Rhetoric Run Riot

Dion Cautrell Rhetoric Run Riot (on Michael Bemard-Donals, The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge , and Pedagogy in the Academy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998]) With the growth of composition studies, rhetoric's increasing influence both within and outside the discipline of English has exacerbated the division between literature and composition. In recent years, rhetoric-composition and its practitioners have found themselves in increasing demand, though perhaps not for the right reasons, while traditional literary studies have appeared to suffer serious stagnation, if not outright decline. Furthermore, given various other disciplines' increasing fascination with rhetoric, many outside the field are also coming to view rhetoric as an intellectual despot, one in the process of seizing vast tracts of their work. In The PracticeofTheory, Michael Bemard-Donals cautions againstsuch seizures and negotiates a middle ground by formulating a rhetoric that embraces the discipline's commitment to building productive debate without defending rhetoric's right to some all-powerful role within the academy. Even so, Bemard-Donals' prescription for rhetoric—urging our greater understanding of its "social and transformative force" (238)— presents little that's "new." This social view of discourse production has defined rhetorical theory since the sophists, and despite some moments of forgetting, few modem compositionists would seriously argue against it. The more general difficulty for both compositionists and others comes in defining the overused phrase "social force," especially at a time when everything is seen to be symbolic of social forces. In contrast to this textual revolution, current scholarship in composition studies has progressively moved beyond rhetoric, as compositionists struggle to determine more clearly what the field should be studying, and finding themselves torn between theory and practice. This movement raises questions about charges that composition studies hasbeen largely responsible for the academy's increasing interest in rhetoricality; or more striking , that through rhetoric's dominance compositionists have sought to bolster the supposed prestige they've enjoyed in the last two decades . It is no small irony, of course, that this second charge is laid against a field whose teachers are increasingly graduate students and adjuncts and whose "service courses" are often seen as the lowest species in the course-offering hierarchy. Despite these contradictory influences, the "social" and "transformative " are the guiding terms in Bemard-Donals' interweaving 366 the minnesota review of classical rhetoric and materialist dialectic. This tack allows a return to the original site of transformative social action, the polis— the place where the discursive and the social/physical traditionally meet. As with most current theorists, Bernard-Donals casts knowledge as the engine of possibility, but the hybrid nature of his work tempers this with a materialist concern for something beyond theorizing , for the essence of transformative social action. Even assuming this overcomes the problems I've mentioned, he must also confront a larger challenge, the skepticism of materialists. Rhetoricians' success in the social realm is the primary reason Plato condemned sophistic rhetoric in Gorgias and Phaedrus. (If it lacked a potential for shaping society, it's rather unlikely he would have perceived it as a threat.) Like Plato, some will be unconvinced that materialist dialectic can benefit from classical theories of rhetoric. BernardDonals ' response is to show that classical rhetoric has been materialist in practiceaswell as in theory. Unfortunately, this may notchange prevailing attitudes, which are in part motivated by a deep-seated assumption about what theory ought to be and do. Rhetoricians and compositionists, especially those of the socalled "new rhetorical" tradition, have largely concerned themselves with broad strokes rather than small details, for texts about texts rather than textual production itself, claiming an all-encompassing group ofclassical authors, who were in actuality seldom of like mind. Many contemporary compositionists—who have little formal training in classical rhetoric—assume rhetorical theory before Kenneth Burke to beofonepiece, and a not veryappealingpiece at that. This means, however, that much of what passes for rhetoric today is not really rhetoric at all but rather some nebulous field labeled composition studies. Still, as Bernard-Donals suggests, the peculiar role rhetoricians currently play also presents them with unique opportunities for innovation: what better way to incur fundamental change within the field than by retheorizing its formative beginnings? It is in...