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[(In Defence of Rhetoric)] [Author: Brian Vickers] published on
A spirited effort to restore the importance of rhetoric, this book examines its early development in the classical era, its triumph during the Renaissance, and its subsequent decline. While acknowledging rhetoric's general loss of prestige, the author asserts its value in modern times as an indispensable vehicle for style and thought in the work of Joyce, Orwell, Jarrell, and others, and concludes by surveying rhetoric's fragmentation and misapplication in the current critical theories of such thinkers as Jakobson and de Man.
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First published April 14, 1988
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January 17, 2021
For an extremely long time, dating back to classical antiquity, the art or technique of rhetoric comprised a skill set for professionals, essentially serving as a sort of law degree, or else as a requirement for entry into political life. In Defence of Rhetoric is Brian Vickers' (hereafter V) long historical overview of the West’s fascination with and fear of rhetoric. It invokes some important classical texts, ranging from the Greece of Plato and Aristotle to the Rome of Cicero and Quintillian, and beyond. Greco-Roman writers such as these were revered as great authorities on how public discourse can be used and misused. It is certainly true that protracted debates about sophistry and about persuasion’s relevance to logic--debates which seemed so urgently relevant in the middle ages and renaissance--have atrophied and disappeared in recent centuries. Yet V concludes his book with an assessment of how rhetoric is still alive and well today. And even today, rhetorical skill is still maligned as sophistry, accused of being a mercenary pursuit where the orator invents and develops arguments based on the point of view and interests of whoever is paying. In the end I would argue that V’s notion of rhetoric today is far too narrow, as V fails to take into consideration the roles rhetoric continues to play, for good or ill, in politics, law, management, branding, and advertising. V focuses instead on what I would call rhetoric’s ‘marginal utility’ as a toolkit for literary criticism. It is an open question whose rhetoric V has historicised and interpreted here. Yet ultimately, V’s interesting longitudinal view on rhetoric should engender much needed debate on the future of our deliberative institutions, and on the future of democracy itself, something well worth considering very carefully.
So what is rhetoric exactly? While Nietzsche equated rhetoric with language itself, the tradition of classical rhetoric rather conceives of rhetoric as the marked and refined use of language in the service of suasion. The early chapters of In Defence of Rhetoric are dedicated to a synopsis of classical rhetorical theory and method. Here goes a synopsis of the synopsis:
a piece of rhetoric must fulfill some practical function, whether to teach (docere), to delight (delictare), or to motivate (movere) and influence (flectare)
a piece of rhetoric must either face the future (deliberative), analyze the past (forensic/judicial), or else praise or blame who or what we see in the present (epideictic)
a piece of rhetoric must represent the character of the speaker (ethos), must modify the disposition of the hearer (pathos), and must align and articulate facts in the world as proof of some argument (logos)
a piece of rhetoric must be generated by a method or process, like this one by Cicero, which includes:
inventio – find the arguments you must make
disposito – organize the arguments in a logical structure or outline
elocutio – make the arguments vivid through linguistic means (enthymemes, tropes, and figures)
memoria – commit to memory
pronuntatio and actio – utilize the fine points of delivery, including pronunciation and gesture
Many a philosopher, dating back at least to Plato, have attacked rhetoric and have conjured what V sees as a phony problem, the antagonistic binary opposition between rhetoric and philosophy. This forced use of binary contrast, itself an act of rhetoric, helps Plato dismiss the arguments of Socrates’ interlocutors, those straw men and puppet figures in Plato’s dialogues. Plato ‘defeats’ the sophists in the dialogue 'Gorgias' by having Gorgias and his students agree with Plato for no apparent reason. It seems Plato ensures the validity of his assumptions about rhetoric simply by putting weak words into the mouths of the other characters in his Socratic dialogue.
