solicitation to young readers, Wroth stabilizes the signature of “Pamphilia” and perfects her oeuvre. She exploits her overdetermined family history and its generic affiliations to write the elegy and hagiography of her “martired heart” (Sonnet 1), synchronizing the end of her sonnet sequence with the periodic resolution of a dynastic romance which, of necessity, turns on the problematic of legitimacy. In the structure of Wroth's sequence and its rubric of address to the inconstant Amphilanthus, writing offers no egress, only negotiation and iteration, emblematized by the crown of sonnets at its centre. The “thread of love” which promises to lead Pamphilia out of the sequence and into another closet, the retired location of thought addressed to itself, never escapes the labyrinth of textuality and its affective excess: “No time, no room, no thought or writing can/Give rest or quiet to my loving heart” (S7, P101). The distinction the sequence wants to effect between writing and discourse hinges on the coefficient drive to renounce the abject matter of writing in favour of traceless and etherealized thought. Such a desire underscores the mutual imbrication of writing and address within a masochistic poetics of female heterosexuality at once constituted by lack and the scene of its reproduction. The conclusion of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus signals the way to truth as a departure from, and supersession of, the corporeal and worldly implications of poetics: 'what's past shows you can love”. But who or what is “Pamphilia, Queen of Pamphilia”, after she stages her own abdication? What is that writing which marks itself as posthumous, beyond the vicissitudes of private and public life? Pamphilia to Amphilanthus seeks to exemplify and terminate the poetics of heterosexuality but cannot fail to resuscitate the buried refrain of the crown: “in this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?/Ways are on all sides while the way I miss,” at once reifying and scotomizing the signature “Pamphilia.” Rhetorical reading unfolds what Francis Bacon called “the places of persuasion and dissuasion” by attending to the triangulation of texts, authors and readers and the play of ratios of difference: subject and object, self and other, presence

What is the New Rhetoric?

135

and absence, recognition and misrecognition. As Montaigne wrote in “On Experience”: “if our faces were not alike we could not tell man from beast: if they were not unalike we could not tell man from man” (Montaigne 1213). Or, to extend his formula: sonnet from sonnet, reader from reader.

Notes 1. For the gender politics of the Petrarchan sequence with particular reference to Shakespeare, see especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets” in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes are Nothing like the Sun” in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760., ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 13-38. 2. See in particular Patricia Fumerton's suggestive work on constructions of the self as 'a multifaceted jewel in an ornamental setting' (p. 26) in sonnets and miniatures, and her sense of the 'encrusted' material history of subjectivity, in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press, 1991); and Anne Ferry, The “Inward Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press, 1983). 3. On courtship and courtiership see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984) 53-68; and Louis Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977) 3-35. 4. For the pseudo-autobiographical, see the discussion of Astrophil and Stella as 'synecdoches, heraldic devices by which Sidney figures forth part of their identities and enigmatically veils the rest', in Clark Hulse, “Stella's Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney's Sonnets”, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press, 1986), 272-286, p. 274. 5. For a very detailed and formally engaged reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets in terms of a specifically non-dramatic rhetoric of character see Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987). 6. Alan Bray calls the 'peculiarly ambivalent' character of 'intimacy between men' in early modern England, 'less secure in its meaning than the formal Elizabethan essays on friendship would have us believe' “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994) pp. 40-61, p. 56. In a complementary move, Goldberg has cautioned against a rigid either/or understanding of modern sexualities, following Sedgwick's analysis of the crisis in sexual taxonomy. Goldberg stresses that the young man of the Sonnets is equally 'a site of crossing' and negotiation for the socially unstable 'new men of the Elizabethan age' (Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), p. 159). Goldberg emphasizes, with Bray, the routinely sexual and sexualized nature of 'ordinary transactions between men in the

136

Chapter Nine

period' (p. 162), and their simultaneity with injunctions against 'sex between men [] not conducive to maintaining social hierarchies and distinctions' (p. 163). 7. I agree with Goldberg's brief criticism of Fineman's argument as “invidiously” programmatic (p. 257, n. 30) and, like him, admire the “formidable” virtuosity of Fineman's particular readings. 8. On other related implications of “straightening” see Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Events,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992), 186-213, p. 212, and Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 9. For heterosexuality as back-formation see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Lee Edelman, Homographesis: essays in gay literary and cultural theory (New York: Routledge, 1994). Gary Schmidgall's Shakespeare and the Poet's Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentuck, 1990) offers a recent example of the kind of recuperation Stallybrass charts. He describes Shakespeare's Sonnets as “perhaps the most compelling subversive commentary we have...on the generic courting poet's quality of life” (p. 163); but what makes them “compelling” on his account is their ethical distance from what he calls (citing G. Wilson Knight) the “perverted...social realities of courtiership” (p. 164): the “distaste” which Schmidgall feels for the milieu of the Sonnets is anticipated and assuaged by Shakespeare's abandonment of courtly poetry for “the theatrical muse of the Dark Lady” (p. 163). In “Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 143-173, Marotti argues that the 1609 text of Shakespeare's Sonnets “does not really constitute a sonnet sequence” - or a book in the modern sense but rather a materially ephemeral and “heterogeneous collection” in which the sonnets addressed to the young man are “a poor fit with the more miscellaneous verse of the 'dark lady' section “ (pp. 155-156). Although he emphasises the structurally and contextually “distinct” character of the two groups in the 1609 pamphlet, he also defends the straightening license of Benson's 1640 edition:”he did not have to do much to the texts of the sonnets themselves to create the impression that most of the poems were heterosexual love poems,” p. 162 . As Benson's apologist, Marotti sympathizes with the problem of “heterogeneity” in the sonnets and implicitly defends the editorial and critical tradition of heterosexualization. Mary Wroth was, in all likelihood, a reader of both Thorpe's 1609 edition and Benson's in 1640; her own sonnet sequence appeared in print roughly midway between them. 10. Fineman explores the exponential productivity of what he calls “double double entendre”, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, p.26. See also Joseph Pequigney's Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 11. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender, and Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), stress the productive negativity of Wroth's sequence. In her long and ambitious pseudoallegorical romance, The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, published under the full dignity of her own name in 1621, Wroth figures herself principally as Pamphilia, Queen of Pamphilia, and her lover and cousin, William Herbert, as King Amphilanthus. The fantasy of highest rank, and the uniquely effective supervention of gender ideology it authorizes, stands in heavily ironic relation to the facts of Wroth's life. As the first-born

What is the New Rhetoric?

137

child of Robert Sidney and Barbara Gamage, she was destined to be superseded by her younger brother, Robert, who became the next Earl of Leicester. Her ostensibly financially advantageous marriage to Robert Wroth embroiled her in life-long financial difficulties following his death, and the death of their only child. The illegitimate son and daughter of Mary Wroth and William Herbert were likewise barred from paternal succession, despite the absence of a legitimate heir. Wroth's displacement and dispersal of her history of prestigious misalliance in the narrative efflorescence of the Urania, works to promote (Sidney) women to dynastic equality and in particular to prove herself , as princely author, an oblique but true heir of King Philip and his sister, Queen Mary. It is hard not to see in the romance and alternative line of Mary Wroth and William Herbert the perverse sequel, illegitimate and inbred, of the ambiguously eroticized collaboration of brother and sister in the previous generation. The death of Elizabeth Manners, Philip's only child, and Wroth's friend and contemporary, in 1615, may have made Mary's identification with the posthumous legacy of the uncle she knew only via the intimacy of reading and anecdote all the more acute; similarly, Mary's namesake and godmother, the Countess of Pembroke, had no daughter. On the interplay of Wroth's family and career see Josephine Roberts' “Introduction” to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, pp. 3-60; Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: Univ. Of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Gary Waller, “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construction in Early Modern England” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: Univ. Of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 35-63; Margaret Patterson Hannay, Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); and Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993). 12. This phrase is from Wroth's letter to Denny in February 1622, reprinted in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, p. 240, and cited in Lewalski, The Writing Women of Jacobean England, p. 251. Josephine Roberts surveys the wealth of early seventeenth century dedicatory and commendatory tributes addressed to Wroth in dynastic terms by Jonson, Drummond, Chapman, Davies, Wither, Sylvester and others during the prosperous years of her marriage (1604-14) when Mary was active at court. See The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, pp. 16-22. Despite the financial difficulties and sexual scandal of Wroth's early widowed life, she was protected by the increasing influence of William Herbert, appointed Lord Chamberlain in 1615; and of her father, Robert Sidney, who was created Earl of Leicester in 1618. Lewalski argues convincingly that Wroth's “illicit relationship and its offspring were obviously not secret, but also not notorious”, and that she continued to be shielded by both royal and familial favour in the 1620s. See Lewalski, The Writing Women of Jacobean England, pp. 248-249. It is also evident that the sources of patronage Wroth could call upon were literally diminishing: both the Countess of Pembroke and Mary's mother, Barbara Gamage, died in 1621, the year of Wroth's venture into print; Queen Anne in 1619 and King James in 1625; Robert Sidney in 1626; and William Herbert in 1630. Although Wroth lived until 1651 or 1653, traces of the last thirty years of her life are few and according to Roberts, “only in connection with the problems of settling her enormous debts”, p. 38. Critics agree in dating Wroth's other known manuscript texts, Part 2 of the Urania, and the pastoral tragicomedy, Love's

138

Chapter Nine

Victorie, to the 1620s, cannily or uncannily (but perhaps erroneously) reproducing another family genre, the spectacular and truncated Sidneian career as author. 13. The texts of Denny's 'To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius' and Wroth's reply, “Railing Rimes Returned upon the Author by Mistress Mary Wrothe”, are reprinted in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, pp. 32 -34. Jones and Stallybrass argue suggestively that Renaissance figurations of the hermaphrodite reveal “all attempts to fix gender...as prosthetic,” exposing “gender as itself a fetish”, “Fetishizing Gender,” p. 106 . On the Denny controversy, see also Wall, The Imprint of Gender, pp. 337-338 and Rosalind Smith’s stimulating “Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal,” English Literary Renaissance, 30 (2000). 14. See Margaret Hannay's discussion of the Countess of Pembroke and admonitory dedication, in Philip's Phoenix, pp. 84-105. The irony of the aristocratic but relatively impoverished Wroth inscribing herself indirectly in the literature of clientage is in some ways intensified by the significance of its shadowed addressee, William Herbert, as patron. The intimately familial and sexual relation between Pamphilia and the inconstant, neglectful Amphilanthus allegorically asserts Wroth's as the highest and most authentic claim to Pembroke's love and attention, staging an occupatio of withdrawal from a competition she is both intent on winning, and anxious to distance herself from. On Pembroke's patronage and reputation see Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1988). 15. The likelihood that Wroth's unpublished tragicomedy, Love's Victorie, may have been privately performed, fosters an ideal mirroring between text and reader/performer, as does the existence of the manuscript continuation, and generational sequel, of the Urania. See Lewalski, The Writing Women of Jacobean England and Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 16. Hall cites Pamphilia's anxious and impossible wish in the text of the Urania to be “purer than either purest White or Black” (p. 191). She also notes that Wroth “may have been present when Pocahontas was brought to court as the wife of John Rolfe and christened Rebecca,” p. 193. 17. Dubrow discusses the links between a poetics of equivocation and the lyric present in Shakespeare's Sonnets in Captive Victors, p. 176.. See also Jones, The Currency of Eros. Whilst Ann Rosalind Jones' excellent reading of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus adduces Wroth's insistence on abstraction and generalization as proof of exile and captivity (p. 145), I argue that evacuation of detail is a strategy of sovereign disdain. Both accounts hinge on a shared understanding of the problematic of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and its writing subject.

Works Cited Bredbeck, Gregory W. Sodomy and Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

What is the New Rhetoric?

139

Hall, Kim F. “'I Rather Would Wish To Be A Black-Moor': Beauty, Race and Rank in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania.” In Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge, 1994 Hutson, Lorna. “Why the Lady's Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.” In Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, eds. Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760. London: Routledge, 1992. —. The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994. Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. “Fetishising Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe.” In Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge, 1991. Keeble, N. H., ed. The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1994. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993 Marotti, Arthur. “`Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order.” English Literary History 49 (1982): 396-428. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Trans. and Ed. M.A. Screech. Harmondsworth:Penguin, Parker, Patricia. “Preposterous Events.” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 186213. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Swan in Love: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets.” In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Sidney, Philip. Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19889. Stallybrass, Peter. “Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 981-103. Wigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Wroth, Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. Josephine Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

CHAPTER TEN LATE MODERN BLOG: AFFECT, CONTAGION AND FLOW FROM THE PICTURE POSTCARD TO THE BLOGOSPHERE MELISSA JANE HARDIE

Nobody need fear that there is any spot on the earth which is not depicted on this wonderful oblong. —James Douglas, 1907

Precipitated by increasingly urgent literacies in the West; facilitated by the proliferating forms of cheap lithographic reproduction; mandated by the postal system's expansion from parochial reach to “World Wide Postage”: although the possibility of the postcard preceded its adoption as a means of democratic and decentralised interaction and reportage, these particular proximities of technology, aesthetics and rhetorical franchise allowed the craze to bloom until the end of the First World War, when the vicissitudes of international conflict enervated the form1. And so it is with the “blogosphere.” Although the possibility of such a “revolution” in online publishing has existed for nearly a decade, a number of factors enabled the formation of “blogging” as a distinct, and distinctly familiar activity. How do we gauge propinquity in the formerly undiscursive “space” of the blogosphere, now that it approaches a plenum? One way, I argue, is to find an appropriately informal analogue for blogging in the mania of “postcarding” – a closeness of acts rather than in time. In particular, I am interested in what I am calling the “late modern blog,” a recapitulation of modernity's fascination with the unidirectional and performative act of one-way communication. Picture postcards may bear the image of their point of origin, but unlike letters or other mail they have no return address. Their contents, sent out into the world on their “wonderful oblong,” are persistently public: The postcard spread the news everywhere that subjectivity, as a product of the letter’s confidentiality, had been addressed to a public audience, and it did so

What is the New Rhetoric?

141

precisely for the reason that it lacked the confidentiality of the letter. (Siegert 147)

This lack of confidentiality, the dissolution of a private subject, offers a remarkable forecast of the blog, particularly in its more intimate formations, and this chapter is concerned with blogging not as an adjunct or ancillary version of journalism but as a form of public personal expression.

