Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation

Conclusion

181 Conclusion Rhetoric in a Nonmoral Sense The very idea of rhetoric, its institutional meaning and value, is based on universal notions of human being. By definition, rhetoric originally was conceived as a pedagogical, cultural, and political practice uniquely suited to the expression of essential human truths, values, and virtues. Even contemporary rhetoricians who define the art in seemingly neutral terms, as persuasion or argumentation, inherit definitions of rhetoric first made possible by its codification, in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., according to intellectually narrow and socially prejudiced ideals of reason, truth, knowledge, and morality. Rhetoricians seldom have questioned, much less relinquished, the doubly representational logic long used to define and legitimate their domain of inquiry. Throughout the rhetorical tradition, rhetoricians have claimed that, in representing (or lending speech) to transcendent phenomena such as truth or virtue, the rhetor represents (or personifies) the defining truth and virtue of human being. Consequently, this representational logic facilitated a definition of the art (and, by implication, the human subject) in moral terms. Sound rhetoric manifested the rhetor’s wise and virtuous intentions, the integrity of his or her reason and truthfulness, and thus the rectitude of his or her person. Specious rhetoric manifested the rhetor’s unlearned and dissolute intentions, the faultiness of his or her reason, and thus the errancy of his or her person. Since its inception, the discipline of rhetoric has measured not merely “the way one speaks” but “the way one lives” (Baumlin 1994, xv). To paraphrase Quintilian, a good orator is, by definition, a good person speaking well. To develop a conception of rhetoric beyond representation is to develop a nonmoral definition of rhetoric. Toward that end, the focal point of my 182 Being Made Strange inquiry throughout this book has been the category of ethos. I take Aristotle’s description of this proof as the “controlling factor” of rhetoric in its literal sense: traditionally defined, one’s appeals to character should confer favor on whatever other proofs one employs by manifesting an ethos indicative of the ideal reason and good conduct to which all of humanity should aspire (Corbett 1989, 204). Even in modern public speaking textbooks, which offer the most elementary treatments of ethos, the proof is said to undermine one’s combined efforts at persuasion precisely when one’s ethos appears to violate accepted standards of character and credibility. Significantly, then, the discipline of rhetoric has, for centuries, constituted a principal intellectual and cultural practice according to which universal notions of human being have been refined into commonly accepted standards of reason, truth, knowledge, and virtue. Conceiving of rhetoric beyond representation, contrary to universal notions of human being, thus offers the prospect of refuting the seemingly categorical, but actually privileged and partial, moral imperatives that have pervasively informed social identities and civic affairs throughout much of our heritage. Developing a conception of ethos no longer defined by the rhetorical expression of a universal human nature is integral to developing a conception of rhetoric beyond representation. Because ethos, the controlling factor of rhetoric , represents categorical notions of “practical wisdom [phronēsis] and virtue [aretē] and good will [eunoia]” (On Rhetoric, 2.1.5), one must question such supposedly categorical attributes of human being in order to forge a nonrepresentational conception of ethos. More daunting still, one must do so by questioning the basic ontology that endows the category of being, human or otherwise, with its conventionally ideal and original meaning or value. I have sought to do so, not by advocating an alternate ontology with starkly contrasting definitions of truth, meaning, and human being, but by assigning an alternate sense and value to such fundamental metaphysical categories. Attempting to either reveal the inherent falsity of such categories or transcend them altogether would simply emulate the metaphysical pretensions to an ideal truth that first produced the universal notions of human wisdom and virtue according to which rhetoric, throughout its history, has been defined. Instead, I have demonstrated (in Parts 1 and 2 of this book especially) that differences and transformations in orders of discourse, rather than an intrinsic and transparent sameness, produce the apparent identity between sensible and intelligible phenomena. In this context, I have assigned a discursive, or nonrepresentational, sense and value to the very category of representation. By implication, assigning this altered significance to the category of representation bestows a discursive sense and value to...