V’s historical narrative opens vistas on how rhetoric is much more than Plato’s ‘cookery’ for the ‘soul’. After his polite deconstruction of Plato’s anti-rhetorical heritage, V goes on to demonstrate how the arts of persuasion tap into the great potential for vivid expression that is found resting in all language. Metaphor, for example, makes an idea vivid by forcing an appreciation of a previously unnoticed or under-emphasized semantic similarity. Metaphor stems from a natural creative impulse, by which folks are driven to make a shred of language their very own. Everyone everywhere has always made use of rhetorical figures like metaphor. More subtle, and perhaps more artificial, is the enthymeme, which can be instantiated as a formal argument which is made informally. Such arguments are presented without making explicit all the connections between ideas in the argument. Enthymemes are expressed in this way in order to invite the audience’s cognitive participation, where hearers of an enthymeme are left to connect the dots themselves, thereby seeming to share in the invention of an argument as though it were one’s own.
In the hands of a master, rhetoric conjures a mimesis, which is a creative reformulation of reality arising from the congruence between verba and res, between language and things, between words and the matter under consideration. For V, mimesis depends on the poly-functional nature of tropes and figures, whereby feelings are manipulated as the contextualized meanings of certain expressive forms are made vivid. There is no one-to-one mapping between a rhetorical figure and its psychological effect. Instead, the orator’s figurative torsion of language concocts a stew of unusual and interesting linguistic forms, invented conceptual meanings, and aroused feelings of sympathy or disdain for the topic being discussed.
With all of V’s gab about linguistic form and meaning, you would think there would be much here for the modern linguist. Truth is, V appears conservative in isolating rhetoric from both grammar and logic. The one linguist whom V looks at rather closely is a favorite of mine, Roman Jakobson. V doesn’t care much for Jakobson, calling him “opportunistic and vague” and "a disaster for the critical school”. All because Jakobson in his interpretation of aphasia appeared to reduce rhetoric to a binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy. As metaphor and metonymy are in no way opposites but are rather metonymically related (they both deal with a transfer of meaning, unlike most other figures), it seems to V that Jakobson is using the term metaphor rather metaphorically. True enough. But V would profit from a reading of Jakobson’s analysis of the speech event scenario in Linguistics and Poetics, an analysis which could help to bring the rhetorical schemata of Aristotle and Cicero up to date.
There are certainly sub-fields of linguistics which are worth considering in any work on rhetoric. Pragmatics--primarily concerned with resolving meaning through context, but also gaging the apropriateness or salience of an expression--points to correlates between presupposition and topic, and between entailment and enthymeme. Contemporary syntacticians, moreover, look increasingly to pragmatic roles of information structure (like topic and focus) in order to explain certain marked but not uncommon syntactic transformations or constructions. And cognitive linguistics would be nowhere without rhetoric’s much earlier work on metaphor, metaphor being the best weapon in an orator’s arsenal on account of its vividness effects and its universal appeal.
While rhetoric could benefit from a rapprochement with linguistics, linguists could likewise benefit from an intensified interest in rhetoric. To give an example, the sophist Isocrates believed that internal debate within the mind moves us from doubt to conviction. This ‘internal debate’, this weighing of agonisticly opposed possibilities, forms the basis of dialectical thought, both in the philosopher and in the swineherd. Isocrates saw this internal, deliberative rhetoric as the only known way to make our own inner thoughts clear. Note that this is not how most linguists understand thinking. Chomsky, for example, avers that thought is the sole reason for morphosyntactic computation, with any communication with the world outside the skull being quite literally an afterthought. But with rhetoric, we see how communication gives form to thought rather than the other way around. For human beings, language is constantly reinvented, and the creative figures of yesterday become the new literal meanings of tomorrow. Historical linguists will recognize V’s example of how a piece of figurative language, being at its origin marked in form and/or meaning, becomes phonologically and semantically unmarked through use and overuse.