I. This Wonderful Oblong The postcard as we know it originated in Austria in 1869, as a result of concern over the burden letter writing placed on the postal system (Staff 46, 83), and to provide a venue for short comments, greetings, and other brief messages. The postcard obviated the need to write prolix messages in favour of short ones guided by the inherent limits of its shape and size, and modifications of its design saw the different elements of the communication – address, message, decoration – disposed on the two sides of the card in various ways. It wasn’t until 1903 that postcard standards were revised to authorise the use of the back of the postcard to bear a message, as well as the address, leading to the so-called “divided back” with which we are all familiar (Staff 36). This determination lead to the blossoming of pictorial art on the front of the postcard and the dominance of the picture postcard over other forms of postal card, a dominance that re-asserted itself in the field of collection. Not surprisingly the art most usually displayed on the postcard was photographic and lithographic, technologies of reproduction, which married well with the postcard’s seriality and ubiquity. The ubiquity of the postcard can be gauged by the ways in which it came to represent a portal onto the variety of landscapes it depicted. Writing in 1907, James Douglas described the picture postcard as “a candid revelation of our pursuits and pastimes, our customs and costumes, our morals and manners” (Staff 79). “Nobody need fear,” he continued: that there is any spot on the earth which is not depicted on this wonderful oblong. The photographer has photographed everything between the poles. He has snapshotted the earth. No mountain and no wave has evaded his omnipresent lens. The click of his shutter has been heard on every Alp and in every desert . . . . Every pimple on the earth’s skin has been photographed, and wherever the human eye roves or roams it detects the self-conscious air of the reproduced. (Staff 79)

142

Chapter Ten

Ironically, though the postcard was introduced to ease the burden of postal delivery, the exchange of postcards and the collection of postcards became popular practices: In the cafés and open-air restaurants and other public places, it was common to see a postman with a mailing box strapped to his back, going from one table to the next, selling picture postcards and postage stamps. Then and there, people could write their messages and mail their postcards while the postman was waiting. (Staff 59)

Prolific exchanges of postcards were sufficiently common that an affliction, “postcarditis,” came to be named. In 1913, for example, “five billion” postcards were circulated in Europe alone (Vincent 425). Staff quotes an 1899 article from The Standard that describes the rise of interest in postcards through an assortment of pathologising metaphors: The illustrated postcard craze, like the influenza, has spread to these islands from the Continent, where it has been raging with considerable severity. Sporadic cases have occurred in Britain. Young ladies who have escaped the philatelic infection or wearied of collecting Christmas cards, have been known to fill albums with missives of this kind received from friends abroad . . . (60)

The passage parodies international congress as a form of contagion, one that follows the tracks of the postcards itself as harbinger of the foreign: Hindu temples, pyramids, medieval castles, wild game, rattan baskets, and scantily clad peoples lay alongside the tea cozies in Victorian or Edwardian front rooms and parlors and were displayed and passed around, pasted randomly or categorically in a scrapbook or by themselves, evoking myriad responses from gasps to sighs, from giggles to outrage, from a brief comment to a less brief discussion – and, often enough, a complete lack of interest. (Wong 356)

A “craze” for postcards is aligned with other afflictions, and occupies their place because alternative afflictions have been either avoided or exhausted; inherent in the notion of a “craze” is the notion of its exhaustion. Postcards, like stamps and Christmas cards, are the carriers of a metaphorical illness whose contagiousness is revealed in the behaviour of young ladies in particular, and particularly in young ladies who have “friends abroad.” The passage implies that the contagion is pronounced among those who are relatively well off, and one might assume that the acquisition, display, and appreciation of postcards were activities consonant with middle-class leisure. However, the distribution of this “craze” was certainly far wider than among the middle classes, young women, and far beyond the continent; by the time of this article it had certainly

What is the New Rhetoric?

143

spread to the United States and Colonial Europe’s far reaches. The article’s description of its afflicted disguises one crucial aspect of the postcard, which was that it enfranchised readers, writers, and collectors across social classes, generations, and fixed geographical locations. Writing of his Berlin childhood the philosopher critic Walter Benjamin paused to remember the passion he felt for the postcards he received from his grandmother: There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part, I believe that I would gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards, if I were able to leaf through it again today. . . . [N]one of my boys’ adventure books kindled my love of travel as did the postcards. . . (Benjamin 620-21)

For the young boy the postcards offer simultaneously a forecast and retrospection, pivoted around the contemplation of the collection. The postcard collection, bequeathed to the child by his grandmother not through an act of inheritance but through the mail, offers insight distinct from heredity, horoscopes, or education; it offer indices of affective connection and contagion, the incitement of feeling between generations and across geography. The love of travel incited by the postcards metaphorises the love between the two as a form of transport, and the transportation of affect, sentiment and engagement became the prime purpose of the postcard in its circumscribed contours and prolific production. The postcard heralded the phatic in serial, mediated and published enunciations, the exchange of postcards resembling the everydayness of speech acts. The movement of words between people came to travel the same groove, so to speak, as the movement of the artefacts themselves. That the messages carried on postcards were to be conventional and formulaic, as the phatic commonly is, only served to highlight the importance of their being conveyed. A 1906 commentary on “Postal Carditis and Some Allied Manias” in American Illustrated Magazine asserted that “the microbe postale universelle caused ‘faddy degeneration of the brain’” (Zenari). The breeding ground for such manic dissemination is commonly calculated as an account of these novel and progressive shifts in the structure of postal delivery in Europe and elsewhere, of an assortment of technological innovations in printing, and in the newly near-ubiquitous phenomenon of literacy. The sale of postcards was both for dispersal and collection — postcards were purchased either or both to be retained in private (the album) and to be sent forward into publication (the postal system). The affliction “postcarditis” could be understood as a euphoric response to the proliferation of communicative possibilities signaled by the sturdy simplicity of the picture postcard: a condition of contagious communicativeness, akin to graphomania. It represented, equally and contradictorily, the desire to write and send postcards and the desire to

144

Chapter Ten

accumulate these miniature canvases in private archives, sometimes after their postal use, sometimes before they were ever published within the postal network. Picture postcards, which articulate and address, may be sent to distinctly dissimilar places: the collection, the archive, and the lost letter offices. Perhaps this accounts for the particular form the mania assumed; “postcarditis,” then, was a contagion which propelled itself in two apparently contradictory channels, toward and against communication, a token for contact and exchange or “dead-lettered” and unrealized artefacts withheld from the system. The first condition of possibility for the postcard craze was the internationalisation of the postal system. What modern sense we have of an international postal system was formally constituted when the Universal Postal Union was established in 1874 (Vincent 405). An “integrated postal community” in place of “a jumble of … postal treaties” (ibid), its establishment was heralded by the Times as “the most practical realization which human ingenuity has yet achieved of those floating aspirations towards universal brotherhood, regarded generally as of the nature of dreams, however decorative of the pages of poetic literature” (ibid). As Vincent notes, the Universal Postal Union “[facilitated] the use of reading and writing” (ibid) creating a world-wide information system in which, at least in theory, all parties and all places were implicated as potential interlocutors and potential sites within a newly devised written sphere of sociable interaction: “the peoples of the civilised world could now connect by means of their shared command of the written word” (ibid 4056).2 The Times’ comment offers an elaborate analogy to describe the postal community, understood as a “practical realization” of “floating aspirations,” that is, as a technical and physical instatement of a poetic or figurative possibility. Aspirations “float” on the back of the post; the postal system offers a vehicle for the metaphorisation of communicative instruments as affective, objects which elicit affective response (movement) through their own circulation. The quotation leaves unexamined precisely what the “shared command” of the “written word” might be – the postal system united those whose command of the written word was in important ways asymmetrical: postal objects negotiated not only different languages but even different writing systems. In fact, one might say that the “streamlining” implied by the universal system of postal exchange served precisely to adumbrate just how various and distinct were those precincts which it traversed; the “civilisation” it proposed (in the guise of representing) was constitutively colonial and Eurocentric. In other words, this “universal” and “civilised” system of communication served to create a membrane that would ideally contain, as well as communicate, the wide variety of potential communication it boded.

What is the New Rhetoric?

145

These floating aspirations metaphorise the postal system as an updraft. Conceptualising the circulation as horizontal, paratactic, would limit the function of this membrane to encircling and containing communicative possibilities in a fashion that produced depth as a quality along with the distances covered by circulation. In distinctly Aeolian style, an aesthetic animation of the postal system draws it into currents that may approach “toward” the goal of communal integration among correspondents. Their nature is both dreamlike and poetic, and as such it’s “decorative” of the “pages of poetic literature,” with “decoration” not gesturing to specific ornaments but to the way in which the affective and aspirational both haunt the domain of the poetic, and in so doing display texture and dimensionality on the otherwise flat “pages” of poetry. In such a way the postal system creates a supplementary dimensionality of the realm of that which merely “decorates” the page; the flatness of writing is contrasted with the depth words attain once subject to the effects of post. This curious and striking set of analogies suggest that the very media of word transmission are subject to chance once the possibility of their automatic and global commerce is systematised. The delivery of letters, books, and other written artifacts of course far predated the establishment of “universal” postal service, but the notion of a systematic, universal post created the sense of a new formation of these familiar elements, one for which the Times’ writer’s metaphoric reach symptomatically moves the figurative into the territory of exploration, the finding of new spaces or dimensions for the written word released from the two-dimensional written page. The Times’ writer moves quickly to the decorative as a way of deepening the metaphors of circulation; what goes into circulation is not just a set of words but also floating “decoration.” Such a metaphor supplements the written with a visual artefact, understanding the decorative as supplementary to writing’s communicative exchanges. It’s probably no surprise, then, that a “key development” of this sphere was the picture postcard (Vincent 425). As an image with address affixed, the picture postcard was an emblematic “floating” realisation of the aspiration to universalism implied by the codification of standard postage; its images formed a kind of decoration consonant with those aspirations’ non-literal but “decorative” alignment with this new sphere of communication. This new sphere was equally engaged with, and by, images and text. The postcard allied the two in a fashion that anticipates by several years the association of words and images in film, that key new technology of the twentieth century. But while the experience of film inaugurated a century of public and mass mediation, the postcard deployed these same ingredients in a medium both less and more ephemeral.

Chapter Ten

146

II. Diagnosis Blogitis A rhetorical prehistory exists for the weblog through an analogical rephrasing of the picture postcard's waxing and waning. While weblogs are certainly readable in terms of Manuel Castell's notion of the “dynamic networking” that structures 21st century sociality, an understanding of the “blogosphere” which speaks only of that dynamism, and only of those weblogs which function essentially as forms of informational media misses an opportunity to understand solitary, unidirectional, publicly enunciated but privately phrased intimacies and gifts within its discourse. It is no doubt clear from my description of the Universal Postal Union that I'm suggesting that it functioned for the late nineteenth century rather as the World Wide Web functioned for the late twentieth century as an unfamiliar new space of communication. A connection between the postcard and the blog, however, can be more specific. Whereas letters generally fold their communications in a protective envelope, postcards publish their messages. A postcard's message always exists, in some sense, in a “public,” open space. The postcard opened a public space for a constituency of readers and writers who had little prior access to any mode of publication, let alone one that potentially crossed continents. It's in that respect that the postcard can be considered as a “late modern blog,” a technology which arose as a consequence of, firstly, the general environment of cross-national, global innovations like the Universal Postal Union, and secondly through the creation of formal templates for writing entries on the surface of their “wonderful oblong.” These generic and formal constraints, as well as the global re-orientation of postage, permitted the rise of the postcard just as the progress of the web through the nineteen nineties, and the development of templates and publishing options such as those provided by blogger, moveable type, livejournal, and so on were the precipitating factors in the rise of the blog. It's something either more, or less, than a coincidence, then, that one hundred years after the diagnosis of “postcarditis” was made, a similarly-named condition emerges on the world-wide web: “blogitis.” “Blogitis” is variously defined as x x x

as a blogger’s sickness: “[f]or those overtaken by Blogging. So much... it's making you sick. Journals, blogs, diaries, rants, raves and original writers welcome.” (“Blogitis Webring”); as a condition which afflicts a blog: “blogitis - (blog.itis) 1. Inflimation [sic] or irritation of the blog (“Blogitis”); as ennui: “I like spouting off, I like using it as a venue to put my thoughts into words, but I was getting that 'blogitis' where you wonder what the hell are you doing this for” (“Frenetic Minds: Politics

What is the New Rhetoric?

x x

x

147

Archives”); as “a catch-all-phrase that means whatever you want it to mean in regards to so called web logs” (“Word Salad”); as a failure to blog: a poster writes “I have been suffering from a tragic condition known as blogitis. I haven't updated my blog in a while and I need some “medicine.” Please help me pay for this with the “honor” system. Thank you. (Rubush); as a failure of the system: “[by blogitis] I usually mean that the blogger software/site has sent my post somewhere into the ether or else I had too much last night” (“Word Salad”).

“Blogitis,” in other words, can mean either or both too much blogging or too little; a surfeit or a deficit of communication; an “irrational exuberance” (Greenspan’s phrase for the internet-fueled stock market of the late nineties) as well as a deadening compulsion; it can refer both to communicative fervour and dead ends. One way to rephrase might be to call blogitis “modernity,” with its attendant states of euphoria and exhaustion, the death drive’s compulsion to repeat, repetitious action as internalised Taylorism; lassitude, hyperactivity, pathology and prosperity, all tangled in that loose conglomerate experience of the industrial revolutions of mechanical reproduction (in the postcard’s time) or the industrial revolution prompted by information culture (in the blog’s time). This curious concatenation of diverse experiences indicate above all else that the registration of blogging’s effects is made through an alteration of affective state, and of conscious, one reminiscent of Douglas’s description of landscape, after the postcard, and its “ self-conscious air of the reproduced.” While the effect of blogging is consummately public, its excesses are relegated to the private sphere somewhat as the pathology of “postcarditis” did to the postcard when it joined the serried ranks in collectors’ albums; in a 2004 New York Times story about the pernicious ubiquity of blogs, Katie Hafner draws a startling picture of blogitis as sequestration: To celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time. ‘I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on,’ Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.

Hafner’s description of the errant spouse-blogger features a familiar topos for the sequestrated indulgence of blogging’s compulsive pull; this “epistemology

148

Chapter Ten

of the water closet” (after Edelman) offers a disconcerting coalition between blogger and other forms of evacuation.3 Whatever it is that Wiggins is doing in there, it’s to the detriment of his real-time and real-space relations. His blogging body – note how the passage draws attention to the balance of his laptop on his knees – is at once stationary and withheld, mobilised not by life but by the affective discharge between blogger, blog, and the blogosphere. The use of the Wiggins as an example of the blog author at work (use made by both me and Hafner) requires him to attain the status of exemplar; Massumi writes that: [l]ogically, the example is an odd beast. . . . An example is neither general (as is a system of concepts) nor particular (as is the material to which a system is applied). It is “singular.” It is defined by a disjunctive self-inclusion: a belonging to itself that is simultaneously an extendibility to everything else with which it might be connected (one for all, and all in itself) (17-18)

This kind of exemplarity, like the definitions of blogitis, which adumbrated the diagnosis, has the quality of offering unlikely or disjunctive possibilities of connection. The example is an “odd beast,” rather like the odd beast blogger locked in the bathroom exemplifying singularity. Encapsulated within this image of quintessential solitude is also an account of connectivity fostered by, and structured around, the blog’s capacity to form connections: the story leaves unclear (as no doubt it is unclear) whether the connection felt by the lonely, long-distance blogger is to the blog per se or its potential to amplify and diversify the blogger’s audience; this distinction, in fact, hardly exists. The emergent properties of the blogging system, like the emergencies of war that effectively ended the postcard craze, remind us of the rhetorical complexities all open systems adduce, of the unpredictability of discursive spaces. As written blogs become either increasingly embedded in networks (as quasi-journalism), or else unidirectionally stagnant and ultimately incorporated into a virtual archive resembling the albums of postcards stockpiled by collectors, it remains to be seen how effectively this medium can contour or enunciate geopolitical formations and the effects of globalisation. Though the terms were coined a century apart, and, as far as I can tell, with no deliberate sense of repetition or resemblance, both “blogitis” and “postcarditis” are used in uncannily similar ways to describe these wild vacillations between a writer's sense of impassioned agency and of exhaustion, as if in both instances the potential for communication is either outstripped by the facilities of technology, or else outstrips technology itself, and as if there remains a distinct ambiguity over where this infectious incitement to discourse resides; in the writer or the sphere in which texts circulate. This uncanny echo across divergent technologies, societies, and agents is activated, in the first instance, by the homologous coinages “postcarditis” and “blogitis.” It suggests that there are

What is the New Rhetoric?

149

ways in which the formation of each followed a similar logic, something to do with the experience of a new sphere in which to manifest and motivate a writing subject, one which offers a pivoting perspective on public and private spheres. It also suggests that the analogical movement between the two terms has an irresistible quality rather like the irresistible or compulsive activity of the blogger and postcard aficionado, a contagious property registered rhetorically as well as experientially. This slide into the contagious nature of resemblance, naming, and invention will re-orient the late modern blog as a textual artifact.

