Notes
Notes 1. Public Knowledge and Private Inspiration I. Several epistemological systems were in circulation during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. I refer specifically to those thought to have been espoused by the older Sophists, on the one hand, and by Aristotle in his rhetorical and dialectical treatises, on the other. On the epistemology of the Sophists, see Untersteincr, Kerferd, and W. K. C. Guthrie. 2. Modernism was a dominant discursive practice during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as well as the early years of the twentieth. Had Weaver compiled his list of ultimate terms in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, it would have included the term reason as well. 3. I borrow the term discursive practice from Michel Foucault. Briefly, a discursive practice is any set of rules that governs what may be said (or not said) in a given social, historical, or cultural arena. For example, classical rhetoriciansbound as they were by their notion of common sense-could not have used, or understood, the currently popular expression "That's just your opinion." This expressiondepends for its articulation on the discursivepracticeinvented by Lockean empiricism, which defines opinions as the product of individual experience. Following Foucault, I have assumed that the set of texts that propounds the new rhetoric and current-traditional rhetoric, taken together, may be treated as though they articulate one discipline-specific manifestation of one modern discursive practice. In Order ofThings, Foucault labels the discursive practice that privileges representation rather than resemblance as classical; I label it modern in order to avoid confusion with the epistemic description I supply for classical-that is, ancient-rhetoric. Knoblauch and Brannon saddle classical rhetoric with blame for many of the negative practices they find in contemporary writing instruction. My analysis is 173 174 Notes to Pages 5-10 partIy a c!Jmmentary on their work, a commentary arguing to the contrary that the practice of contemporary writing instruction, warts and all, owes a good deal more to Lockean than to classical epistemology. The differences between our positions result from our different perspectives toward modernism. Knoblauch and Brannon take modern perspectives as fruitful grounds for the development of a theory of composition, while I take a postmodern perspective to be a better alternative from which to understand both rhetorical theory and practice. I read thc classical tradition through a postmodern lens, while they attribute to it many of the very features I associate here with modern thought. 4. The revolutionary quality of the intellectual transition from medieval thought to modernism is demonstrated by Reiss and by Foucault in Order of Things. The following account is very much indebted to their work. I use the masculine pronoun here to underscore the fact that modern epistemology is permeated with patriarchal assumptions about the way the world works. For an account of the masculine cast of modernism, see Keller and Grontowski. 5. In the chapter entitled "The Masculine Birth of Time," from which this citation is drawn, Reiss brilliantly traces the transfer of authority from the individual speaking subject to the "machinery" that is discourse. Reiss argues that writing is necessary and complicit in the performance of this transfer, since it occults the presence of an enunciating subject. In other words, modern discursive practice is intimately tied to the availability of literacy. Ong made this point, albeit negatively, many years ago. 6. Modern philosophy has, in recent years, foundered on this rock-that is, on its inability to show why the speaking subject should be authorized to speak the world. See Descombes and ROlty for accounts ofthe philosophical difficulties entailed in according inventional authority to the speaking subject. 7. The representative role of language in modern rhetoric is most obviously manifested in its theories of style and in its dicta about grammar, syntax, and usage. For example, current-traditional rhetoricians taught that grammatical sentences literally represented complete thoughts. Since this study centers on invention, I have not pursued the issue of style here. Interested readers can consult my "Current-Traditional Theory of Style." 8. Howell establishes this point in Eighteenth-Century British Logic. I have drawn my account of eighteenth-century inventional theory from the work of five theorists-teachers whose contributions are widely acknowledged to have been central to the development of the new rhetoric: Hugh Blair, George Campbell , Joseph Priestley, Adam Smith, and Richard Whately. My synchronic treatment of the work of these discourse theorists necessarily elides some of the important intellectual differences between them. For example, Priestley was a dissenter...
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