Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation

Introduction

Introduction 1 Introduction Prior to the twentieth century, the discipline of rhetoric could boast of Western culture’s most complete and integrated system for understanding the manifold uses of language in human affairs. The following synopsis documents, in the most general terms, how rhetorical scholars historically have appealed to universal notions of human being to define and legitimate their discipline. The rhetorical tradition originated in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., when skill in public address emerged as an essential requirement for one’s success, most notably, in Athenian government and society. The demand for instruction in a style of speaking suited to the practice of civic affairs and professional advancement transformed rhetoric from a poetic and theatrical practice into a valued academic discipline.1 Isocrates (436–338 B.C.E.) helped to institutionalize rhetoric as a prominent feature of Greek education. Over time, his teachings influenced Roman education and, through this connection, Western education in general. In his Antidosis, he calls speech “that power which, of all the faculties which belong to the nature of man, is the source of most of our blessings” (253). Isocrates anticipates more than two millennia worth of conventional wisdom regarding the nature of speech and humanity: For in the other powers which we possess, as I have already said on a former occasion, we are in no respect superior to other living creatures; nay, we are inferior to many in swiftness and in strength and in other resources; but, because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts. . . . It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good. Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise. (253–55)2 In Isocrates’ account, humans transcend the life of “other living creatures” not simply by virtue of their capacity for reason, for founding cities, laws, and arts, but through the ability to cultivate and express their reasoning in 1 2 Being Made Strange speech. Without speech, our reason would make us no better than “wild beasts.” According to Isocrates, “the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul” (255–56). Like so many in classical Greece, Isocrates maintained that reason, the very hallmark of human being, would lie dormant and useless without eloquence.3 Aside from Isocrates’ considerable influence, contemporary rhetoricians frequently characterize the sophists, with whom he is often (and somewhat controversially) grouped, as Hellenistic counterculturalists or protopostmodernists whose teachings provide a classical Greek template for civic education and discourse in the so-called postmodern era (Jarratt 1991; Vitanza 1997). Regardless of contemporary interpretations, the sophists generally affirmed conventional civic and intellectual ideals. Although the sophists’ standards of truth and virtue were, indeed, often more flexible than Socrates or Plato’s standards, most of them advocated moral education for the orator, celebrated the virtues of reason, and venerated both enlightened government and the gods (Kennedy 1999, 50). “[W]ho does not know,” Isocrates opined, “that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight that that which is furnished by words?” (Antidosis, 278). In this sense, Isocrates’ influential espousal of the orator’s contributions to Hellenistic culture strongly resembled widespread sophistic contributions to the establishment of reason, truth, morality , and eloquence as Western cultural ideals.4 Whereas Isocrates emphasized the virtuous capacities of the speaker, Plato (ca. 429–347 B.C.E.) emphasized the corrupt nature of rhetoric. In his Sophist , the interlocutors conclude that “skill in the region of discourse” enables one “to impose upon the young . . . images of all things in a shadow play of discourse, so as to make them believe that they are hearing the truth and that the speaker is in all matters the wisest of men” (234c). Nevertheless, Plato admitted that uniquely gifted individuals could use speech virtuously. For him, the only form of speech immune to the human penchant for deceit was spoken by the philosopher, by a lover of wisdom...