III. Exemplary, Catachrestic, Contagious A model of “stickiness” is implicit in both diagnoses, “postcarditis” and “blogitis.” Those who fall under the spell of these miniature communicative technologies become adherents and liable to transfer their affliction to others. This “stickiness” can be given both positive and negative valences: positive when what is precipitated is a desirable trend of assimilation – participation in an emancipatory new rhetorical sphere (or “realm,” Perelman’s term); negative when fear of certain consequences of this emancipation (distraction, compulsion) precipitates a moral panic. As such it seems less micro biotic than viral, recalling the now near ubiquitous metaphor of the “virus” as a form of social interaction: viral metaphors reach both destructive intrusion (“The Melissa Virus”) and emancipatory social congress as good marketing (“Unleashing the Ideavirus”). In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell charts this epidemiological fashion, drawing from discourses of contagion a model of social interactivity that has strong resonance for internet and virtual communities. Gladwell’s influential figure symbolises the dominance of epidemiological metaphors in a description of the growth of internet community, the porting of off-screen subjectivity into on-screen identity, the fashionable adoption of virtual templates to orient an expressive subjectivity online. Above all else connectivity is the diacritical aspect of these accounts. Similar kinds of figurative drift characterise the naming and plotting of these new technologies of self. Metaphors of contagion are one way in which to put into discourse the question of connectivity; catachresis connects from the past to the present in the reuse of a word. In the seventies and eighties the naming of new information technologies relied substantially on the rhetorical figure of catachresis, or “abusio.” Catachresis is a form of extravagant metaphor, one that reaches well beyond literal meaning to create a “proper” name for something, which lacks a proper name4. A simulated workspace on a video screen becomes a “desktop,” for example. Silvae Rhetoricae tells us: “[t]his figure is generally considered a vice; however, Quintilian defends its use as a way by which one adapts existing terms to applications where a proper term does not exist.” In

150

Chapter Ten

short order from the figurative pioneers of Xerox Park and Apple came not only “desktop,” but “window,” “cut” and “paste,” “mouse,” and so on: familiar words for wholly unfamiliar properties, protocols, or practices of interface and interaction. This muddle of metaphoric license located spatial relations onscreen and biological motors to one side: the “mouse,” whose heretofore unremarkable career in technological servitude was less signal than its passing resemblance to a small and moving boxy item with a whip-thin “tail” to its rear. Catachrestic usage, and metaphor more generally, only works when there is a certain “contagious” appropriateness to their adoption: however outlandish catachreses may seem, they becomes quickly incorporated into a public lexicon if they “work,” both aesthetically and pragmatically. Such is the case with “blog.” Fashioned from the longer term “weblog,” “blog” quickly caught on, not least because, I suggest, it echoes another set of relations: blog, bog, fog, smog. One definition of the “blogosphere” speaks of it as “ a poisonous environment of methane, self-satisfaction and other hot gasses. “The only creatures that can survive in the blogosphere are low-order molds, able to feed off the waste of others” (Knauss).5 Smog, of course, is a word that was coined at the the turn of last century, a neologism formed around 1905 to describe the “smoky fog” of London, another environment of unpredictable modernity. “Smog” has been more recently employed by David Schenk to describe a purported information glut, as “data smog.” The soupy, saturated realm satirised by Douglas in his 1907 description of the postcard engulfing the world returns in the figure of “data smog” and particularly in the epidemic diagnosed as “blogitis.” A fear of discourse can be attributed to the same fear as Douglas expressed of the postcard, that it would imbue the non-physical world which represented itself in the blogosphere with the “self-conscious air of the reproduced.” In One-Way Street Walter Benjamin wrote: [o]pinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. (444)

These “hidden spindles and joints” are the places where inconspicuous forms are fostered; for Benjamin, in One-Way Street, faced with an environment of “data smog,” prolific “prompt language” is the only one “equal to the moment” of modernity: Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal

What is the New Rhetoric?

151

gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. (444)

My argument might be seen as a prelude to the observation that the blog offers an opportunity to contribute effectively in this facilitation of movement. This contribution would come from the blog’s capacity to offer “prompt language,” opinion-as-action in the face of a lifestyle otherwise stilled by the proliferation of fact. The blog, after all, facilitates the expression of opinion above all, and its migration toward journalism and other forms of information delivery represents ultimately a drift against the nature of the medium. The movement offered by blogs I want to characterise as not merely the provision of opinion, but more particularly as the circulation of affect, which is sometimes prompted by, and sometimes prompts, the expressive energy of the blog. “Prompt language,” in this context, is language which moves: “relations of motion and rest: affect” (Massumi 20). The postcard was important for literacy not merely because it was easily accessible, easily used and easily delivered, but because it associated literacy with affective exchange. As effectively “a stamp that could be written on,” the postcard “reduced the materiality of communication to its bare economy”: the postcard’s journey “celebrated the elimination of the world because the distance it effectively had covered in circling the globe added up to exactly zero” (Siergert 154). Surprisingly, then, what worldwide postage offered was the diminution of physical distance and the substitution of “relations of motion and rest” in the form of bare, phatic messages. The blog’s work within the networks of the world wide web has the same effect, one hundred years later, when the earlier technology has lost its immediacy and capacity to move. Where these prolific exchanges might lodge, and how they might find themselves in the way of “hidden spindles and joints” depends upon a recognition of the particular affective registers of blogging, and recognising that on some fundamental level the blog’s template and overdetermined format is, in fact, a fundamental aspect of its rhetorical potential. Devising blogging as the “prompt language” of postmodernity redeploys the concepts of late modernity to new ends. By severing the postcard’s provision from its usual context and adumbrating it here as a “late modern blog” I’ve hoped to do the kind of “creative violence” Massumi speaks of when he writes of the re-use of concepts: A concept could be severed from the system of connections from which it is drawn and ploppped into a new and open environment where it suffers an exemplary kind of creative violence. . . . When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility. (30)

152

Chapter Ten

This severed concept “plopped into a new and open environment” analogies the unpredicable movement of prompt language into its “spindles and joints,” and offers a way to understand linking as a final form of contagious expression in the informational flow described by blogs. Thinking through the blog as a late formation of the postcard posits the blog within a contemporary moment strategically connected to the late modernity betoken by the postcard. Thinking through the blog in terms of concepts severed from one system and yet still bearing the character of “connectibility” brings us to the metaphor of the link as a form of neutral metaphor quite distinct from the contagions and smogs which have otherwise preoccupied theories of connectivity. Links materialise, perhaps memorialise the affective incursions represented by the system of blogs; their presence gives a new framework for the analysis of flows in the blogosphere, an analysis which benefits from a consideration of its precusor technology, the postcard.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Fergus Armstrong, Kate Lilley, and Susan Thomas for the ways in which they facilitated and enlivened my work on postcards and blogs. 2. Wong’s marvelous analysis of the postcard’s negotiation of incommensurabilities and of the fragmentation of the colonial world pursues these implications. 3. Hafner’s description of the cloistered bathroom blogger evokes Edelman’s exploration of “urinary segregation,” and particularly Edelman’s discussion of the scene from Laura where Clifton Webb types in the bathtub, his typewriter lying on a tray that obscures his groin. This image is conveniently used on the cover of Edelman’s book. 4. For a properly complex account of the “violent intrusions” (72) of catachresis, see Parker. 5. Is it merely coincidental that Knauss’ dictionary parodies Ambrose Bierce’s 1911 Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical encyclopedia written during the period of postcard mania?

Works Cited Anonymous. “Blogitis.” . Anonymous. “Blogitis: The Sickness.” . Anonymous. “Frenetic Mind: Politics Archives.” . Anonymous. “Word Salad.” . Bender, John and David E. Wellbery. The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

What is the New Rhetoric?

153

Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. Selected Writings Vol. 2 1927-1934. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1999. 595-637. —. One Way Street. Selected Writings Vol. 1 1913-1926. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 1996. 444-487. Burton, Gideon. Silvae Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. . Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Edelman, Lee. Homographesis. New York: Routledge, 1994. Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000. Godin, Seth. Unleashing the Ideavirus. . Hafner, Katie. “For Some, the Blogging Never Stops.” The New York Times 27 May 2004. Knauss, Greg. The Devil’s Dictionary, 2.0. . Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Parker, Patricia. “Metaphor and Catachresis.” Bender and Wellbery 60-73. Perelman, Chaïm. The Realm of Rhetoric. Trans. William Kluback. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982. Shenk, David. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. (New York: Harper Collins, 1998). Rubush, Matt. “Frobie’s House.” . Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard & Its Origins. London: Lutterworth Press, 1979. Vincent, David. “The Progress of Literacy.” Victorian Studies 45:3 (2003): 405431. Wong, Yoke Sum. “Beyond (And Below) Incommensurability.” Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002): 333-356. Zenari, Vivian “Folio: Postcard Fever.” Folio 37:14, March 17, 2000. .

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE PHYSICAL AND RHETORICAL PLACEMENT OF THE WESTINGHOUSE TIME CAPSULE OF CUPALOY, 1938-6939 FERGUS ARMSTRONG

Moreover, it is a mistake to emphasize only the rejection which operates from the side of consciousness upon what is to be repressed. We have to consider just as much the attraction exercised by what was originally repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection. —Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, quoted in Leclaire 36

The First Time Capsule So Called The term “time capsule” was coined by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company publicist G. Edward Pendray for his Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy, which “at high noon on September 23, 1938, the precise moment of the Autumnal Equinox,” (Pendray 539) was ceremonially lowered into its so called Immortal Well (or Well of the Future) at Flushing Meadow, New York, where construction work for the upcoming New York World’s Fair was already underway (Fig. 11-1). The rhetorical climax of that deposition ceremony - its performative moment of truth - is described as follows by Pendray in his definitive account of the time capsule project, “The Story of the Time Capsule,” published in 1939: While a Chinese gong tolled solemnly, A.W. Robertson, Chairman of the Board of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, committed the Time Capsule to posterity with these words: “May the Time Capsule sleep well. When it is awakened 5,000 years from now, may its contents be found a suitable gift to our far off descendants.” (539)

What is the New Rhetoric?

155

Fig. 11-1. A.W. Robertson and Grover A. Whalen with the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy.1

The capsule today remains at the same site, buried fifty feet below a small monument in what is now Corona Park, and remains due to be exhumed and unsealed nearly five thousand years hence, in year 6939 of the Christian or Common Era. Thus the desired sequel to Robertson’s optative, metaphorical pronouncement - “May the Time Capsule sleep well” (emphases added) - plays out in present reality: as was expressly desired and hoped, the time capsule remains intact, the “sleep” undisturbed, the “gift” preserved.2 The time capsule’s ongoing “sleep” - the persistence of both the thing itself (the physical machine or artefact; the container and its contents) and the longterm, cultural-symbolic experiment - troubles efforts to situate the object definitively in historical time. The time capsule's construction and ceremonial dedication are past events documented in such a way that we may refer to them in the past tense, assigning a cultural-historical context in retrospect. But the

156

Chapter Eleven

capsule itself, for as long as it continues to “sleep well” in the earth, will call emphatically for descriptive predication in both the present and future tenses. Note, for example, how the fact of the capsule's physical durability compels the use of the present tense in my next paragraph (“The Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy is a cylinder...” etc.). Resisting interpretive relegation to the cultural-historical past, the project insists as an experiment in decisive postponement of interpretation. The outcome of this long-term archival test of time is concealed in the far future both by rhetorical definition and by physical contrivance. Crucial to the experiment in performative deferral is indexation to the preservative seal, whose physicality as such is (I shall suggest) disclosed as essentially cryptic. The Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy is a cylinder seven and a half feet (about 2.3 metres) long and eight and three eighth inches (about 20 centimetres) in diameter. Both ends of the cylinder are smoothly tapered so that, as can be seen in photographs taken prior to its deposition, the capsule resembles a shiny torpedo or rocket. The burnished outer case is made of an alloy of copper, chromium and silver - a Westinghouse product with the registered trademark “Cupaloy.” Fitted inside this metal case, whose wall is one inch thick, is a heat-sealed, glass tube - Pendray called it a “crypt” - into which, in turn, the encapsulated items are closely packed. The capsule’s contents include some thirty five articles of common use, ranging from a slide rule to a woman’s hat, each selected for what it might reveal about us to the future archaeologists. Also included are about seventy-five samples of common materials, ranging from fabrics of various kinds, metals, alloys, plastics, and synthetics, to a lump of anthracite and a dozen kinds of common seeds. These material items, however are only supplementary to a voluminous essay about us and our times, reduced to microfilm. On three and a half small reels there are reproduced books, articles, magazines, newspapers, reports, circulars, catalogs, pictures; discussing in logical order where we live and work, our arts and entertainment, how information is disseminated among us, our general information, our religions and philosophies, our education and educational systems, our sciences and techniques, our earth, its features and peoples; medicine, public health, dentistry and pharmacy, our major industries, and other subjects. This “Microfile” comprises more than 22,000 pages of text and 1,000 pictures; a total of more than 10,000,000 words. It would take an ordinary person more than a year to read all of it; more than a decade to assimilate all this knowledge. Probably no man living knows as much about us as those who study this Time Capsule will know. A small microscope is included for reading the microfilm; also instructions for making a larger, more comfortable reading machine, such as those used in libraries and newspaper offices for this purpose. There are likewise instructions for making various kinds of modern instruments, including a motion picture

What is the New Rhetoric?

157

projection machine. For use with this, three reels of newsreel are contained in the Time Capsule, showing about 20 characteristic, significant, or historic scenes of our times, complete with sound, and ranging all the way from an address by President Roosevelt to a Miami fashion show. The newsreel was especially edited for the Capsule by RKO-Pathe Pictures, Inc. (537-38)

There are two actual books (as distinct from microfilmed texts) in the capsule. One is a “leather-bound rag-paper copy of the Holy Bible” (543) and the other is a copy of The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy: Deemed Capable of Resisting the Effects of Time for Five Thousand Years Preserving an Account of Universal Achievements - Embedded in the Grounds of the New York World's Fair 1939. 3,650 copies of the fifty-two-page Book of Record were printed in 1938 under the imprint of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, New York, using permanent paper and inks. One was placed in the time capsule and the rest were distributed to “libraries, museums, monasteries, convents, lamaseries, temples and other safe repositories throughout the world” (536) ostensibly to remind and/or inform posterity of the capsule’s existence, its exact whereabouts and the scheduled date of its recovery. A full and detailed inventory (twelve pages long) of the time capsule’s contents is appended to the body of Pendray’s “Story” prior to a sequence of six photographs showing various preparatory stages of the project (541-53). The time capsule’s “cryptic” capacity is thus not here a function of obliviousness to the identity of capsule’s contents. My argument is that, even while the identity of the capsule’s contents is ostensibly known, the fact of their physical containment and interment for the very long term effectively submits the whole order of such identity and knowledge to a cryptic chrono-topography. Promoted as a “gift to our far off descendents” and to “future archaeologists,” the time capsule was intended immediately to be newsworthy and thus to gain publicity for Westinghouse. The novel concept together with the apparent sturdiness and streamlined functionality of the thing itself was intended to connote something of the company’s imaginative commitment to industrial research and ability to innovate reliable machine-commodities (Hyman and McLelway). The capsule served in the relatively short term as a glorified foundation deposit and promotional drawcard for the Westinghouse Company Building at the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair. For the duration of the Fair the site of the capsule’s recent inhumation remained a public attraction in the building’s forecourt, where the open mouth of the Immortal Well was on display a few metres from another attraction, the 120 foot high Singing Tower of Light, an inverted cone of concentric rings, whose appearance was intended to be symbolic of electric power.3 Remarkable as both a minor feat of industrial engineering and a vehicle of future-archaeological fantasy, the time

158

Chapter Eleven

capsule made sense as a symbolic component of what planners had dubbed the “Fair of the Future.” The capsule’s techno-futurological implications were clearly intended by Pendray to complement the Fair’s overarching theme, which was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” On 23 September 1940, at the end of the Fair’s second season, the capsule’s Immortal Well was filled and sealed ceremonially in the presence of a group of selected guests “including representatives of scientific and youth societies, business and civic organizations” (“Time Capsule Sunk Till 6939 at Fair”). In 1965, in conjunction with the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair, a second Westinghouse capsule - resembling the first and containing information and artefacts representative of mid-sixties cultural and technological advancements was buried ten feet to the north of its predecessor. This “postscript” remains due for recovery at the same time as the 1938 original (Jarvis 159). Today the two capsules remain interred together at the original site, each sealed in the monadic isolation of its virtual “sleep.” The original Westinghouse Building is long gone. A single capstone, serving as site-marker and monument for both capsules, bears the inscription: THE TIME CAPSULES DEPOSITED SEPTEMBER 23, 1938 AND OCTOBER 16, 1965 BY THE WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC CORPORATION AS A RECORD OF TWENTIETH CENTURY CIVILIZATION TO ENDURE FOR 5,000 YEARS

Time Capsule Defined The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines a time capsule succinctly as “a container used to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time.” In his Time Capsules: A Cultural History, William E. Jarvis defines time capsules as “deliberately sealed deposits of cultural relics and recorded knowledge that are intended for retrieval at a given future target date” (Jarvis 1-2). A long term time capsule thus represents both the reflexive “thought” of “life at a particular time,” instantiated in the selection of objects, and target-dated deferral to distant posterity’s retrospective regard and assessment.

