Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art (review)

The overarching theme of Michael Kochin's Five Chapters on Rhetoric seems to be that classical rhetoric is still important. With the help of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Gorgias, Callicles, Protagoras, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and others, Kochin makes the case that when thinking about rhetoric, we ought to listen to the ancients—at least most of the time. While the overarching theme deals with the classical tradition, the book's central argument is focused squarely on current rhetorical practices. The proper role of rhetoric, Kochin argues, is to allow "the facts" to "speak for themselves" (164). He attempts to establish this claim by exploring five concepts that are, or ought to be, central to our understanding of rhetoric—character, action, things, nothing, and art. In wide-ranging analyses of rhetorical theory and practice, Kochin tries to show how rhetoric can aid the process of mobilizing knowledge for collective use. Focusing in particular on political and scientific knowledge, he explores how our judgments of character and action allow us to connect with "things" and "to defend the fabric of social life from things or facts" (16). Whether Kochin succeeds in showing that rhetoric's job is to allow the facts to speak for themselves remains unclear, for reasons I address below.

To say the least, Five Chapters on Rhetoric is a confounding book. It is thought-provoking at the same time that it reiterates well-known tenets of rhetorical theory. In fact, many of Kochin's claims about character, action, things, nothing, and art can be found in basic public speaking textbooks. Consider the chapter on character. Kochin ponders the question of "what makes someone trustworthy as a source of political advice in a democracy" (25). In trying to answer the question, he arrives at what he calls the "rhetorical problem of character or ethos." The problem is this: "The speaker in a democracy must show that he or she is 'one of the boys,' in the sense of being comfortable with others, and that he or she is concerned with the going on of the ways that they are together, of the continued existence of the community that they together constitute." To put it differently, "the speaker grants his or her audience respect in order to show that their interests and concerns are worthy of being respected" (32). The point is basically about establishing goodwill. The speaker must show that he or she has the best interests of the audience in mind; otherwise, the audience will not respect the speaker or see him or her as credible.

Yet this is not to say that Kochin's point is insignificant. In the end, the chapter on character proves intriguing, as Kochin makes the case that expertise may actually hinder the establishment of ethos. "The very concept of rhetoric," he explains, "is threatened by the assignment of all things to one or another substantive area of expertise: what, we may wonder with Socrates, can the rhetorician add to a deliberation about war that the general is not better equipped to supply?" Nevertheless, there remains a place for rhetoric: "Judgment of character provides a minimum role for rhetoric in that there is no peculiar area of expertise to which it can be assigned. … Rhetoric is not about things or about human beings understood as things: rhetoric is reflective manipulation of the distinction between our relations to each other and our relations to things" (53).

The chapter on nothing is likewise strangely thought-provoking. In this chapter Kochin explores how "rhetoric can be both an art of saying something and an art of saying nothing" (113). At one level, Kochin is dancing around the concept of kairos—knowing the opportune moment to speak or to act. Sometimes it is appropriate to speak substantively, other times it is appropriate to say very little, and still other times it is appropriate to hold one's tongue. But at another level, Kochin is driving at...