So if V’s In Defence of Rhetoric shies away from from any linguistic treatment of grammar and logic, whose rhetoric is being defended here? Unfortunately, the book’s intended audience seems to be solely the liberal arts community of elites ensconced in their ivory towers. V’s quotations in French are neither translated nor brief. It seems at times that V would rather worship the bon mot than make a clear and cogent argument. V’s elitism also shines through when he relates rhetoric to its ‘sister arts’, which are narrowly confined to poetics, painting, the novel, and the canon of literary criticism. While I found V’s rhetorically informed critique of Orwell's 1984 to be insightful and more than a little scary, his discussion of the later Joyce reads like a hagiography for a writer who failed, in my opinion, to make himself intelligible.
Moreover, I believe V is looking for modernity’s rhetoric in all the wrong places. If rhetoric functions to inform, entertain, and move to action, then one should consider our omnipresent and omnivorous media first, before tackling texts like Ulysses which hardly anyone can understand. While V’s pursuit of literary criticism might be a bit more elevated, I think the more urgent task should be to understand how rhetoric informs, entertains, and motivates members of our fracturing society. To do this, we must recognize branding, advertising, sound bites, and social media to be the true and vital legacy of the rhetorical tradition. It becomes increasingly clear that we live in a world of social posts, of sound bites, of fifteen second commercials. So while looking exclusively at the high styles of rhetoric as found in the academy, V misses the far more significant, because far more pervasive, low styles of rhetoric found all around us. A lot is at stake. The herd populism of 2021 can only be challenged by an understanding of the populist-nationalist brand. This brand encourages the teaching of falsehoods. This brand celebrates the delight we might feel in having our base prejudices accepted in a community, albeit a community of cranks. This brand spawns a certain movement to cruel action through its self-verifying, self-legitimating words of hatred. In facing brand politics, students of rhetoric must call out the dirty tricks of the demagogue. They must contest the vapid reasoning espoused by every sensationalizing tyrant who panders to an intentionally illiterate and zealously xenophobic mob. We live in some very dangerous times, and V’s preference for the elitist and academic doxa of rhetoric only increases our blind spot when it comes to the plain folk—what they know, what they feel, and what they hope to accomplish.
Isocrates always maintained that rhetoric is not to blame for civil unrest. Rhetoric does not kill people, people kill people. Yet if language is a loaded weapon, as Bolinger once said, then we need to look to how this weapon is used. We can’t excuse the mob by saying that rhetoric is to blame. That’s not how democracy works. Democracy rests on values of tolerance, including a tolerance for an opposition. For democracy to survive, the folk must be open to listening to other, opposing viewpoints, for only the airing of ideas and the debating of principles can supplant violence as the way to sort things out. To listen openly requires some ethical relativism, or at least tolerance for alternate beliefs and ways of life. Here, V’s history of rhetoric comes in handy, although it does not take a historian to see that rhetoric thrives best in democratic, republican contexts. While the deliberative assemblies in democratic Athens or republican Rome were fertile grounds for the fruition of rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic, the medieval period in Europe saw a disintegration of rhetoric. This disintegration followed the end of deliberation in European polities and coincided with the growth of autocratic systems of power and control. With the renaissance and enlightenment, there was renewed hope of achieving truth through linguistic art and artifice. The blossoming of rhetoric in the early modern era had a lot to do with a hallmark of liberalism: the idea that all who wish to speak must be given their say. Society’s return to dialogue and debate led to a renewed professionalization of rhetoric in fields like law and politics. Today, I feel we are moving once more away from the literacy which capitalism and print made possible and towards a short-sighted jingoism combined with a pervasive antagonism toward anyone who might dare to disagree with the ideology of the populist nationalist brand. I agree with the sophists here. If you oppose a tyrant with force, you only solve half the problem. It takes an orator to bring the people along in one’s campaign against tyranny. We must decide whether our republic can be saved from a fate worse than Trumpism, that fate being the moral collapse of civil society into a government of, for, and by the venal liars. If our republic is to survive as a democracy--rather than as an aristocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy--we must all use our words to teach truth over lies, to delight in community rather than in conflict, and to move that community to an acceptance of and openness to others. There is always space for more and better arguments, but only by listening can we grow and mature as citizens of a republic.