What is the New Rhetoric?

159

Jarvis, whose book is the first such extensive survey of its topic, assembles a wide variety of material-cultural examples, ancient and modern. From distinctions and comparisons amongst these examples he infers tentative interpretive categories. His strongly empirical and descriptive account, quite conversational in style, while not an overtly theoretical work as such, is laced with many insightful, speculative remarks that signal opportunities for further theoretical elaboration. He favours the general thesis that ancient “consecrations and commemorative founding rites are the antecedents of our modern (post1876) time capsule deposits and rituals” (10), and emphasises that “the predesignation of a single target date point in time for a time capsule opening quite clearly delineates the modern, secular, 'linear-historical' time capsule from the foundation deposit and the cornerstone repository, its historical `twin cousins’” (14). Mindful of the time capsule’s strongly metaphoric character, Jarvis considers not only actual time capsules but also time-capsule-like experiences and phenomena.

Encryption, Prolepsis With any ongoing time capsule project - and particularly with the historically definitive, ambitiously long-term one discussed here (the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy, 1938-6939) - we get a kind of crypt to talk and write about, a cryptic structure whose temporal and spatial aspects are mutually inextricable. To seal and target date artefacts and texts representative of “life at a particular time” is to fix in cryptic future-anteriority their erstwhile cultural significance. Sealed away for a very long time, these purportedly representative items are for the time being excluded from the daily economy of representation. Interpretation of the long-term time capsule’s sealed cargo of “cultural relics and recorded knowledge” is intentionally postponed for hundreds or thousands of years and thus barred to the presently living. The prerogative to interpret capsule and contents is assigned to “our far off descendants,” about whom nothing much is ascertainable except (by circular definition) their far off descent and their appreciative receipt of the archaeologically programmed “gift.” The sealed consignment of objects is supposed to stand metonymically for that cultural setting in which the selection has been made. But distant target dating of the consignment stalls or diverts the process of metonymy: representation of the time capsule’s culture of origin is delayed so as to culminate in the far future via eventual receipt of the perfectly preserved “relics.” The symbolic manoeuvre of long-term time encapsulation thus exaggerates a structure or figure of future-anteriority inherent in cultural representation: the sealed selection of objects represents “life” not as it is but as it will have been. The anticipation of death and of cultural demise determines

160

Chapter Eleven

the “thought... of life” instantiated here. The time capsule functions as a memento vivere by functioning as a memento mori. Not only the selection of objects but also the sheer fact of being time encapsulated is “representative” of life at a particular time. The cryptic character of the metonymic example represents the cultural-historical context’s own setting, its own cryptic context.4 The project qua ambitious performative gesture, tied to the physical fact of preservative encapsulation, is reflexively indicative of the world's culturalarchival condition. The selection of time-encapsulated objects represents life cast pre-emptively in the guise of lifeless remains discovered in the far future. The sealed, long-term time capsule thus cuts in representation a figure of prolepsis, which is a particular mode of anticipation, the taking of something future as already done or existing, the assignment of an event, a name etc. to a too early date, an anachronism or prochronism (Oxford). In long-term time capsular prolepsis, cultural texts and artefacts are symbolically de-animated in acknowledgement of their destiny to signify as posthumous relics of a distant past. The capsule’s preservative seal ensures and signifies that the consigned objects are not going to change over time and therefore that they are already in condition for retrieval as ancient archaeological remains. The day of the time capsule’s eventual retrieval, still hidden in the far future, is in effect hidden already today within the time capsule (as within a frame of long-term anticipation). The remote target date is already at hand behind the preservative seal, inside the proleptic device. The entire posthumous term is already completed there, smuggled into obscure, obscurely physical, presence. The time capsule thus in effect contains enigmatic “relics” of the cultural “life” not only of its makers but also of “our far off descendants,” who are circularly defined as recipients of this same durable legacy. By prolepsis, the consignment stands for its culture of destination just as it stands for its culture of origin. The two cultures have in common their seizure by metonymic example as inanimate, cultural-archival remains. In the context of traditional rhetoric, prolepsis, taken as synonymic with procatalepsis, is a figure in which objections or arguments are anticipated in order to preclude their use, answer them in advance, or prepare for them an unfavourable reception (Oxford; Lanham 120-21). The long-term time capsule qua cryptic object incorporates anticipatory and recollective thought in such a way as to forestall or pre-empt reductive cultural historical, cultural critical or social scientific arguments about itself, to preserve itself from these and thus to retain itself as unconditional “gift.” The sealed memento’s isolation from life at a particular time is representative of that life. Isolation from the culturalhistorical origin is exemplary of that origin. With its contents retained in futureanteriority via the interposition of a preservative seal and assignment of a distant target date, the time capsule qua cryptically self-contained gift induces in the

What is the New Rhetoric?

161

language of its description and interpretation a peculiar logical and rhetorical topos or locus - a mute and intractable “finding place or pigeonhole for an argument” (Kennedy 82).5 As a radically elusive “object” of study, the cryptic container draws interpretation toward a temporal aporia that shows itself in perplexities of descriptive tense: the sealed consignment is already still as it will (in the far future) have been (in the distant past), etc. A crypto-chrono-topographic node is thus incorporated within that discourse whose ostensible topic is an ongoing, long-term time capsule project.

Cryptic Physicality, Heraclitus We inherit the theoretical topic of the crypt as part of the legacy of psychoanalysis and deconstruction (for example: Abraham and Torok; Derrida “For”; Miller). These emphasise in various ways the modern insistence of secret or immemorial legacies - those of the unconscious (or of comparable sites of repression) and of cancelled Being (or Being as reflexive cancellation). Etymology leads us from the English word “crypt” back to an ancient tomb, vault or grotto, the cryptic etymon or thing-itself of the crypt. This is the crypt of the thing-itself, set exactly into the hiding place of itself. The Greek word țȡȣʌIJȩȢ (kryptos) means hidden, which is what the crypt thus by definition remains (Oxford). Tautological and paradoxical, the cryptic enclave and its contents stay fully hidden even and precisely in being indicated. With no other sign or substance being equal to it, the encrypted matter instantiates a closed economy. It is exchangeable only for itself and translatable only into that and nothing else. At some time in the late sixth century BC the philosopher Heraclitus committed to writing and thus to posterity the gnomic declarative: ijȪıȚȢ țȡȪʌİıșĮȚ ijȚȜİȚ (physis kryptesthai philei). This is usually rendered in English as “Nature loves to hide” - a choice confirmed in Charles H. Kahn’s translation of the fragments of Heraclitus. Kahn offers, as a possible alternative, the translation of the fragment as “the true character of a thing likes to be in hiding” (Kahn 32-33). Guy Davenport translates the fragment as both “Nature loves to hide” and “Becoming is a secret process” (Herakleitos and Diogenes 14). Heraclitus’s original Greek is lost or obscured in the translations, which thus exemplify the natural tendency to hide confided in the formula. With long-term time capsule projects we get something like a performance or demonstration of Heraclitus’s declarative positing of cryptic physicality. It is as though the time capsule had been invented to oblige cryptic nature as such, to reproduce technically, artificially, that “true character” which according to Heraclitus (and his translators) “likes to be in hiding.” Heraclitus’s positing of nature’s love to hide establishes a nexus of the rhetorical and the physical. The

162

Chapter Eleven

Heraclitean formula discloses rhetorically the inherent closure of the thing’s “true character.” In a comparable way, the long-term time capsule combines the rhetorical and the physical. Promissory submission to the unknown future via the closed, anticipatory figures of prolepsis and future-anteriority coincides with concealment in a machine of metal, glass, inert sealants and so on. By suitable irony, the physically innate tendency to stay hidden stays hidden via its demonstration by technical artifice. The natural is pre-empted precisely in its proof by experiment. The cryptic co-originality of the natural and the technical is thus indicated. Performative (rhetorical) invocation of the future - consignment of objects etc. to distant posterity - is keyed to the physical consistency of the preservative seal and thus of the enclave of secret becoming. Archaeological agreement with remote posterity is shown to rely upon the consistent secrecy and secret consistency of “nature” (i.e., of what Heraclitus called physis, which is also hidden via derivation and translation in today’s terminology: the “physical,” “material,” etc.). The anticipatory short-circuiting of cultural and historical difference is keyed to the technical reliability of nature’s tendency to hide. Paradoxically, the long-term time capsule belongs to the cultural-historical past as an exemplar of or index to that durable physicality or materiality to which its maintenance in the present - today and in future, sequestered from the effects of time - is owed. The time capsule’s contents are maintained in a kind of enduring presence precisely by virtue of their enforced absence in sealed containment and sequestration from and within the world. Defined - even and especially in a playful, pseudo-scientific or quasi-scientific manner - as futurearchaeological artefacts sealed against change for the long duration of a projected “sleep,” the time capsule and its contents, instantiate a chronological aporia, serving as cultural-historical evidence of the aporia of evidence-as-such. Long-term time encapsulation appears to be a quasi-scientific demonstration of the aporetic nature of cultural-historical relations to the real and/or posited fixity of the physical - i.e., of physical properties and/or of the property of being physical.

A Last Letter How will cryptic physicality have become evident in a cultural-historical sense, its cryptic or cryptographic character become legible? Seen in plan view, the Beaux-Arts modern style Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company Building, for which the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy served as foundation deposit, took the shape of an upper case omega. That symbol - which was appended to the Greek alphabet in the seventh century BC, about a hundred and sixty years before Heraclitus is supposed to have written his (long lost

What is the New Rhetoric?

163

except for fragmentary citation) book on nature - has a modern use in being attached by scientific convention to values of electrical resistance measured in ohms. In aerial photographs of the Fair, the Westinghouse Building is recognisable as a monumental omega - a giant omega or o-mega-mega set upon the earth (Fig. 11-2). This monumental emblazoning of the Westinghouse Company’s association with the achievements of science and electrical engineering conformed to a symbolic practice established across the World’s Fair as a whole. The Fair’s board of design, formed in 1936 and responsible “for coordinating the Fair’s general plan and architectural design,” had contended that “a building’s exterior shape should symbolize its content and purpose” (Santomasso 30, 35).

Fig. 11-2. Aerial Photograph of the Westinghouse Building, 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair.6

164

Chapter Eleven

The capsule, physically instantiating figures of future-anteriority and prolepsis, implies a mutely intractable “finding place” (topos) within the field of representation. The time capsular seal, indicator of cryptic physicality, induces a kind of black hole or vanishing point in the cultural historical picture. Some sense of this may be gained from a documentary image of that structure for which the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy served as unique foundation deposit. In aerial photographs we see how the limbs of the Westinghouse Building’s monumental omega embrace the Building’s forecourt so that the Time Capsule’s Immortal Well and the Singing Tower of Light are contained within the Greek letter as within the cavity of a mouthed vessel - say, an urn or amphora - seen in cross-section. The Singing Tower of Light juts in plain view perpendicularly to the plane of the Building’s omega-shaped footprint while, on the same axis as the tower but hidden from view, the Time Capsule deposit lies at the bottom of the Immortal Well’s 50-foot shaft, behind or beyond the legible topography of the scene. The photograph makes in a certain way evident the letter’s consistency with cryptic physicality. Contained in the colossal hieroglyph, the capsule is retained invisibly in the earth, which thus in effect functions as another time capsule, another such technical device. Some remarks upon this “earth” - upon this deictic phrase, “this earth,” which points out this earth - will conclude my discussion, below. Rhetorically speaking, my whole account of time encapsulation is intended to evoke a melding of geographia description of the earth - with the epideictic affirmation of an irreducibly cryptic topos.

The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy The epigraph to the Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy is a quotation from the Book of Job: All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee. Job XIV: 14-15 (Book of Record 3)

The epigraph hints at the time capsule project’s cultural-thematic reflection of the venerable account of mortal predicament. The verses are extracted from a passage in which Job, afflicted and complaining of human life’s brevity and misery, introduces the notion of a posthumous “set time” culminating in resurrection: But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up:

What is the New Rhetoric?

165

So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin? My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity. And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man. Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away. His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn. (Job 14.10-22, King James Version, boldface emphasis added)7

This passage contains hopeful pleas and speculations that can, in retrospect, be taken more or less subtly to have prefigured the technical concept of time encapsulation and to have supplied something of its archaic, cultural raison d’être: Job proposes temporary detainment in a “sleep” of death, hidden interment in “the grave” for an appointed “set time,” “transgression... sealed up in a bag,” “iniquity” sewn up. The Book of Record contains no direct allusions to the Holy Bible beyond the epigraphic quotation, but the inclusion of copies of just those two books (Bible and Book of Record) within the capsule implies Biblical reference as a tacit, cultural-interpretive premise. The first chapter of the Book of Record, entitled “The Time Capsule: A Segment of Our Time Preserved for Future Generations,” contains an introduction to the time capsule concept and an invitation to “those who come after us” to cooperate in this “archaeological venture across the reaches of time.” The motive of time encapsulation is stated at the outset: When we survey the past and note how perishable are all human things, we are moved to attempt the preservation of some of the world’s present material & intellectual symbols, that knowledge of them may not disappear from the earth. For there is no way to read the future of the world: peoples, nations, and cultures move onward into inscrutable time. In our day it is difficult to conceive of a future less happy, less civilized than our own. Yet history teaches us that every culture passes through definite cycles of development, climax, and decay. And so, we must recognize, ultimately may ours.

166

Chapter Eleven By the same reasoning, there will rise again a civilization of even vaster promise standing upon our shoulders, as we have stood upon the shoulders of ancient Sumer, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The learned among that culture of the future may study with pleasure and profit things now in existence which are unique to our time, growing out of our circumstances, needs, and desires. (5)

Readers are encouraged to “cherish and preserve” the book “through the ages” and to “translate it from time to time into new languages that may arise after us, in order that knowledge of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy may be handed down to those for whom it is intended.” Readers are “likewise” asked to let the Time Capsule rest in the earth until its time shall come; let none dig it up for curiosity or for any other reason. It is a message from one age to another, and none should touch it in the years that lie between. (6)

The same chapter contains an account of practical aspects of the project in three successive sections headed, respectively, “Preparation of the Capsule,” “Recovery of the Capsule” and “The Contents of the Capsule.” The second of these sections describes various ways of reckoning accurately the capsule’s scheduled date of recovery and addresses the possibility that some of those ways of reckoning might not themselves survive into the far future. The second chapter, written by Dr John P Harrington, an ethnologist at the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, comprises a “Key to the English Language” that explains with the help of simple diagrams and a phonetic alphabet the peculiarities of English pronunciation and grammar - i.e., on the assumption that “after five thousand years all the spoken languages of the present time will have become extinct or so altered as to require a key for their understanding” (19). Supplementary to this chapter is a “Vocabulary of High-Frequency English: The Thousand Most-used Words of English in Neophonetic Spelling.” The third chapter, written by Sherwin Kelly, Chairman of the Committee on Geophysical Methods of Exploration at the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and entitled “Seeking Metallic Substances Beneath the Ground,” describes how to locate a buried metal object - in this case the Time Capsule of Cupaloy - by means of electromagnetic induction. This information is given in view of the unlikely possibility that the technique will have in time “become a lost art” (39). The fourth chapter, entitled “Determination of Latitude and Longitude,” is co-written by Commander C L Garner, Chief of the Division of Geodesy, United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and C H Swick, Chief of the Section of Gravity and Astronomy at the same Division. The fifth and final chapter comprises transcriptions of messages to the future from three “noted men of our time” (45) - physicist Robert Millikan, literary

What is the New Rhetoric?

167

author Thomas Mann and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein - the originals of which, “written on permanent paper in nonfading ink” (Pendray 544) are enclosed in the capsule.8 The texts of the same messages were printed in the New York Times one week prior to the time capsule’s deposition (“Einstein Hopeful for Better World”).

Thomas Mann's Message to Posterity Mann's message, time encapsulated for the people of 6939, runs as follows: We know now that the idea of the future as a “better world” was a fallacy of the doctrine of progress. The hopes we center on you, citizens of the future, are in no way exaggerated. In broad outline, you will actually resemble us very much as we resemble those who lived a thousand, or five thousand, years ago. Among you too the spirit will fare badly - it should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer. That optimistic conception of the future is a projection into time of an endeavour which does not belong to the temporal world, the endeavor on the part of man to approximate to his idea of himself, the humanization of man. What we, in this year of Our Lord 1938, understand by the term “culture” - a notion held in small esteem today by certain nations of the western world - is simply this endeavor. What we call the spirit is identical with it, too. Brothers of the future, united with us in the spirit and in this endeavor, we send our greetings. [signed] Thomas Mann Thomas Mann [1875- ], German novelist & essayist; awarded Nobel Prize in literature, 1929. Now living in the United States. (Book of Record 47)

Mann’s guardedly optimistic espousal of a progressive, humanist idealism runs obliquely to the strident commercialism and futurism of the World’s Fair. What Mann dubs the fallacious “idea of the future as a better world” was a phantasmal premise and overarching theme of the “Fair of the Future,” whose official motto was “Building the World of Tomorrow.”9 It would take a long time to do justice fully to both the “spirit” and letter of Mann’s message - to unlock and harness its deconstructive potential. Pace Pendray’s estimation that it would take an “ordinary person” “more than a decade” to read and assimilate the “voluminous essay about us and our times” contained on microfilm within the time capsule, we may anticipate that fifty centuries of critical effort will not finally decrypt Mann’s message since, at least for that span of time, the interpretive prerogative will have remained exclusively with those spectral “citizens of the future,” “brothers of the future,” to whom the author has pointedly addressed himself. In

Chapter Eleven

168

any case, an interpretive labyrinth is implied in Mann’s configuration and coordination of key terms from the traditional humanist lexicon: progress hopes citizens spirit earth world man idea humanization culture nations the western world Mann defines “culture” as the “endeavour of man to approximate to his idea of himself, the humanization of man.” He identifies “culture” with “spirit,” which he characterises as that which has and “will fare badly” amongst men and which “should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer.” He ascribes a false estimation of culture to “certain nations of the western world.” (Mann’s own, forty-two year residence in Munich came to an end in 1933. He then based himself in Switzerland before settling in the US in 1938. In 1936 the Nazis revoked his German citizenship. By the time he composed his message to the future he had spent five years as (in his own words) “an émigré, expropriated, outlawed, and committed to inevitable political protest” (Mann 260)).

Terminus 1: Band of Brothers Mann’s address to citizen-brothers of the future, inextricable from the cryptic context of its long-term time encapsulation, exemplifies something of that culturally and historically deep-seated principle of fraternity which Jacques Derrida evokes and questions in Politics of Friendship: The concept of politics rarely announces itself without some sort of adherence of the State to the family, without... a schematic of filiation: stock, genus or species, sex (Geschlecht), blood, birth, nature, nation - authocthonal [aboriginal, sprung from the land] or not, tellurian [of the earth] or not. This is once again the abyssal question of the phúsis, the question of being, the question of what appears in birth, in opening up, in nurturing or growing, in producing by being produced. Is that not life? That is how life is thought to reach recognition.

What is the New Rhetoric?

169

If no dialectic of the State ever breaks with what it supersedes and from which it arises (the life of the family and civil society), if politics never reduces within itself this adherence to familial generation, if any republican motto almost always associates fraternity with equality and freedom, as for democracy, it is rarely determined in the absence of confraternity or brotherhood. Literally or through a figure, but why this figure? (Derrida Politics viii)

A “schematic of filiation” is implicit in the time capsular relation to “our far off descendants” (Pendray 539). While “there is no way to read the future of the world,” a continuation of “life” is tacitly expected: “peoples, nations, and cultures move onward into inscrutable time” (Book of Record 6). The Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy - as cryptic topos, as the physical stamp of “inscrutable time” - instantiates what Derrida, presumably evoking Heraclitus amongst others, calls “the abyssal question of the phúsis.” Just as “democracy” is “rarely determined in the absence of confraternity or brotherhood,” so the time capsular “gift to our far off descendants” is notionally intercepted by Mann as an expression of confraternal “spirit.” In Mann’s interpretation the technical reliability of cryptic physicality is conscripted to the so-called spiritual “endeavor on the part of man to approximate to his idea of himself.” Exploiting the time capsule’s preservative seal, Mann secures a closed, confraternal exchange - “Brothers of the future, united with us in the spirit and in this endeavor, we send our greetings.” As emphasised above, the anticipation of death and of cultural demise curiously determine the long-term time capsule’s representation of “life at a particular time.” The selection of time-encapsulated objects represents life cast pre-emptively in the guise of lifeless remains discovered in the far future. This insistence of the cultural memento mori might be understood cryptically to betoken for posterity archaic patricide (as posited in Freud's Totem and Taboo), at least within the economy of confraternal spirit - i.e., within “this history of brothers that has been told to us for thousands of years” (Derrida Politics ix): As we know, what still links democratization, perhaps more today than ever before, to fraternization cannot always necessarily be reduced to patriarchy in which the brothers begin by dreaming of its demise. Patriarchy never stops beginning with this dream. The demise continues endlessly to haunt its principle. At the centre of the principle, always, the One does violence to itself, and guards itself against the other. (ix)

170

Chapter Eleven

Terminus 2: This Earth

Fig. 11-3. Westinghouse Time Capsule deposition site.10

How do medium and message mutually “approximate” in the case of Mann’s letter to posterity? How is the confraternal inscription topically coterminous with the time capsule's subterranean enclosure? Note that the spiritual rhetoric and physical letter of Mann’s message coincide in a gesture of commitment to “this earth.” In his message, which is physically committed to the earth in the time capsule, Mann rhetorically commits the future endeavour of idealistic, human self-approximation precisely to “this earth”: “Among you too the spirit will fare badly - it should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer” (emphasis added). Like the Westinghouse Time Capsule inserted down into its Immortal Well (Fig. 11-3), the phrase “this earth” functions as a mute pointer. The interred capsule indicates “this earth” via crypto-physical contiguity, and the utterance or inscription “this earth” is perhaps indicative or indexical in a like manner, at least when spoken or

What is the New Rhetoric?

171

inscribed upon this earth. In each case there insists a tacit acknowledgement of this most basic commonplace (topos) and “finding place.” Mann thus affirms “culture” via recommitment to this earth of “this history of brothers that has been told to us for thousands of years.” In one interpretation this epoch's long protraction - past, present and future - is that “life at a particular time” of which the Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy will have been “representative.”

Notes 1. Image taken from Donald J. Bush, The Streamlined Decade (New York: G. Braziller, 1975), 168. Image originally courtesy of the Westinghouse Corporation. 2. Optative: derived from the Latin optare - choose, wish. A. adj. 1. Grammar. Having the function of expressing wish or desire... 2. Characterized by desire or choice; expressing desire... B. sb. 1. Gram. The optative mood... (obs) 2. Something to be desired, a desirable thing. 1605 Bacon Adv. Learn. ii. viii. §3 That by these optatives and potentials mans enquirie may be the more awake. (Definition adapted from The Oxford English Dictionary Online) 3. “Towers and domes provided additional means of symbolizing commercial and industrial enterprise. Clustered in the vicinity of the Plaza of Light, the towers and domes were variations of the Trylon and Perisphere forms north of the plaza. To signify its theme of harnessing electricity to serve man, the General Electric Company created a lightning-bolt-like tower topped with an astrolabe. As a symbol of electrical energy, the entrance court of the Electric Utilities Building displayed a 150-foot-high transmission tower of open steel framework. The staid, 108-foot-high rectilinear tower of the Glass Industries Building demonstrated the practical use of glass block. By contrast, the dramatic Westinghouse tower, 120-feet high, was a looming inverted cone of six concentric rings held by steel rods. The 105-foot-high Du Pont tower was a skeletal construction, research apparatus suspended within it. The Westinghouse ring-tower drew attention to where the Fair’s famous Time Capsule was buried while the Du Pont tower, with its surrounding exedra of open steel framework, alluded to the company’s advances in chemistry” (Santomasso 36). 4. The making of a long-term time capsule implies that a cultural task of post-mortem rationalisation should fall to “our far off descendants.” The project expresses a fantasy of grasping imminent demise through preparation and provision for subsequent mastery of the event. Jarvis suggests as much in his (unelaborated) observation that the “operational research analysis approach to reconstructing the nexus of cause and effect in recent period military-industrial accidents of friendly fire shootings of U.S Army helicopters (by U.S. Air Force jet fighters) reminds us how the interpretation of a lethal accident scene can be akin to a time capsule interpretive experience” (Jarvis 224). The advanced preparation of posthumous relics implies eventual “interpretation” (cultural assimilation)

172

Chapter Eleven

of that “lethal accident” which must, in effect, in every case befall “life at a particular time.” 5. “Topos in Greek means `place’ and a logical or rhetorical `topic’ is thus a findingplace or pigeonhole for an argument; in Latin locus, plural loci, is similarly used. `Places’ and `commonplaces’ appear in older English writers, but as we have said, such usage invites confusion with `commonplace’ in the literary or general sense and should be avoided. Aristotle probably borrowed the concept of the topic from the system of mnemonic devices being taught in his time” (Kennedy 82). Lanham summarises: “The topics were for Aristotle, as they have been for rhetoricians since, both the stuff of which arguments are made and the form of those arguments” (152). In his discussion of topoi, Lanham cites Walter J. Ong’s The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967): “In one sense of the term, a commonplace or locus communis was what we would think of as a `heading,’ but, instead of being so conceptualized, it was thought of as some kind of `place’... in which were stored arguments to prove one or another point. Whether this place was taken to be in the mind or in one’s notes or elsewhere remained always quite vague and unsettled” (152). 6. Image taken from Applebaum 46. 7. Note how the same verses in the New Revised Standard Version reflect an archaic notion of time encapsulation via a somewhat different set of specific associations and emphases: But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they? As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep. Oh that you would hide me in Sheol, that you would conceal me until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me! If mortals die, will they live again? All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come. You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands. For then you would not number my steps, you would not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity. But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place; the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so you destroy the hope of mortals.

What is the New Rhetoric?

173

You prevail forever against them, and they pass away; you change their countenance, and send them away. Their children come to honor, and they do not know it; they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed. They feel only the pain of their own bodies, and mourn only for themselves. (Job 14.10-22, New Revised Standard Version) 8. The three “special messages from noted men of our time” are listed in Pendray’s inventory as “special texts” along with a “Certificate of official witnesses at packing of the Westinghouse Time Capsule,” a “Message from Dr Thornwell Jacobs, president of Oglethorpe University” and a “List of Westinghouse men whose suggestions guidance, engineering, and other special skills made the Time Capsule possible” (544). 9. In March 1937, unveiling, the design for the Fair’s Theme Center (the famous Trylon and Perisphere), Grover Whalen declared: “These buildings are themselves a glimpse into the future, a sort of foretaste of that better world of tomorrow, of which we hope in some part to be the harbingers” (Santomasso 34). 10. Image taken from Book of Record 4. Note that the size of the time capsule and depth of the Immortal Well are exaggerated in this diagram.

Works Cited Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Nicolas T. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Appelbaum, Stanley. The New York World's Fair 1939/1940. New York: Dover, 1977. The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy: Deemed Capable of Resisting the Effects of Time for Five Thousand Years - Preserving an Account of Universal Achievements - Embedded in the Grounds of the New York World's Fair 1939. New York: Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 1938. Derrida, Jacques. “For: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” The Georgia Review 31, no. 1 (1977): 64-116. —. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. “Einstein Hopeful For A Better World.” New York Times 16 September 1938: 22. Herakleitos and Diogenes. Herakleitos and Diogenes. Trans. Guy Davenport. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1976. Hyman, Stanley Edgar, and St. Clair McLelway. “Onward and Upward with Business and Science.” New Yorker 5 December 1953: 194, 196-206, 209216, 219. Jarvis, William E. Time Capsules: A Cultural History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2003.

174

Chapter Eleven

Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Leclaire, Serge. A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive. Trans. Marie-Claude Hays. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Mann, Thomas. “I Accuse the Hitler Regime.” The Nation 6 March 1937: 25961. Miller, J. Hillis. “Derrida's Topographies.” South Atlantic Review 59.1 (1994): 1-25. The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 2000. Pendray, G. Edward. “The Story of the Time Capsule.” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution 1939: 533-54. Santomasso, Eugene A. “The Design of Reason: Architecture and Planning at the 1939/40 New York World's Fair.” In Dawn of a New Day: The New York World's Fair, 1939/40. New York: New York University Press, 1980. “Time Capsule Sunk Till 6939 at Fair.” New York Times 24 September 1940: 33.

CHAPTER TWELVE NEW VOICES OF NEW RHETORIC: STUDENT PERPECTIVES

OPEN AND CLOSED TEXTUAL SYSTEMS BY SACHA JANCZUK What does it mean to refer to a text as “open” or “closed”? According to Mike Jones, traditionally conventional texts are governed by a ‘closed-expert system’.1 These are ‘closed’ in that they remain authoritative and fixed entities. In other words, these texts are complete, finished and whole; they are the product of a primary author, and although we may study and analyse such texts, they remain fixed in time and unaltered, or more importantly, unalterable. Such texts include novels, poetry, film and, to an extent, television - media governed by a singular or primary body of authors. In Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, Walter Ong traces the gradual shift, particularly in the West, towards open-system models of communication and textual representation: Today, it appears, we live in a culture or in cultures very much drawn to openness and in particular to open-system models for conceptual representations. This openness can be connected with our new kind of orality, the secondary orality of our electronic age, which both resembles and contrasts with primary or preliterate orality. This new kind of orality, secondary orality, has its own openness, but is itself dependent upon writing and print. (305)

Fiction writing (including contemporary drama) is the first example Ong uses to illustrate how a system begins to “open up.” This opening in literature occurs because writers have begun to expect more interaction between their work and the audience. Ong compares the role of the audience or reader in contemporary society to the audience or persons listening to an oral performance. Both situations call for response towards openness and a breaking away from the usual norms established by writing and printing. Audience participation in drama is particularly interesting as dramatists strive to include the audience as part of the play. Contemporary drama has

176

Chapter Twelve

moved away from Aristotle’s idea that there must be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even asides spoken by the actors (written into the script) have been superseded by actual encounters between the players and the audience. Ong uses Jack Gelber’s play The Connection as a case in point: “At the beginning, there is no curtain to ‘go up’, thus no separation between the actors and the audience. The ‘author’ is introduced to the audience, to whom the actors are also introduced by the ‘producer’ after he stops the action, and the ‘author’ and actors get into an argument. One of the actors panhandles from the audience during the intermission,” (313). There is a deliberate blurring here between art and reality, an attempt to ‘open’ a once-ostensibly closed system of drama and stage performance to new modes of representation and meaning. Ong’s next example is the medium of television, a communicative device, which reaches far beyond the audience of live drama or readers of printed text in ways that were never thought possible: “Both visually and aurally (sound is the essence of television), the instrument takes a real presence from the place where it is real and present and represents it in other localities where it is neither real nor truly present,” (315). In other words, television calls for a kind of planned spontaneity; that is, the show must look spontaneous, but paradoxically it is carefully planned. The advent of videotape underscores the paradox even further. The show is planned, then videotaped to be shown at a later date; when it is eventually watched, it has the appearance of spontaneity. For Ong this is yet another example of the ways in which the boundaries between reality and unreality have been blurred. Despite its extraordinary openness, “the alignments and cultural implications of television remain a tangle of unsolved mysteries,” (Ong 315). What is underscored, however, is that the “open-systems,” which these several examples portend, are merely facades of interactivity. The consideration and incorporation of the audience into the dramatic production, although an innovative idea, is completely pre-planned and mapped. Although there is certain room for spontaneous interaction between players and audience, the audience do not alter the production, nor the potential outcome of the play. A similar sentiment may be applied to the production of television. In the twenty-first century, Western society has developed a somewhat vicious fervour for “reality” and “give-away” programming. These “shows” actively encourage the engagement and interactivity of the audience through several cleverly conceived marketing ploys. The audience’s interaction and engagement with such “spontaneous” and “live” programming is merely vicarious, however. Big Brother is an example of this vicarious engagement. This program plays on the voyeuristic tendencies of the public, by offering an invisible insight into the banal interactions of people living within a communal house. The public is encouraged to develop a sense of simpatico and rapport with the members of the house, and asked to vote on which members are evicted and which members are

What is the New Rhetoric?

