Classical Rhetoric and Other Misnomers

Intersections and divergences in culture have always been of assiduous interest to me. As such, I was intrigued and daunted by the prospect of creating a geographical map that would specifically locate those points of divergence. I have always struggled with spatial processing and things with names like “map,” “chart,” or “graph. However, once I began to look closely at the readings it seemed nearly impossible to track the cultural movements of rhetorical information any other way. I have a habit of trying to sum up the totality of humanity in every assignment, as previous professors have said, so I struggled to refine my ideas about the material into manageable categories.

Sean, Andrew and I began by trying to compile the breadth of what we read into a comprehensive map that showed the spread of rhetorical theory. Initially we talked through questions and observations we collected through our individual readings of the texts and tried to hone in on the places where we agreed and those where we disagreed. We somehow each settled on a different text as our point of identification and operated from those standpoints, Andrew with Kennedy, Sean with Smith and myself with Lyon. This division of interest proved advantageous for our discussion because it allowed us to (figuratively) assume the roles of each theorist. From this vantage point we began to identify specific themes that were present in the texts. One theme that permeated all of the readings we considered was language. In dissimilar but related forms, language was the connecting factor that linked each author’s intent.

Linda Tuhewai Smith places special emphasis on language and the importance of naming as an imperial act, “Columbus names that legacy more than any other individual” (Smith 21).  Smith traces the path of colonization and making note of the points in history when names have been used to privilege certain groups or events over others. It was this process, combined with my predilections for the philological, that peaked my interest in language as a means of power and division. Smith explains the process of de-humanization employed by colonizing parties, one aspect of which was the propagation of titles like “savage”. This word allowed the colonizers to treat the indigenous as sub-human. “One of the supposed characteristics of primitive peoples was that we could not use our minds or intellects…we did not practice the arts of civilization. By lacking such virtues we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself” (Smith 26).

Arabella Lyon considered language more in terms of the inherent limitations of specific cultural vocabulary. Smith posits that many cultural aspects of particular people are dictated by the phonetic or ideographic classification of a language. We found a three-part example of this lingual facet (though many other existed); the first was Lu Ming Mao’s Facts of Non-Use (how something is rather than what it is), the second was Smith’s explanation of the Daoist notion of wuwei or non-act, and the third was Gilbert Ryle’s anatomy of verbs (terminus verbs/process verbs) from Lyon’s text. We chose to take the Daoist words from Lyon’s text and plot them on a Google map in a cluster. We designed the map to resemble a mirror to symbolize Richards Mirror (Lyon). Within the looking glass we filled in our visual representations of other rhetorical tropes, the “crack” in the glass (a crooked line running from the Middle East down the Near East) represented the Western divide. We then drew lines from different points across the Middle and Near East, over the West, to the Far East. We labeled the lines with words that encapsulated the prominent themes in the texts i.e. persuasion, remonstration, eloquence, hermeneutics, fluidity and timeliness. Our intention with this method was to demonstrate the importance of language by establishing its limitations in our project. These restrictive terms forced artificial boundaries within our map, similar to those forced on those who try to write about their cultural experience.

From this wide range of lingual interpretation we moved toward a more geographically focused discussion of language. For this we drew on Shane Borrowman’s Recovering the Arabic Aristotle. Borrowman’s book makes a persuasive argument for the Middle Eastern influence on the Western Aristotle. “I argue that the Aristotle that entered the intellectual life of Europe was fundamentally different from the Aristotle now studied by scholars of rhetoric” (Borrowman 99). We deduced from Borrowman’s ideas about the “Arabic Aristotle” that there was a trend of theories and texts passing through the Middle East before they could travel from the West to the Far East and vice versa. This theory gave us the idea to plot our map with lines that did not have an arrow on one side that would indicate singular direction. The lines symbolize continuous passage, demonstrating the itinerant nature of information. Our ultimate, and largely unfulfilled, goal in this assignment was to boil down everything we read and locate specific cannons of rhetoric for each culture. However it soon became clear that there was no way to canonize these rhetoric’s in such concrete terms. The futility of the exercise reminded me of the way Lyon describes the Dao, “in Daoism, there is not cosmic unity, only process and becoming” (Lyon 186). Similarly comparative rhetoric cannot be pinned down by incomplete terminology of one or any language. Kennedy broaches this subject in his introduction, “Rhetoric, in essence, is a form of mental and emotion all energy” (Kennedy 3). In positing that rhetoric is a natural, ethereal force it is impossible to place it firmly anywhere, its like trying to decide which culture invented wind or laughter.

It was something of a happy accident that the mapping technology was archaic. That drawback offered an interactive example of the limitations faced by rhetoricians. As Kastely states, “we are inescapably placed”, rooted unshakably in the place where our cultural ties lie. The notion that there could be a way to look beyond the figurative looking glass seems to hold an idealistic romanticism, rooted in its unattainability. However after considering the theorists that make up global rhetoric individually it seems as though the simple act of grappling with the veritable impossibility of looking beyond the screen, to consider things in Burkean terms, of ones own situation begs the potentiality progress. I have always considered an effective text one that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. After reading and unpacking these texts I feel far less sure of what I thought I knew and more aware of the inconsistencies of language, history, privilege, and cultural connectivity. Even if Kastely is right and we are “inescapably placed” I think there is a legitimate case to be made for the necessity of locating ones placement in the world and understanding that the view from that place is unique, limited and (should be) unprivileged.