In short, a knowledge of rhetoric, including an awareness of when we are being hoodwinked, provides the best possible antidote to the poisonous hate speech that is mislabeled as free speech. Words do damage, and language often is the loaded weapon responsible for that harm. If we seek to disarm the rabble and so diffuse a treacherous situation, we must begin with an awareness of the destructive as well as constitutive power of words.
So what is rhetoric exactly? While Nietzsche equated rhetoric with language itself, the tradition of classical rhetoric rather conceives of rhetoric as the marked and refined use of language in the service of suasion. The early chapters of In Defence of Rhetoric are dedicated to a synopsis of classical rhetorical theory and method. Here goes a synopsis of the synopsis:
a piece of rhetoric must fulfill some practical function, whether to teach (docere), to delight (delictare), or to motivate (movere) and influence (flectare)
a piece of rhetoric must either face the future (deliberative), analyze the past (forensic/judicial), or else praise or blame who or what we see in the present (epideictic)
a piece of rhetoric must represent the character of the speaker (ethos), must modify the disposition of the hearer (pathos), and must align and articulate facts in the world as proof of some argument (logos)
a piece of rhetoric must be generated by a method or process, like this one by Cicero, which includes:
inventio – find the arguments you must make
disposito – organize the arguments in a logical structure or outline
elocutio – make the arguments vivid through linguistic means (enthymemes, tropes, and figures)
memoria – commit to memory
pronuntatio and actio – utilize the fine points of delivery, including pronunciation and gesture
Many a philosopher, dating back at least to Plato, have attacked rhetoric and have conjured what V sees as a phony problem, the antagonistic binary opposition between rhetoric and philosophy. This forced use of binary contrast, itself an act of rhetoric, helps Plato dismiss the arguments of Socrates’ interlocutors, those straw men and puppet figures in Plato’s dialogues. Plato ‘defeats’ the sophists in the dialogue 'Gorgias' by having Gorgias and his students agree with Plato for no apparent reason. It seems Plato ensures the validity of his assumptions about rhetoric simply by putting weak words into the mouths of the other characters in his Socratic dialogue.
V’s historical narrative opens vistas on how rhetoric is much more than Plato’s ‘cookery’ for the ‘soul’. After his polite deconstruction of Plato’s anti-rhetorical heritage, V goes on to demonstrate how the arts of persuasion tap into the great potential for vivid expression that is found resting in all language. Metaphor, for example, makes an idea vivid by forcing an appreciation of a previously unnoticed or under-emphasized semantic similarity. Metaphor stems from a natural creative impulse, by which folks are driven to make a shred of language their very own. Everyone everywhere has always made use of rhetorical figures like metaphor. More subtle, and perhaps more artificial, is the enthymeme, which can be instantiated as a formal argument which is made informally. Such arguments are presented without making explicit all the connections between ideas in the argument. Enthymemes are expressed in this way in order to invite the audience’s cognitive participation, where hearers of an enthymeme are left to connect the dots themselves, thereby seeming to share in the invention of an argument as though it were one’s own.
In the hands of a master, rhetoric conjures a mimesis, which is a creative reformulation of reality arising from the congruence between verba and res, between language and things, between words and the matter under consideration. For V, mimesis depends on the poly-functional nature of tropes and figures, whereby feelings are manipulated as the contextualized meanings of certain expressive forms are made vivid. There is no one-to-one mapping between a rhetorical figure and its psychological effect. Instead, the orator’s figurative torsion of language concocts a stew of unusual and interesting linguistic forms, invented conceptual meanings, and aroused feelings of sympathy or disdain for the topic being discussed.