177

to remain. Again, I emphasise the vicariousness of such interaction. Although the audience has a certain say in the outcome and eventual winner of such a program, these strategies are completely mapped and governed by strict guidelines. These (con)texts merely pose as open-systems, when in fact they are predominantly closed and authoritative. Blogs and Wikis similarly allow for an air of uninhibited plurality, and to an extent move well beyond television and broadcast media in terms of “open-system” engagement; however, they are by no means interactive “free-for-alls.” Blogs and Wikis are regulated by similarly strict and enforceable guidelines; suitably subversive and intentionally harmful content tends to be removed from the Web expediently. Purely “open-systems” in a completely democratic sense, therefore, cannot exist, even in the most liberal of settings. Another example from Big Brother reinforces this idea: two male housemates were evicted this year for sexual misconduct. What this incident exposed, more importantly, was that the transparency seemingly enjoyed by both housemates and audience alike was exploded. Moreover, it showed that the program’s premise of “live” and spontaneous interaction was in fact answerable to pre-proposed ethical and authoritative mandates. The Internet, when it was first introduced, was hailed as a bastion for free speech. Even now, as we become immersed in the rhetoric of “Web 2.0,” which promotes “dynamic involvement on a global scale,” we should be ultimately questioning the extent of that involvement. Perhaps contemporary society requires an authoritative paternalism, in order to protect those more vulnerable to subversive material? Governments frequently debate these ethical questions, on the one hand wishing to appear visibly democratic and on the other, concerned by potentially harmful content. ‘Open-system’ models, although potentially a façade of representation, have contributed to the overwhelming popularity and success of blogs, and should not be overlooked.

Note 1. Taken from ‘Screen Speak Presentation’, (8 May 2006), for the English Teachers Association NSW. Notes are available via the link: ‘Fresh + New’ at .

Work Cited Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1977.

178

Chapter Twelve

REALITY BYTES: DISCOVERING A LINK BETWEEN REALITY TELEVISION AND THE INTERNET BY JOEL MEARES Television producer Mark Burnett has struck gold since the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. His summer gamble, Survivor, which aired its first series between May 31 and August 23 2000, attracted seventy-two million viewers to its finale ("News for "Survivor"). Replacing hap-shod bikinis with industrial minis and setting his next competition beneath and in the canopy of New York City, Burnett scored another success in 2004 with The Apprentice. As phenomena of popular culture, the academic council has spoken often of the influence of both programmes on society and culture. However, academia has rarely explored the relationship between the rise of such "reality television" programmes and other coinciding phenomena, and the possibilities of connections between the two. Also left relatively unconsidered has been the narrative structure of the new reality television. Here, I will attempt to draw together and compare Burnett's phenomena - as prime and popular examples of the genre - with the phenomenal rise of internet use, and from this comparison investigate potential links between the two. In characterising the internet, I will focus on theories of hypertext. Hypertext theory, with its emphasis on dismantled linearity and interactivity, seems to constitute a footnote possibility as a framework for an inter-academic consideration of "reality narrative." To what extent this link holds firm is the energy of this investigation.

Defining Hypertext From 2000 to 2006, North America and Australia saw internet usage growth of 112% and 141% respectively ("Internet World Stats"). During the same period, Burnett's programmes debuted and dominated television ratings. As users of the internet, or an audience to it, the persons constituting these internet statistics, are engaging, consciously or unconsciously, critically or uncritically, in the constructivist and navigational language of hypertext (Joyce 41).1 It is the definitional dialect of hyperspace – that process linking you to an email, unfolding your research, or allowing you to post in an Apprentice forum. Growth in internet usage is growth in hypertext consumption and dialogue. Hypertexts today refer to texts constructed on electronic media that contain links to other documents. Michael Joyce suggests that the idea of the hypertext began in 1945 with Vannevar Bush's insistence that "the human mind… operates by association… in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain" (22). This anatomisation of electronic writing worlds is carried through to Joyce's own definition of hypertext as "links" and "nodes." Nodes function as chunks of information or "cells" of written and visual and

What is the New Rhetoric?

179

aural composition whilst links form the trails to and from them (19). George P. Landow turns to Roland Barthes for historical grounding in discussing hypertexts, identifying Barthe's notion of the "ideal text" as a reversible "galaxy of signifiers," stuffed with connected "lexia," as fundamental to academic considerations of hypertext (3). Ilana Snyder identifies hypertext as being process rather than product-oriented, and herself offers a process-oriented definition: a wholly electronic form of writing that uses the computer as a medium on its own (not merely as a stepping stone to formatting printed texts) for the creation and reading of texts (13). To this definitional accumulation, Douglas adds the capacity for a hypertext to be used by persons of divergent interests and of varying reading abilities (145). Navigating the hypertextual splay of hypertext's definition, I conclude that a hypertext is electronic, comprised of links (connections to information) to lexia or nodes, which can be read differently and individually.

Hypertext and Narrative Linearity Aristotle is the infamous author of enforced narrative linearity— contending the necessity of the "beginning, middle and end" formula. Printed books cemented this linearity as an expectation of storytelling by thinning the influence of oral culture on information communication (Ong 5-15). However, Derrida argued that the experiences of the modern world could not be expressed in such a contrivance and that writers would develop new ways to write (in Snyder 46). Hypertext might be the unphilosophical (i.e. without insistence on direction and logic) instrument of which Derrida began to conceive. Hypertext offers the possibility of digitally conceptualising the fundamentals of postmodernism. Douglas writes, "a hypertext argument could represent multiple constructions of a single object… that yield radically divergent interpretations depending on which path you trace through the text" (145). This is unlike printed books, where information is stored according to "unchanging spacial grids" and order and page location are unchanging (Snyder 17). Essentially, hypertext can map, reflect and create the galaxy of discourses with which postmodernist theory grapples. That hypertext pivots on the notion of the audience interacting and choosing which links to follow, that it can do away with Aristotle's resolve for a "probable or necessary sequence of events," disrupts the insistence on a linear progression of plot. Compounding this "multilinearity" and arguable insecurity of the text is the virtuality of what Balestri calls "softcopy" (in Snyder 13). In writing for the screen (i.e. producing softcopy), a consistent synthetic pervades. Screen words in hypertexts are digital code foremost and representative characters second (Snyder 3).2 An intangible distrust evoked by the ulterior existences of these binary literatures ruffles the

180

Chapter Twelve

comfort of linearity and expectations. However, hypertext is not entirely nonlinear. Joyce argues that as an infant medium hypertext does much to mimic its printed predecessor (189). In this way, hypertext narratives often follow conventional Aristotelian plot structures. Landow argues the same point differently. He claims that linearity surfaces in hyperspace as it is constructed by the audiences deciding their ways through it (184-185).

The "Survivor Method" It is evident at this stage that much literature exists on the narrative flamboyances of hypertext documents. However, little attention has been given to the postmodernist structures and narrative styles of reality television programmes. Here I will attempt to identify certain narrative trends in Survivor, as a popular example of the genre, and link them to the theoretical ideas and terminologies elucidated in hypertext theory. Survivor spent its first season establishing and refining what I will call the "survivor method." The "survivor method" is a structural device whereby a central action takes place and characters involved in the action or tangential to it narrate the event. This narration typically begins as voiceover. After some seconds, the video catches up with the audio track, and audiences are watching a survivor being interviewed. We then return to the event and more often than not, another survivor will begin his or her voiceover. Though I term this the survivor method—because Survivor has made it contemporarily popular—it is in fact characteristic of most "docu-soap" reality television and documentaries in general, from Paul Rotha and John Grierson's early documentaries to the 7 Up series (Dovey 133). The method fits well Richard Killborn's idea that reality TV is defined by reconstructions (Dovey 79). Here, verbal reconstructions act to demonstrate the multiple perspectives evolved from one single event. It is a documentation of divergent discourses. In the second episode of Survivor Borneo, we see the survivor method taking shape. BB (an older male character) is hard at work building the Pagong tribe's shelter (Burnett, "The Generation Gap"). Whilst we watch BB hacking at the trunks of coconut trees and stringing palms together, he is heard, on an audio track from an interview, complaining about his tribe members' lack of work ethic. He is then showed being interviewed, and then working again. Similarly, younger members of the tribe, Colleen and Jenna, are interviewed and this footage and audio is interspersed in and around the main event taking place. Finally, BB says in an interview segment, "I think they find me abrasive… authoritarian… there's probably a few more adjectives you can throw in there as well" (Burnett, "The Generation Gap"). The scene ends.

What is the New Rhetoric?

181

The survivor method disrupts the linearity of the programme's narrative. In hypertext terms, it links the audience from one central node to others and swings back into completion. It is a circular digression in a linear overall. It bears a strong relationship to the way in which users engage with online hypertexts. Douglas writes that hypertexts offer a range of perspectives on the one item, and this is exactly what the survivor method provides (154). It is exploratory in the sense that though as an audience we do not directly control with whom we spend our time (arguably a constructivist element), we may choose with whom we sympathise, in this case BB, Colleen or Jenna. Links in hypertexts too are not as open as one may initially imagine. Just as a director selects which survivors to show within the construct of the method, a scriptor selects his or her links. No link is undiscerned.

Avatars3 In hyperspace and hypertexts, "avatars" are the digital images that represent a human character, often the first person participating in a programme. In Burnett's programmes, this notion of avatars pervades. The contestants' avatars are constituted of their own input, the production choices of the show's creators, and of course, of unpredictable glitches in the system. When contestants set out to define their own avatars, the audience is forced to contend with the discourses of said contestant, producers and themselves. Multiply discursive postmodernist multi-linearity ensues. It is up to an interactive audience to select the links to their own viewing experience. In the following statements, Survivor contestants create their own avatars and reveal an awareness of this process: Sue: "I'm a redneck and I don't know corporate world." (Burnett, "The Marooning"). Richard: "… interesting in this new environment to decide when to say what." (Burnett, "The Generation Gap").

Perhaps the most intellectual castaway from Survivor's first series was Ivy League graduate Greg. From day one, Greg adopted the persona of the entertainer: speaking on an invisible "nature phone," telling ribald jokes and flirting with designated ingénue Colleen. However, Greg, perhaps a student of postmodernist discourse himself, was always aware that he was creating an avatar. Of Colleen, in an interview, Greg said "She's fun to play with," dismissing what appeared to be genuine affection as mere utility (Burnett, "The Generation Gap"). Upon being voted off the programme, Greg confided that his entire avatar was created, and that he had looked forward to Survivor as an opportunity to play along the blurry line between reality and fiction (Burnett and

182

Chapter Twelve

Dugard 151). Greg was an exploratory user/scriptor, finding his own way through a constructivist island. We should not have trusted him. A completely new link is available in our interactive viewing of Greg—he was that binary code of a softcopy effecting a perhaps not entirely false (he was romantically linked to Colleen after the show) surface character. This was no doubt the case for all sixteen castaways and the many that have come since, whether knowing or not. The web of television viewing in this new genre, the discourses it acknowledges and experiences, is potentially as wide as even the most labyrinthine hypertext. There are numerous other ways that the structures of hypertexts and reality television can be compared. Interactivity, particularly in those programmes involving phone votes such as American Idol, offers audiences a chance to sever the links of contestants. Narratives may be structurally linear, but the audience has the power to insert the end of the line. Click. Audiences of Survivor can interact by applying for the programmes themselves, or completing the link between the internet and reality television by commenting on the series on web forums. Like hypertexts, reality television is not entirely non-linear, for it too is a new medium. As such, it tends to the familiar, each episode having some semblance of a beginning, and ending with a "tribal council" or "boardroom." However, infant mediums always grow up. As reality television and hypertext internet documents increase in popularity, the possibilities for scriptors and producers are as endless as hyperspace itself.

Cautious Conclusions There exists in the least a tenuous link between the structural devices of reality television—editing techniques, demonstration of varying perspectives, construction of identities, interactivity—and the internet. They both rose to prominence at approximately the same time in history and both are firmly rooted in postmodernist distrust and distortion. Lacking theoretical constructs in which to frame a discussion of reality TV narrative style and structures, an investigation of hypertext theory has proven helpful. Viewers of both mediums are able to frame their own experiences within the parameters the scriptors provide. Of course, one might easily fillet this argument with talk of Survivor's producer-controlled narrative or The Apprentice's Trump card dominance over its own proceedings. What we have discovered is not so much that reality television should be considered under the newly burning lights of hypertext theory; rather, that in the hypertext of cutting-edge critique, this link should not go unconsidered.

What is the New Rhetoric?

183

Notes 1. Here Joyce argues that hypertext has meant a redefinition of readers and writers, citing "audience" as more adequate for readers, and agreeing with Snyder that "scriptor" best describes the hypertext writer. 2. Here Snyder discusses Bolter's idea of a "writing space" online in which the information presented on screen is somewhat untrustworthy because of its primary existence as computer code. 3. See Meyer. Here "avatar" is defined as "an interactive representation of a human in a virtual reality environment." This notion of "avatar" is considered an apt metaphor for the personalities reality television contestants construct on screen.

Works Cited Burnett, Mark and Martin Dugard. Survivor: The Ultimate Game. New York: TV Books, 2000. Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. "Will the Most Reflexive Relativist Please Stand Up: Hypertext, Argument and Relativism." Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Eds. Ilana Snyder and Michael Joyce. New York: Routledge, 1998. 144-162. Dovey, Jon. Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto Press, 2000. "Internet Usage Statistics – The Big Picture." Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. 18 Sept. 2006. Miniwatts International. 22 Sept. 2006 . Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Mayer, Eric. "A Beginner's Web Glossary." PA Online Web Design. Tabor Griffin Communications. 16 July 2005 . Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. "News for "Survivor"." IMDB. 30 Aug. 2000. Internet Movie Database Inc. 18 July 2005 . "Sex, Lies and Altitude." The Apprentice: Season One. Exec. Prod. Mark Burnett. NBC. 15 Jan. 2004. DVD. JMBP Inc, 2004. Snyder, Ilana. Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996. "The Generation Gap." Survivor: Borneo. Exec Prod. Mark Burnett. CBS. 7 June 2000. DVD. Survivor Productions, 2004.

184

Chapter Twelve

"The Marooning." Survivor: Borneo. Exec Prod. Mark Burnett. CBS. 31 May 2000. DVD. Survivor Productions, 2004.

