Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric

Conclusion

145 Conclusion: Centering Rhetoric—The Psychology of Anxious Moments and Solemn Occasions P aul Bénichou closes The Consecration of the Writer: 1750–1830 by pointing out that the secular spiritual power he has been describing only begins in the mid-nineteenth century; his book unfolds the prehistory of that power and engages a point of view whose full narration might begin where his ends and continue to the current moment. He identifies this power as “critical in its essence,” saying that when organized religion (or any social “ministry of lofty edification”) no longer holds cultural authority, a “law of examination and debate” takes over. Claiming with many that literature replaces religion as its secular counterpart in this authority,1 he concludes that trust in all such discourses dissipates: “Our age knows where the real priests are and no longer counts much on them for its salvation, [so it] is not ready to grant to newcomers a kind of authority that it denies to their predecessors.” After the world no longer works in old commonplaces or even knows those who once announced a certain kind of mediating character—priests and analogous icons—any continuing sign of pedagogic or literary self-privileging insults its audiences. Certified authorities are no longer identical to charismatic discourse: “As soon as such a pretension takes too peremptory or too precise form, it can appear absurd to the average person” (341–42). Bénichou’s point has a great deal to do with my recurring critiques of formalist approaches to metadiscourses. Certainly the foundational claim of that approach is that stable Truth about any phenomenon emerges from naming its parts and describing their relationships. That dour confidence may have inspired the late-twentieth-century reaction to it, the then apparently obvious naming of jouissance as the center of poststructuralism. The play of signs 146 Conclusion endorsed a rather serious notification that language is a self-referential system to be taken in the spirit of its infinite play. But neither of those turns—neither to meaning nor to self-referential stylizations of language—has bothered rhetoric studies in significant ways. The argument that language is never so controllable as oratorical rhetoric claims appears not to affect its belief that we can (much less should) “mean what we say,” nor the conviction that no matter how obviously crafted a text is, its reader/audience can discern its intentions. Instead, rhetoric studies continues to rely on formalism to convey the spirit of its cultural work, projects whose exemplifications are more interesting than Bénichou’s “too peremptory or too precise.” Thus, in the interest of another sort of truth, my point has been that continuing to ignore the authority of many forms of precedent trust over any discursive persuasion, and the partiality of any persuasion no matter how it is effected, retains a formalist history that cleanses rhetoric of feelings that actually constitute its importance. In such histories, Hudibrasian “rules and tools” yield little to sources and forces, human and supposedly “philosophical,” that become historical objects of study. Ignoring the still unremarked essence of persuasion—willingness to cooperate—allows historians to ignore how formalist categories offer false substitutes for the diffused “spirit” of many rhetorics. The generative problematic that my choice has involved is typical in poststructuralist histories. That is, they must simultaneously turn to specific examples, as New History does, but without re-turning to totalizing explanations of them, to a retained religious spirit that makes Hegelian histories cohere around organized canonical authorities. In this case, however, if understanding persuasion depends on reviving pre-Cartesian acceptance of emotion as always at its center, even if for some quite regrettably, it further requires recharacterizing trust, our emotional consent. We have taken many forms of comfort from antique Mediterranean cultures, and more, insofar as new findings about them suggest that some centers have held. That is, the word “civilization” might become descriptive rather than evaluative were we to forgo origin stories that have begun much later than they should, to extend a Western history that includes all of its Mesopotamian precedents. That beginning also might remind us of another obvious starting-place for rhetorical analyses, in the identity between persuasion and emotionally invested interaction. Of course, to make that emotional point as we recast rhetoric as multiple metadiscursive sites produces a less detailed analysis than is warranted. Rhetoric history that enlarges its view of the sites and nature of persuasion to include multiple, equally active pedagogies requires many close readings...