With all of V’s gab about linguistic form and meaning, you would think there would be much here for the modern linguist. Truth is, V appears conservative in isolating rhetoric from both grammar and logic. The one linguist whom V looks at rather closely is a favorite of mine, Roman Jakobson. V doesn’t care much for Jakobson, calling him “opportunistic and vague” and "a disaster for the critical school”. All because Jakobson in his interpretation of aphasia appeared to reduce rhetoric to a binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy. As metaphor and metonymy are in no way opposites but are rather metonymically related (they both deal with a transfer of meaning, unlike most other figures), it seems to V that Jakobson is using the term metaphor rather metaphorically. True enough. But V would profit from a reading of Jakobson’s analysis of the speech event scenario in Linguistics and Poetics, an analysis which could help to bring the rhetorical schemata of Aristotle and Cicero up to date.
There are certainly sub-fields of linguistics which are worth considering in any work on rhetoric. Pragmatics--primarily concerned with resolving meaning through context, but also gaging the apropriateness or salience of an expression--points to correlates between presupposition and topic, and between entailment and enthymeme. Contemporary syntacticians, moreover, look increasingly to pragmatic roles of information structure (like topic and focus) in order to explain certain marked but not uncommon syntactic transformations or constructions. And cognitive linguistics would be nowhere without rhetoric’s much earlier work on metaphor, metaphor being the best weapon in an orator’s arsenal on account of its vividness effects and its universal appeal.
While rhetoric could benefit from a rapprochement with linguistics, linguists could likewise benefit from an intensified interest in rhetoric. To give an example, the sophist Isocrates believed that internal debate within the mind moves us from doubt to conviction. This ‘internal debate’, this weighing of agonisticly opposed possibilities, forms the basis of dialectical thought, both in the philosopher and in the swineherd. Isocrates saw this internal, deliberative rhetoric as the only known way to make our own inner thoughts clear. Note that this is not how most linguists understand thinking. Chomsky, for example, avers that thought is the sole reason for morphosyntactic computation, with any communication with the world outside the skull being quite literally an afterthought. But with rhetoric, we see how communication gives form to thought rather than the other way around. For human beings, language is constantly reinvented, and the creative figures of yesterday become the new literal meanings of tomorrow. Historical linguists will recognize V’s example of how a piece of figurative language, being at its origin marked in form and/or meaning, becomes phonologically and semantically unmarked through use and overuse.
So if V’s In Defence of Rhetoric shies away from from any linguistic treatment of grammar and logic, whose rhetoric is being defended here? Unfortunately, the book’s intended audience seems to be solely the liberal arts community of elites ensconced in their ivory towers. V’s quotations in French are neither translated nor brief. It seems at times that V would rather worship the bon mot than make a clear and cogent argument. V’s elitism also shines through when he relates rhetoric to its ‘sister arts’, which are narrowly confined to poetics, painting, the novel, and the canon of literary criticism. While I found V’s rhetorically informed critique of Orwell's 1984 to be insightful and more than a little scary, his discussion of the later Joyce reads like a hagiography for a writer who failed, in my opinion, to make himself intelligible.
Moreover, I believe V is looking for modernity’s rhetoric in all the wrong places. If rhetoric functions to inform, entertain, and move to action, then one should consider our omnipresent and omnivorous media first, before tackling texts like Ulysses which hardly anyone can understand. While V’s pursuit of literary criticism might be a bit more elevated, I think the more urgent task should be to understand how rhetoric informs, entertains, and motivates members of our fracturing society. To do this, we must recognize branding, advertising, sound bites, and social media to be the true and vital legacy of the rhetorical tradition. It becomes increasingly clear that we live in a world of social posts, of sound bites, of fifteen second commercials. So while looking exclusively at the high styles of rhetoric as found in the academy, V misses the far more significant, because far more pervasive, low styles of rhetoric found all around us. A lot is at stake. The herd populism of 2021 can only be challenged by an understanding of the populist-nationalist brand. This brand encourages the teaching of falsehoods. This brand celebrates the delight we might feel in having our base prejudices accepted in a community, albeit a community of cranks. This brand spawns a certain movement to cruel action through its self-verifying, self-legitimating words of hatred. In facing brand politics, students of rhetoric must call out the dirty tricks of the demagogue. They must contest the vapid reasoning espoused by every sensationalizing tyrant who panders to an intentionally illiterate and zealously xenophobic mob. We live in some very dangerous times, and V’s preference for the elitist and academic doxa of rhetoric only increases our blind spot when it comes to the plain folk—what they know, what they feel, and what they hope to accomplish.