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE: FAN FICTION AND THE POLITICS OF TEXTUALITY BY ALYS MOODY Fan fiction (also written “fanfiction”) is a generic term used to describe works of fiction whose characters, setting, plots and scenarios or other elements of the “universe” of the text are derived from a second text, known as the source text. This source text may be a film, a television show, a book, a video game, a play or even the life of a real person. Although literary texts can and do produce fan fiction, it is most commonly associated with popular culture, and particularly texts of significant “cult” status. Fan fiction usually refers specifically to written texts, often prose narratives, although poetry, scripts, letters or emails, or diary entries are all common. It is also associated with a range of other modes of production, including fan art (the production of drawings, paintings or other illustrations based on the source text) and “filking” (songs or music based on the text). All these forms of fan production are distinct, however, from spin-offs, sequels, merchandising and other official affiliated texts, by virtue of the fact that, having been produced by fans, they have no official standing. Consequently, their dubious positions in relation to copyright and intellectual property laws necessitates that all fan production be non-commercial. Fan fiction has a long history, and has been a focus of critical study since at least 1992, when Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith both published seminal studies of fan fiction and the communities from which they arise. However, in recent years, the Internet has led to a revolution in both the volume and accessibility of fan production—including making it accessible to readers outside of fan communities—which makes the theorisation of fan fiction both more urgent and more interesting. Above all, this theorisation of fan fiction must take account of the unusual relationship between source text and fan production, which defies traditional assumptions about the singularity, self-containment and originality of fictional works. This questioning of such assumptions places fan fiction in dialogue with recent theoretical work in fields such as textual criticism and hypertext theory. In fact, fan fiction can be theorised effectively through N. Katherine Hayles’ model of the Work as Assemblage. This model conceives of a “work” as composed of multiple “texts” which, rather than converging on a single “ideal” text, exist in all their multiplicity and intertextual interaction as themselves constitutive of the work in its entirety. This conceptualisation of textuality,

What is the New Rhetoric?

185

which she visualises in terms of a spectrum on which texts are clustered according to similarity and difference, allows for the inclusion of a fuller range of related texts to be included within the “work” itself, and encourages its consideration as multimodal and multiply authored (Hayles 277-80). Thus, the source text upon which a fan community bases their production would appear at the centre of the spectrum, surrounded most closely by those fan texts which follow the source text down to precise events—vignettes which retell certain episodes or events from a new perspective, for example. At the extremes of the spectrum we would find those texts which depart discursively or dramatically from the original text, such as slash (which focuses on the romantic coupling of characters of the same sex) based on strictly heteronormative television shows; crossovers, which draw on two or more different source texts; and alternate universe fan fiction, which departs from the facts of the universe, as provided in the source text. The work of fan fiction, then, would expand to include the production of an entire fan community, even as the limits of the work are vigilantly policed by this same community, with off-canon fan fiction (that which departs too dramatically from the source text) often subject to the harshest criticism. In this model, individual texts are simultaneously full and incomplete: full in the sense that each piece of fan fiction is itself (usually) a complete and coherent narrative; incomplete in the sense that it relies on the intertextuality and the context of the broader work – not just the source text, but also other fan fiction and the fan community itself, which define the genres and conventions of textuality within the work. The Harry Potter fan fiction Obscure Loyalties is typical of this interrelationship between the communal and the individual (sauerkraut_poet). This short slash piece describes a relationship between Snape and Regulus, two characters from the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. Although it provides a complete and self-contained narrative that could potentially function independently, this narrative itself is based upon—and only really makes sense in the context of—speculation within the fan community about the meaning of a set of initials, R. A. B., which some fans (and this story) attribute to Regulus. Drawing upon this shared communal knowledge, the familiar story of love and betrayal takes on a second layer of significance, providing context and motivation for events within the source text. The ambiguous status of this story as an independent text that is simultaneously reliant upon the context of a broader work, is matched by the liminality of fan fiction in relation to both its hierarchical and economic status. The democratic accessibility that allows fans to rewrite or “write back” to the source text (and which is implicit in Hayles’ model) is matched by the absolute elevation of the source text above fan productions. Similarly, although the writers of fan fiction participate in a free exchange of ideas and undertake labour for no monetary

186

Chapter Twelve

reward, they are nonetheless, as several critics have observed, at the very heart of the capitalist culture industry in which most source texts are deeply implicated (Hills 179; Gwenllian Jones 163-66). Each of these patterns of liminality arises from fan fiction’s marginal status: its tendency to write in the margins of a dominant text. The value of Hayles’ model for discussing fan fiction, then, lies in the fact that it can expand the work to create room for the space occupied by fan fiction, which tends otherwise to disappear in a binary model that can understand a text only as either original or plagiarised, capitalist or revolutionary, egalitarian or hierarchical. Fan fiction, of course, is always both. Fan fiction’s structural position on the margins of popular culture can be understood, then, as a state of suspension between the dominant and subversive. This political liminality, however, seems to sit awkwardly against many of the more categorical pronouncements by fan fiction critics, among whom there is a strong desire to understand fan fiction as basically subversive. Generally, these critics can be divided between those who locate the subversion in terms of the fan’s involvement in the text (Jenkins; Fiske), and those primarily feminist critics who focus on the subversion of dominant discourses – usually discourses of gender and sexuality – within fan-produced narratives (Felder and Scodari; Busse; Bacon-Smith). Felder and Scodari’s analysis of X-Files “shippers” (fans who support relationships between characters who are not romantically involved in the source text—in this case, between Mulder and Scully) is exemplary of this latter group. They argue that the X Files shipper community is “counterhegemonic due, first of all, to its marginality with respect to the incentives of production which privilege male viewers and resist culturally feminine conventions,” specifically, the conventions of romance (Felder and Scodari 244). What the binary assumptions of this position seem to ignore, however, is the extent to which “culturally feminine conventions” are themselves hegemonic constructs. Indeed, even slash, which is also written primarily by straight women (Lee 71), balances its clearly anti-hegemonic homosexual content against a style that is deeply informed by these same “culturally feminine conventions” of romance. MariekeNaomi’s slash fan fiction Concerning the Werewolf, for instance, describes a moment of intimacy as follows: Remus slides their fingers together and holds tight, savouring the feeling of skin on skin. We’re not okay, Sirius, he tells him, but we will be. We will be. (MariekeNaomi)

The melodramatic dialogue, the conventional actions, and phrases such as “the feeling of skin on skin” position stories like this firmly within the (feminine) conventions of romance, even as the explicitly homoerotic nature of the story

What is the New Rhetoric?

187

seriously complicates the assumed heterosexuality of the romance genre. When we consider that 23, 585 of the 35, 795 stories available on the popular Harry Potter fan fiction website harrypotterfanfiction.com are listed as “romance,” it becomes clear that manipulation of such discourses is more than incidental ("Harrypotterfanfiction.Com"). Consequently, and in light of its deep investment in popular culture, fan fiction can perhaps be better understood as renegotiating and reorganising competing discourses. In this sense, it constitutes a textual incarnation of the sort of discursive negotiation that Judith Butler has so influentially claimed is constitutive of identity itself (Butler 185). Indeed, the activity of fan communities has often been understood as the assimilation of specific texts into the individual fans’ sense of self {Fiske @4041}. As such, fan fiction functions as a pivot in which readers become writers, a site at which the individual is formed at the intersection of text and discourse. Significantly, this insertion of the fan fiction writer as a pivot between source text and fan texts also involves the effacement of the author of the source text. While writers such as J. K. Rowling and Joss Whedon (creator of cult television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer) are often venerated within their respective fan communities, their capacity to make authoritative pronouncements on their text is never a given. As the Harry Potter fan fiction site, FictionAlley writes in its submission guidelines, “we do not require stories submitted to FictionAlley to comport with all the ‘facts’ posted [on Rowling’s website], or everything she’s said over the years in chats and interviews” (FictionAlley). The implied scepticism of the quotations marks around “facts” emphasises this distancing of author from text in order to facilitate the text’s accessibility to its readers and its independent existence as “a world of its own.” Instead, fan fiction communities transfer the authoritative position of the author, as well as its organising function, to the source text itself. This strategic move has obvious implications for writers from Barthes and Foucault to hypertext theorists, who have all advocated or prophesised a changing relationship between author and text that fan fiction seems to enact. At the same time, however, this shift does not remove the authority of the author so much as it displaces it; nor does it efface the traditional association between author and text, but instead reimagines this relationship as between text and readers—who are also writers. Moreover, as we have seen, these writers produce texts that are simultaneously deeply personal and communal, in which on-going feedback (through reviews, comments and forums) is often central to the production of texts themselves, a duality that is already inherent in Hayles’ model. Ultimately, then, fan fiction offers a form of textual production in which the relationship between author and text, and between different texts, is constantly being displaced and transformed to suit the purposes of the communities and individuals involved in both reading and producing these texts. Consequently,

188

Chapter Twelve

the study of fan fiction presents a fascinating and fruitful site at which to examine the interaction of people with the texts, discourses and communities through which their identities are formed. Because pieces of fan fiction are both discrete, individual texts and participants in a vast, interconnected work whose origins lie in popular culture, they are always simultaneously part of and yet distinct from the dominant popular cultural discourses and relations from which they arise. As such, fan fiction exposes the very real political and personal implications of renegotiating textuality in this way, as well as the basically liminal, always ambiguous position of the texts produced by this process.

Works Cited Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Busse, Kristina. "Crossing the Final Taboo: Family Sexuality and Incest in Buffyverse Fan Fiction." Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Felder, Jenna L., and Christine Scodari. "Creating a Pocket Universe: 'Shippers', Fan Fiction, and the X Files Online." Communication Studies 52.3 (2000): 238-57. FictionAlley. "Submission Requirements". 2006. (2nd July 2006). 20 September 2006 . Fiske, John. "The Cultural Economy of Fandom." The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa Lewis. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gwenllian Jones, Sara. "Web Wars: Resistance, Online Fandom and Studio Censorship." Quality Popular Television: Cult T.V., the Industry and Fans. Eds. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons. London: British Film Institute, 2003. "Harrypotterfanfiction.Com". 2000-2006. Ed. Fanfictionworld.net. 22 September 2006 . Hayles, N. Katherine. "Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality." The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 263-90. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Lee, Kylie. "Confronting Enterprise Slash Fan Fiction." Extrapolation 44.1 (2003): 69-82.

What is the New Rhetoric?

189

MariekeNaomi. "Concerning the Werewolf". 2005. fanfiction.net. 22 September 2006 . sauerkraut_poet. "Obscure Loyalties". 2006. Harry Potter Fanfiction. harrypotterfanfiction.com. 8 August 2006 .

CONTRIBUTORS

Fergus Armstrong Fergus Armstrong is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. His doctoral thesis topic is “Posterity and the literary text or artefact: its globalised context and planetary foundation as `Baconian' legacy.” Areas of research interest are literary exemplarity, technology, time and the legacies of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Bruce Gardiner Bruce Gardiner has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and Coordinator of Special Entry, Advanced, and Honours Units in the Department of English. His research interests include plagiarism and intellectual property; education and erudition; literature and scripture; poetry and poetics; American literatures; and literature in relation to royal courts, households, avantgardes, and cities. Melissa Jane Hardie Melissa Hardie is a lecturer in English at the University of Sydney. She has published in a wide variety of journals, including Journal of Modern Literature, Southerly and Australian Humanities Review, and edited collections, including Rhetorical Bodies (Wisconsin University Press, eds Selzer and Crowley) and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (Penn University Press, eds Gladstein & Sciabarra). She has recently completed a manuscript entitled ‘Shame Became Famous: Rhetoric of Disclosure in Public Life, 1989-2001’, which includes chapters on the Starr Report, Liberace, Malcolm Forbes, and ‘Outing’, JonBenet Ramsey, Paul de Man and Hannibal Lecter. Sacha Janczuk Sacha Janczuk earned a Bachelor of Arts in 2005 with majors in English and Modern History, and an honours degree in English in 2006 (both from the University of Sydney). He is currently pursuing a graduate degree in the Sydney Law School.

What is the New Rhetoric?

191

Beth Kalikoff Beth Kalikoff is Associate Vice Chancellor and Associate Professor of Writing Studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Her areas of scholarly interest in writing studies are assessment as democracy, writing education and popular literature. She studied at Johns Hopkins University (BA) and Indiana University (PhD). Her scholarship and creative work have won national prizes, including a Choice Outstanding Book Award for Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature (1986). Beth’s mystery novel, Dying for a Blue Plate Special (2005), has received strong reviews and is in its second printing. Articles on ‘Berlin, New York, Baghdad: Assessment as Democracy’ and, with psychologist Kima Cargill, ‘Linked Courses and Democracy at the 21st Century University’ are forthcoming. Current projects include a book on interdisciplinary assessment. Joan Leach Joan Leach has convened the Science Communication Program at the University of Queensland since mid-2004. She is an associate in the new program in Biohumanities. She was co-founder and president of the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and has published on the role of rhetoric in scientific medicine as well as on rhetoric in public scientific controversies. She is editor of the international journal Social Epistemology. She is completing a book on ideas of communication in medicine and how they structure medical epistemology. Her publications include: ‘Beyond Social Constructivism’, Social Epistemology 2005, 20:2 and ‘Rhetorical Theories of Testimony’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, forthcoming. Kate Lilley Kate Lilley is a senior lecturer in English and Director of Postgraduate Studies at the University of Sydney, where she specialises in early modern and contemporary literature, especially poetry, poetics and rhetoric. After completing a PhD at the University of London on Figure and Narrative in Masculine Elegy, she began working on early modern women’s writing as Julia Mann Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her first book of poems, Versary (Salt, 2002), won the Grace Leven Prize and was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Prize. Kate edited the Penguin Classics edition of Margaret Cavendish (recently revised), a groundbreaking contribution to the field, taught all over the world. She has published a number of chapters in leading collections on seventeenth century women’s elegy, utopian writing, georgic verse epistle, Katherine Philips, Rachel Speght, Queen Christina and Margaret Cavendish. She has also published widely on contemporary poetry and feminist/queer theory.

192

Contributors

Andrea A. Lunsford Recently named the Louise and Claude Rosenberg, Jr. Fellow in Undergraduate Education and the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Andrea Lunsford is Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She has designed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in writing history and theory, rhetoric, literacy studies and intellectual property. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Lunsford was Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at Ohio State University. Currently also a member of the Bread Loaf School of English faculty, Professor Lunsford earned her BA and MA degrees from the University of Florida and completed her PhD in English at The Ohio State University. Andrea has published fourteen books, including Everything’s an argument; The everyday writer; Essays on Classical rhetoric and modern discourse; Singular texts/plural authors: perspectives on collaborative writing; and Reclaiming rhetorica: women in the history of rhetoric. Her most recent books include The St. Martin’s handbook, 5th edition, and with Lahoucine Ouzgane, Exploring borderlands: composition and postcolonial studies. Joel Meares Joel Meares earned first-class honours in English at the University of Sydney in 2006. He was State Rostrum Public Speaking Champion in 2001 and 2002, and National Rostrum Public Speaking Champion in 2002. He is currently a publicist for the University of New South Wales publishing house and a movie critic for www.filmcritic.com. Alys Moody Alys Moody graduated with first-class honours and a university medal from the University of Sydney in 2006 and is currently applying to Ph.D. programs in the United States. Her research interests include 20th-century literature, queer, feminist and postcolonial studies, and hypertext theory. D. Ohlandt D. Ohlandt (nee Ross) was a visiting Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in 2005, where she used rehearsal data to explore how theatre artists deal with bodily differences such as age, disability and body size in character-based performance. Her interest in body theory and acting has provided opportunities to study overseas in Finland and Australia, as well as to participate in and chair conference panels at home in the US. In her spare time, she has worked as a teambuilding facilitator and facilitator trainer for ‘low ropes’ experiential education activities, as well as occasionally directing and assisting with stage productions. In December 2005,

What is the New Rhetoric?

193

D. returned to the University of Michigan, where she completed her PhD in Theatre Studies. She is now a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching fellow teaching at Kalamazoo College in the Department of Theatre Arts. Patricia Pender Patricia Pender is an assistant professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City. Her teaching and research interests span early modern literature and culture, feminist literary history and theory, film studies, and cultural studies. She specializes in women’s writing from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on traditions of rhetoric, histories of the book, and institutions of authorship. She earned her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Sydney and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation, “Authorial Alibis: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Limits of Literature” for publication as a book. Her previous publications include “Competing Conceptions: Rhetorics of Representation in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko” (2001), “Disciplining the Imperial Mother: Anne Bradstreet’s A Dialogue Between Old England and New” (2001), “‘I’m Buffy and you’re . . . History’: The Postmodern Politics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (2002), and “‘Kicking ass is comfort food’: Buffy as Third Wave Feminist Icon” (2004). George L. Pullman George L. Pullman is currently Director of Writing Across the Curriculum and Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University, where he designed and helped to develop the program of rhetoric and advanced composition. His interests include the history and theory of rhetoric and the intersection of traditional rhetorical lore and computer-mediated communications. His most recent publication discusses the relationship between data and text, and his current work involves online writing environments. His articles have appeared in Computers and Writing, Rhetoric Review and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. They include: ‘From Greek to geek’, Enculturation website, Issue 5.2, 2005. ; ‘Electronic portfolios revisited: the Efolios project’, Computers and Composition 19 (2002) 151–69.; ‘A brief history and technical overview of the current state of JAC Online, with a few observations about how the Internet is influencing (or failing to influence) scholarship: Or, who says you can’t find JAC Online?’ Kairos website, Vol 7, Issue 10, 2002. .

194

Contributors

Susan E. Thomas Susan Thomas is currently Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney, where she teaches rhetoric, professional communication, and some 19th- and 20th-century American literature. Her research interests include rhetoric and communication theory and pedagogy, computer-assisted writing and learning, and American Civil War Rhetoric. Her publications include ‘From Athens to Gettysburg: The Art of the Speech’ in Creativity and Transformation, ed. Richard Madelaine, English Association, Sydney, 2005; ‘Nothing Dirty About Rhetoric’, Australian Higher Education Supplement 7 September 2005; ‘Words are Failing Our Graduates’, Australian Higher Education Supplement, 14 July 2004. Her monograph entitled Building Bridges: An American WPA in Sydney is currently under review. John O. Ward John Ward is Honorary Reader in Medieval History at The University of Sydney. He has a BA (Hons) from Melbourne University and an MA and Ph.D. from The University of Toronto. He was a lecturer and tutor in History and Latin from 1962 to 1966 at the Universities of Melbourne and Toronto. He was a Lecturer in History from 1967 to1973 and Senior Lecturer from 1973 to 2000 at the University of Sydney. He has held various awards (Commonwealth Government Scholarship, Province of Ontario Scholarship, etc.), research grants, and fellowships at universities/institutions/cities in Australia, USA, and Europe, and has delivered papers and lectures and taught at numerous study-days, seminars and workshops, conferences and universities, in Australasia, India, Europe, UK, and North America, being a keynote and/or invited speaker on many occasions. His research interests include medieval rhetoric and intellectual history; historiography; heresy and the inquisition; and witchcraft. He has published widely in these fields, with his most recent publication being The Rhetoric of Cicero in Its Medieval And Early Renaissance Commentary Tradition, (Brill Academic Publishing, 2006), written and edited with Virginia Cox. Claire Woods Claire Woods is Professor, Communication and Writing, and Director of International Programs, in the School of Communication Information and New Media, at the University of South Australia. As Teaching Team leader in Professional Writing and Communication, she is a member of the team that won the 2000 Australian Award for University Teaching in Humanities and the Arts, and the Prime Minister’s Award as University Teachers of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturers & Commerce (UK) and was awarded the George Barton Fellowship and is currently Honorary Professor

What is the New Rhetoric?

195

at the University of Queensland. She is a member of the Executive of the Australian Association of Writing Programs and the National Creative Writing Research Archive. A former ministerial appointment to the Australian National Language and Literacy Council, she is also a former President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and was honoured with Life Membership for her contribution to English teaching in Australia. Her publications include the following: Communication and writing – footprints on a territory, Hawke Institute Monograph Series, No 3, University of South Australia, 2000. ; ‘A program evolves: relocating writing, relocating literary studies’, TEXT 6.2 (2000), , and ‘Altered geographies: ethnography, rhetoric, discourse and the construction of knowledge in a BA ( Professional Writing and Communication) (Part1)’, Australian Journal of Communication 23(3) (1996).

NAME INDEX

Andrews, Richard, 50, 51, 52, 54, 57 Aristotle, xii, 5, 16, 8, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 42, 73, 74, 81, 172, 176, 179 Aronson, Elliot, xii Askew, Anne, 105, 121 Augustine, xi, 17 Bacon, Francis, 32, 104, 134, 171n2 Bacon-Smith, Camille, 184, 186 Barbieux, Kevin, 25 Barthes, Roland, 179 Behn, Aphra, 105 Benjamin, Walter, 143, 150 Bender, John, 29-33 Bentley, Thomas, 106, 107 Berlin, James, 53, 94, 101, 143 Bernays, Edward, 19-21, 25 Billig, Michael, 39-40 Booth, Wayne, 56 Bradstreet, Anne, 105 Brand, Alice, 40 Brando, Marlon, 89 Bredbeck, Gregory W., 130 Broad, Bob, 95, 97, 98 Brooke, C.G., 13 Brown, Stuart, 46, 47, 53 Burbule, Nicholas, 36 Burke, Kenneth, 5, 8, 17, 40, 70 Burnett, Mark, 178, 180, 181 Bush, Vannevar, 178 Butler, Judith, 187 Carter, Locke, 34 Castell, Manuel, 146 Cavendish, Margaret, 105 Ceccerelli, Leah, 69, 70, 71, 80 Certeau, Michel de, 36 Cicero, xi, xii, 16, 17, 23 Cintron, Ralph, 62 Cobbett, William, 30 Colden, Cadwallader, 30-31

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 32 Corbett, Edward P.J., xii, 3, 4. 5 Creeley, Robert, 36 Darwin, Charles, 39, 40, 41 Dean, James, 86 Denny, Edward, 131 Descartes, René, 34 Derrida, Jacques, x, 33, 34-35, 37, 39, 161, 168, 179 Douglas, James, 140, 141, 147, 150 Douglas, Jane Yellowlees, 35, 38, 179, 181 Dovey, John, 180 Doyle, Brian, 59 Eagleton, Terry, 50-51 Ede, Lisa, 17 Edelman, Lee, 148, 152n3 Einstein, Albert, 167 Elbow, Peter K., 75 Elizabeth I, 105, 108-12, 113, 115-17, 119, 122n9 Elliot, Norbert, 98 Enos, Theresa, 46, 47, 53, 65 Erasmus, 72 Euclid, 29 Ewald, Helen Rothschild, 94 Fahnestock, Jeanne, 69-70, 71-72, 73, 78, 79, 80 Feyerabend, Paul, 39 Fineman, Joel, 127, 128, 130, 133, 136nn7,10 Fish, Stanley, 71 Fogarty, Daniel, 17, 18 Foucault, Michel, x, 32, 96, 187 Franklin, Benjamin, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 39-41, 154, 169 Frow, John, 50, 52, 54 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 41 Genette, Gerard, 110

What is the New Rhetoric? Gladwell, Malcolm, 149 Glenn, Cheryl, 105 Goldberg, Jonathan, 128 Gorgias, 21 Gould, Stephen J., 71 Greenblatt, Stephen, 116 Hafner, Katie, 147-48, 152n3 Hannay, Margaret, 104, 106, 108, 114, 117, 121n3, 122nn4,5,7,12, 137n11,14 Hanson, F. Allan, 96 Hayakawa, S.A., 17 Hayles, N. Katherine, 84-85, 184-87 Heraclitus, 161-62, 169 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 32 Hobby, Elaine, 107 Hoffman, Dustin, 86 Hume, David, 30 Huot, Brian, 94, 96-97, 99 Hunter, Ian, 50, 52, 54 James, Henry, 35-36 Jarvis, William E., 158-59, 171n4 Jefferson, Thomas, 30 Jenkins, Henry, 184, 186 Johnson, Steven, 35 Johnson, William, 31 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 134 Journet, Debra, 70-72, 80 Joyce, Michael, 178, 180, 183n1 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 36 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 70 Kennedy, George A., 161, 172n5 Kent, Thomas, 98-99 Korzybski, Alfred, 17 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 105 Landow, George P., 179 Lanham, Richard, 29-33, 35, 37, 38-39, 160, 172n5 Lee, Irving, 17 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 32 Lemann, Nicolas, 96 Locke, John, 31-32, 35 Lunsford, Andrea, 4-15, 17, 56 Maillioux, Stephen, 71 Macy, William H., 86, 93n3 Mamet, David, 86, 93n3

197

Mann, Thomas, 167-70 Marotti, Arthur, 126, 130, 136n9 Massumi, Brian, 148, 151 Michel, Anthony J., 53-54 Milton, John, 107 Montrose, Louis, 116 More, Hannah, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 18, 21, 22, 79, 80 Olsen, Charles, 36 Ong, Walter J., 8, 39, 172n5, 175-76, 179 Papert, Seymour, 9 Pendray, Edward G., 154, 155-58, 167, 169, 173n8 Perelman, Chaim, 5, 18, 21, 22, 29, 34, 40-41, 79, 80, 80n4, 149 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 126 Piaget, Jean, 41 Plato, 5, 16, 18, 21, 25-26, 27, 37, 38, 40 Pope, Rob, 47-48, 60, 62, 64 Powazek, Derek, 21-22 Pratkanis, Anthony, xii Priestley, Joseph, 30 Quintilian, xii, 29, 30, 149 Ralegh, Walter, 105 Ray, John, 107 Readings, Bill, 55 Reid, Ian, 50, 52, 54 Reynolds, John Frederick, 22 Richards, I.A., 7, 17-19, 21 Ridolfo, Jim, 53-54 Rowling, J.K., 185, 187 Sahagún, Bernadino de, 31 Sanford, Hugh, 112-13 Schenk, David, 150 Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, 30 Sedgwick, Eve 127-28, 129, 130, 135n1,5 Seneca, 22 Shakespeare, William, 126-39 Shankar, Tara, 9 Sharples, Mike, 60, 65

198 Sheridan, David M., 53-54 Sidney, Mary, 104-25, 130-32 Sidney, Philip, 108, 110-15, 118-20, 122n10, 123n13, 126, 130, 130, 132, 135n3 Smith, William, 31 Snyder, Ilana, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 179, 183nn1,2 Strasberg, Lee, 86 Stallybrass, Peter, 128, 130, 135n3, 136n9, 138n13 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 86 Surma, Anne, 60 Tacitus, 26 Tatum, Beverly Daniel, 100

Name Index Toulmin, Stephen, 29 Tulip, Malcolm, 82, 83 Udell, Don, 9, 13 Vincent, David, 144 Wallace, David L., 94 Weathers, Winston, 8 Webb, Jen, 60 Wellbery, David, 29-33, 41 Williams, Raymond, 60 Williams, Tennessee, 94, 97 Williamson, Michael, 94, 97 Willis, Paul, 60 Wroth, Mary, 126-39 Yancey, Kathleen Blake, 99 Zebroski, James, 56-57

SUBJECT INDEX

abusio (catachresis), 69, 149, 152n4 advertising, xii, 19-21, 25 acolouthio, 69 acryon, 69 ad hominem, 41 ad verecundiam, 41 affect, 126, 128, 133, 134, 140-53 ambiguity, 70 American Idol (television program), 182 analogy, 70, 74, 115, 117, 118 anthropology of rhetorics, 31 apology, 104, 105, 107 apophasis, 121n2 aporia, 161, 162 aposiopesis (reticentia), 114 The Apprentice (television program), 178, 182 architecture, 162-63 arrangement (dispositio), 1, 10, 16, 2527, 34 assessment, 3, 11, 54, 59, 63, 94-103 auding, 9 Australia, 47-50, 53-68, 84, 178 author, 2, 13, 34, 83, 104-25, 129-39, 148, 175-76, 185, 187 avatars, 181 Big Brother (television program), 176, 177 biology, 41, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80 blogitis, 146-50 blogs, 8, 24-25, 51, 140-53, 177 body of speaker, 7-8, 82-93 of blogger, 148 catachresis (abusio), 69, 149, 152n4 Cell (scientific journal), 73-81 chiasmus, 70, 71, 80, 110, 128, 132 cognitive theory, 30-41, 70, 71

collecting of postcards, 142-44, 147, 148 commonplace books, 24, 26 computers, 11, 25, 179 connectivity, 148-49, 152 contagion, 140-52 copia, 24 crypt, 159-62 data smog, 150 databases, 22-27 dead letters, 144 darkness (blackness), 127-33, 136, 138 De inventione (Cicero), 16 delivery, 7, 10-11, 26, 27, 82-93, 151 drama, 85-93 early modern women (poetry), 104-25, 126-39 earth, 164, 170-71 encomia, 113, 118, 120 English (academic discipline), 5, 6, 4668 enlightenment decorum, 30-45 epic, 36, 77-78 epideixis, 18, 78, 164 ethos, 20, 25 exemplarity, 148-52 fanfiction, 184-89 feminist scholarship, 106, 186 figuration, 69-81 formative assessment, 95-98 fraternity, 144, 168-69, 171 genealogy, 106, 127-28, 130-32 gender, 104-25, 126-39, 186 genomics, 69, 73-81 geography, 143 geographia, 164 Gilgamesh, 36 Gorgias (Plato), 18, 21 Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), 185, 187

200

Subject Index

hermeneutics, 5, 17, 38 Holy Bible, 36, 157, 164-65, 172n7 humility topoi, 104, 106, 110, 117 hypertext, 29-45, 178-83 incomparable motif, 114-15, 118, 119 inexpressibility topos, 113-14, 118, 120 in medias res, 77-79 instructional assessment, 95, 99-102 internet, 21, 23, 26, 51, 95, 140-53, 177, 178-83, 184 intertextuality, 34-35, 184-85 invention, 23 Iroqouis, 30-31 Job, 164-65, 172n7 kairos, 20, 54 letteracy, 9 literacy, 8, 9, 10, 53, 54, 143, 151 literal versus rhetorical, 104-8, 115, 119, 121, 126 literary canon, 104, 127, 128 materiality of language, 26, 33, 37, 119, 151, 157 media studies, 12, 47, 48 mediation, 69, 73-80 memory, 22-24, 37 Mertonian universalism, 75 metabasis, 72, 73-75, 77, 79, 80, 81n5 method acting, 86 mind, theories of, 29-41 mnemotechnics, 22-24 modesty tropes, 104-25 modernity, 140, 147, 150-52 Native American oratory, 30-31 negatio, 121n2 new assessment, 94-103 new rhetoric, definition of, 4-15, 16-28, 29-45, 46-68, 71-81, 85, 94-95, 97 occultatio, 121n2 occupatio (apology), 105, 121n2 open and closed textual systems, 148, 151-52, 175-77 opinion, 18-19, 25, 151 orality, 7-8, 27, 175 paralepsis, 121n2 parthenogenisis, 112

performance and performance studies, 7-9, 82-93 performativity (illocutionary force), 8, 110 persuasion, 5, 17-18, 85-88, 91-92 Phaedrus (Plato) 25, 26, 27, 37, 38 phatic, 143, 151 photography, 141 physis (phúsis), 161-62, 168-69 ploche, 70 polyptoton, 70 post-process theory, 98-99 postcards, 140-53 postcarditis (postcard craze), 142-53 postgenomic biology, 69, 73-81 postmodernity, 29, 151 practical aesthetics, 86 praeteritio, 114, 121 private and public, 111, 126, 134, 149 prolepsis (procatalepsis), 159-61, 162, 164 prompt language, 150-52 propaganda, xii, 18-19, 25 prosodacy, 9 public relations, 19-20 reading, 34-36, 83, 86-87, 122-23, 126, 127, 175-76 reality television, 176-84 repetition, 40, 131 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 18, 20 Rhetorica ad Herennium, xi, 16, 17, 2, 73 rhetorical versus literal, 104-8, 115, 119, 121, 126 science, 41, 69-81, 96, 163 Science (scientific journal), 73-81 secondary literacy, 8 secondary orality, 8, 175 sexuality, 126-39 Silvae Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric (website), 149 speech versus writing, 9, 26, 31, 33-39, 82-93 sprezzatura, 126 spriting, 9 summative assessment, 95-98

What is the New Rhetoric? Survivor (television program), 180-82 talkument, 9 teaching, 4-15, 46-68, 82-93, 94-103 tekhné, 46, 60, 63, 64 textual culture, 46-68 theatre, 85-93 time capsule, definition of, 158-59 topoi, 23, 39, 161, 172n5

201

unconscious, 39-45, 161 United States, 53-54 voice, 82-93 wiki, 177 writing versus speech, 9, 26, 31, 33-39, 82-93 X Files (television program), 186