Isocrates always maintained that rhetoric is not to blame for civil unrest. Rhetoric does not kill people, people kill people. Yet if language is a loaded weapon, as Bolinger once said, then we need to look to how this weapon is used. We can’t excuse the mob by saying that rhetoric is to blame. That’s not how democracy works. Democracy rests on values of tolerance, including a tolerance for an opposition. For democracy to survive, the folk must be open to listening to other, opposing viewpoints, for only the airing of ideas and the debating of principles can supplant violence as the way to sort things out. To listen openly requires some ethical relativism, or at least tolerance for alternate beliefs and ways of life. Here, V’s history of rhetoric comes in handy, although it does not take a historian to see that rhetoric thrives best in democratic, republican contexts. While the deliberative assemblies in democratic Athens or republican Rome were fertile grounds for the fruition of rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic, the medieval period in Europe saw a disintegration of rhetoric. This disintegration followed the end of deliberation in European polities and coincided with the growth of autocratic systems of power and control. With the renaissance and enlightenment, there was renewed hope of achieving truth through linguistic art and artifice. The blossoming of rhetoric in the early modern era had a lot to do with a hallmark of liberalism: the idea that all who wish to speak must be given their say. Society’s return to dialogue and debate led to a renewed professionalization of rhetoric in fields like law and politics. Today, I feel we are moving once more away from the literacy which capitalism and print made possible and towards a short-sighted jingoism combined with a pervasive antagonism toward anyone who might dare to disagree with the ideology of the populist nationalist brand. I agree with the sophists here. If you oppose a tyrant with force, you only solve half the problem. It takes an orator to bring the people along in one’s campaign against tyranny. We must decide whether our republic can be saved from a fate worse than Trumpism, that fate being the moral collapse of civil society into a government of, for, and by the venal liars. If our republic is to survive as a democracy--rather than as an aristocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy--we must all use our words to teach truth over lies, to delight in community rather than in conflict, and to move that community to an acceptance of and openness to others. There is always space for more and better arguments, but only by listening can we grow and mature as citizens of a republic.
In short, a knowledge of rhetoric, including an awareness of when we are being hoodwinked, provides the best possible antidote to the poisonous hate speech that is mislabeled as free speech. Words do damage, and language often is the loaded weapon responsible for that harm. If we seek to disarm the rabble and so diffuse a treacherous situation, we must begin with an awareness of the destructive as well as constitutive power of words.
April 11, 2013
Very good overview of the arguments pro and against rhetoric, its use and misuse. It offers a more academic approach than Sam Leith's 'You Talkin' To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama', with high points being analyses of the rhetorical approaches taken by James Joyce and Randall Jarrell's 'Pictures From an Institution'. Certain ommissions (eg the ommission of any significant mention of analogy in the text and its complete ommission from the glossary of rhetorical terms at the back) and a disappointing analysis of the parallels made by theorists between rhetoric and music left me wondering whether academic narrowness had ended up limiting vision, rather than adding depth, but the literary analysis was strong and the style of argumentation compelling. A refreshing supportive argument, if not a paean to rhetoric.
January 28, 2022
This was HARD work for me, but after reading each page several times I elicited wonderful thoughts and insights... well worth it as the art of rhetoric is critical if handled well.
June 27, 2011
Been reading and re-reading this book for the past 15 years. Just awesome.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews