A backhanded defense of Ramus with a word on letter writing

"We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” –Ralph Waldo Emerson on the future of American literature and our need to break from the Western ideology (1837).

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson’s first—and shortest—sentence in the Political Unconscious (1981).

“We can’t change the present or the future. We can only change the past, and we do it all the time.” –Bob Dylan in his recent Rolling Stone interview (2012). Should I contextualize his quote?

My last blog ended with a word of understanding about Peter Ramus. I know I’m just looking for trouble by writing an even longer defense of Ramus, but as a pragmatist who lives in a capitalist society and who lives in a representative democracy, I don’t find his views altogether unobjectionable. I’ll clarify before you all rise up against me in a moment of anti-Ryan consensus: I don’t find Ramus’ view of rhetoric and dialectic particularly agreeable; nor do I find his abasement of Aristotle and Co. insightful in the direction of developing knowledge. Rather I think we can learn a lot about rhetoric by looking at how he fashions rhetoric within the context of his time. Whatever his notions were, they are worth studying as more than a cautionary tale.

            If we are talking seriously about historical recovery I think we should be taking a page from literary theory and making a push to historicize in several spheres at the same time. If we were to apply what Fred Jameson prescribes in the Political Unconscious we would critically engage the political, social, and historical as concentric contexts (Jameson, 75). In terms of Renaissance politics, the idea of consensus served only for despots—who, if history is any judge, tended to meet a grisly demise when they lost majority control (a natural and crude form of democracy). The social, when examined as the struggle of class becomes problematic when you are looking at the classical dialectic. This, of course, also becomes a product of historical context. Aristotle’s rhetorical canon and the classical dialectic works well when you’re a well-respected Macedonian in Greece 500 years before Christianity became a thing. Aristotle lived in the ivory tower of Greece and academia identifies with this. It’s harder to understand the hard knock school of rhetoric Ramus comes from.

            I’m over-simplifying though. No matter. Bizzel and Herzberg do the same; they just have the book and the authoritative word on The Rhetorical Tradition. Phrases like “Time and again, he [Ramus] fails to understand why Quintilian included...” and “Ramus seems tone deaf to the idea that...” (678) color our comprehension of the texts before we take in the excerpts they provide. We look at Ramus with our modern views and neglect the Jamesonian idea of historicizing. We undercut his revolutionary (again, not necessarily in a good way) ideas by employing rhetoric meant to portray him as ignorant.

            He wasn’t ignorant. He understood his context and how to “win” an argument in that context. Yes, it’s more antagonistic, but the political and social spheres demanded this sort of argument in order to determine standing in society. He might take issue with Quintilian’s “good man speaking well” (684-85) and make Quintilian sound foolish by selecting passages out of context. It looks like those who created the Rhetorical Tradition (and I mean this in a sense that is larger than the book) learned a lot from Ramus. They just applied his argumentation to creating history.

I was going to do another, smaller blog post about letter writing, but I think the evolution from medieval correspondence to the Renaissance letter when put in conversation with our modern perception of Ramus illuminates the lack of historicizing I am talking about. The material conditions of the Medieval Age—namely the availability of writing implements and a sense of literacy as well as trade and transport infrastructure—gave rise to letter writing. But as the editors note, the correspondences were often more or less just a transmission of facts.

            Letter writing became more nuanced and truly rhetorical as a product of the material conditions. That is, the materials themselves did not generate more sophisticated rhetoric—instead they facilitated the increased social and cultural contacts that led to genre realizations about audience, context, kairos, etc. We read this idea of time and cultural interplay and accept it (both in Murphy and in RT). I don’t contest this.

            What is troubling is that the material conditions and society are given a fuller historical treatment, but individuals are sanctified (literally in some cases) and others are straw men when we reify the Tradition. Again, we don’t admonish the Medieval form of letter writing as overly simplistic or of throwing out what we’d developed of oral discourse (“Hey, why didn’t they just put their conversation on paper?”); we understand it because we’ve historicized it in a Jamesonian way. 

Same power structures, different time period

Let me blame paper. Better yet let me blame the printing press. But it seems in Murphy’s account of the typical Renaissance school day that the focus is on reproduction. Texts, he says, “become objects of imitation” (151). So students copy texts, so what? Who hasn’t copied sentences at some point in their school career? Then there’s the translating from Latin to English and back (155) that, besides being draconian, seems to go one step too far. I have to wonder what the political motivation for this type of schooling is.

            [Hint: It won’t be optimistic.]

            The technological advances of the Renaissance—namely the printing press—should have given rise to diversified knowledge. What happens instead is the reproduction and amplification of the power structures already put in place. Writing, Murphy says, becomes far more “central to education” (156). Except the writing being performed is mimicry—and highly organized mimicry at that (see 159’s list of imitation practices). Rote memorization (which through repetition just becomes habit) replaces the art of memory as several of the readings make passing note of. So then we have this dangerous (yes, I’ll be that melodramatic) situation where critical views of history are eliminated by removing memory as an art and mimicry is promoted as composition.

            Imagine a world where all you could do is re-tweet... and you would never know the historical context.

            The politics, as I’ve read them work like this: the rhetorical move of “I’ll agree with you all enough to steal your ethos then break away” became a dominant and potent move. The Lutheran Reformation it should be noted worked because it did not throw out all of Catholicism—just the parts people didn’t like. When the Italians claimed the Classics through translating they essentially make the same power play (RT 559). Women rhetors also replicated power structures with enough variation to become recognized, though they were still a far cry from being treated equally (RT 562-64; Murphy 168). On the whole, the education of women merely reproduced the role of women on a larger level. Much the same, the Jesuit schooling system with its focus on only male students, could be said to perpetuate the male hierarchy created by the clergy—a fairly obvious claim.

            The irony here is the rise of humanism—a supposed focus on the individual. But humanism became a philosophy reserved for the monarchs with the likes of Machiavelli advocating for the individual to reflect the values of the populace. A good man speaking well doesn’t quite work in this new schema. What happens in actuality is a stratification of social class (as described on page 571 in RT with the Tudors’ tutors).

            I use this as a lead in to a statement that may ruffle some feathers: Maybe Peter Ramus gets a bad rap. Yes, his method of doing rhetoric is not composed of the critical awareness we want students to have; however, I have to respect him looking critically at the power systems that created the patriarchic highly stratified oligarchic society at the time and saying, “Maybe Aristotle isn’t all that great; why should we replicate his stuff?” When it comes to this sort of critical examination I wish there was more reflection on how the printing press would be used. After all, the printing press has a direct relationship with my favorite period in history (to gripe about anyways), the Industrial Revolution. 

Depressing capitalistic view on mimicry in education

Last Spring I took Sean Duncan’s Games and Literacy IMS seminar. In addition to discussing video games, we began to critique the current models of education and the workforce. The argument made was that these models were born out of the rise of industry and haven’t changed much since. We’ve been doing the same things in schools for a hundred years for Christ sakes! Then I read Murphy’s History of Writing Instruction. The line at the beginning of the selection this week stuck out because of Sean’s class: “They (the Romans) constructed chariots of identical parts that could be stored and re-assembled easily” (37). It’s as if the Romans are pulling a Henry Ford nearly two millennia before Ford. What’s more is that in Sean’s class we looked specifically at the rise of industry as being influential on education. Societies, it seems, have tendency to gear education toward the model of economy that has been working—not necessarily the one that will be working. Now I’m extending my complaint that schools are outdated into schools are really outdated.

            I’m sure that the point of the readings this week is not so much that we learn, memorize, and have the ability to provide an example of each rhetorical element as outlined by Cicero, Quintilian, the anonymous rule-maker of Ad Herennium. Rather, I think it’s important to see how the rules developed, what cultural standards we’re enforcing/disadvantaging when we use them. Ad Herrenium makes a big deal out of examples. As I read it, the debate sounds a bit trite. But put it into academic context and we realize we haven’t come that far. Who do I quote? Can I use my life experience? Won’t I sound smarter if I quote X?

            We can follow the rules. The author of Ad Herrenium pretty much guarantees great rhetorical results by following his method. And Western society has. The imitatio and progymnasmata Murhpy outlines is still very much the practice of classrooms in America (mine included). I would like to believe it’s working well. Sean would have us question if this system is what is best for tomorrow’s economy though—and I highly doubt it. The Roman rules of language account mostly for oratory performance—an idea that is transferred into text with subsets of rules like those for letter-writing. We’ve entered the digital age. Granted, a digital age that still has one foot in the industrial age, but the hypersystematization of language doesn’t work—can’t work—in postmodern contexts. The rules become too tedious; they become contradictory. We communicate in too many directions to too many audiences through too many interfaces for the Roman rules of oratory to work effectively all the time.

            I have to pause here and wonder how we got to the point where we refuse to examine the fundamentals of our model of education for such a long period of time. Like I said, the idea of writing became secondary to that of speaking. And speaking is equated with morality. Augustine, another great rule-maker, had a penchant for pairing eloquence with wisdom.  But an interesting thing happens as Augustine provides examples(!) of eloquence from the apostle Paul; eloquence becomes a virtue, a thing that can almost miraculously move an audience into action (RT 466). It’s Patrick’s spoken eloquence that makes him a saint after all—and his written eloquence (or lack thereof) that had his capacity of bishop called into question.

            Dare we subvert a sacred tradition? No. And why would we?

            The model of education is one that plays well to our capitalist and imperial tendencies. Like the Romans we’ve centralized the power of the academy. Only now we really don’t call facility with language a virtue; we call it necessary to get along in the business world. Here is how you persuade. This is how to build rhetorical velocity. Here is a how-to guide on doing a proposal. The academy looks at the Druid writings of post-industry writing like Twitter and Pinterest, Facebook statuses and fanfic and decides whether they are virtuous or whether they are worth converting. [Note: In the last year I have either read scholarly articles or attended conferences where each of these was discussed in terms of traditional Greco-Roman rhetoric.]

            If it seems like I’m being hard on the education system, I am. We fool ourselves into thinking we are cutting edge by converting postmodern texts that subvert the rules-based language structures of Western rhetoric into our classroom missions. (Just look at my Kickstarter activity from 607 last year.) Truth is, our delusion is a product of mimicry. We look at what is successful, what is working and we do that. This is the advice of the Romans; it’s an essential skill (Murphy, 54-60). Let me try to tie my entire thought process together now:

            Mimicry is good for those currently in power because it recreates the power structures that endowed them with their authority. To help ensure that the power structures did not change, rhetoric became tied to religion and virtue. As we encounter new Other discourses we do not accept them on their terms. Instead we impose our way of thinking on them (a type of behavioral mimicry), which is ultimately hierarchical.

Wish I could end on a happy note, but it seems we haven’t reached a point where I can. 

Cultural dialectic

Through the majority of the readings this week the idea of cultural dialectic seemed to dominate. As noted in RT, the Medieval period is a time of rhetorical stagnation (in the western world at least). But more than that is that it is a time of cultural isolation. With the dawn of Christianity as an organized system of religion and government came oppression of dissenting viewpoints. Before Augustine the Classical teachings of Plato and Aristotle were thought to be opposition to the Church so they were denounced. As the Byzantine Empire spread, they did their best to destroy Greco-Roman culture. St. Jerome’s divine vision included the destruction of secular texts. Ironically the doctrine of intolerance is ultimately what led to the end of the Dark Ages. The othered groups (the pagans) began invading. Here I am looking at the act of warfare as a sort of cultural dialectic—albeit a hostile one. This sparked the Crusades—a terrible event that put two isolated cultures in contact with each other. As the RT goes on to explain, this eventually gave way to the founding of the university and scholasticism.

            On a more micro level, we have Augustine trying to reconcile the classical rhetoric with Christianity. And once he proved its usefulness, it was assimilated (as was he). Out of the readings this week perhaps the most striking example of cultural dialectic comes from Patrick. Here we have a kidnapped British teenager who is essentially forced to assimilate into the Celtic culture over the course of several years. This assimilation included learning the language, customs and legends/myths of Ireland. Then, after returning to Briton, he decides to go back to the place of his captivity. [Insert joke here about how bad Briton must be in comparison to Ireland.] He effectively goes about converting many of the Druids by putting Christian rhetoric in conversation with the Druid rhetoric. As Sheehan-Johnson notes, the Burkean principle of identification is used as opposed to persuasion in order to convert the Druids (14). Sheehan also goes about drawing parallels between the Irish themes of “courage, generosity, loyalty and beauty” and the Greek ideas of ethos, logos and pathos (8). Later, Sheehan also draws comparisons between the Christian Trinity and the mythic god figures present in Celtic culture (14). Patrick managed to draw these comparisons and effectively convert the Druids, not by following the rules laid out in Herrenium or the structured systems of Quintilian or Cicero. He did it by dialoguing (in a literal and rhetorical sense) with the Druids. [Note: I claim “Dialoging with the Druids” as a band name. You can’t have it.] Patrick understood his audience on a personal level—something that is lacking in the Classical schema. As Sheehan humorously notes, Augustine and his rhetorical flourishes would have likely been killed (15).

            Then, of course, there is the invention of letter writing—a sort of dialogue carried out in written form. What’s important here is the idea that the manuals for letter writing became, as RT puts it, “encyclopedic” in scope with appendices for proverbs and allusions (444). But there is also a sort of historical dialectic going on when we see preaching (the spread of God’s word) framed as curing the disease of sin (445). When put into context, the metaphor would obviously resonate with the audience—a peoples whose daily life dealt with plague and death from disease. The effective rhetoric takes on the conversations of its environment. [This reminds me of Edward’s “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” which invokes the fire metaphor in a time when women’s clothing and “domestic duties” made fire a leading—and very visible—cause of death.]

            More effective than the rules of language, which comprise large swaths of Roman writing, is the dialectic that forms between cultures. To form a false binary, I would say that isolation—the refusal to dialogue with other cultures and instead concentrate on formulating rules and grammar—was more detrimental to rhetoric.

Publishers--the silent partners in history creation

In the last couple weeks we’ve read a lot about the creation of the alphabet, language and literacy. Pretty soon here we’ll read about the reading revolutions that came prior to ebooks. (I read ahead because I like things in a top ten format and the topic seemed more interesting than my Lit Theory reading.) And after I read the Octologs I began to wonder about the power structures that shape our view of history. Specifically I began to wonder where they are located. Saying “the academy” is a cop out. The academy is a dominating force, but what drives it?

            I think a large part of it has to do with the currency of publishing. In nearly all of the readings (themselves, of course, published pieces) the rhetorical situation of publishing came into play. Jarrett rightly invokes Marx in her position statement in Octolog prime. Her first statement afterwards immediately goes to the material: “The printed offering that is on the sheet that you have makes a case for text selection” (16). The dominating monolithic histories stayed monolithic because of publishing. Forgotten histories are forgotten because they are not written down or because the author has less credible ethos (Crowley). Thus histories that add to the mainstream gain value. Put simply, it was not profitable to write about Other groups for a long time.

            In this way I read Bizzel’s chapter as a tale of capitalism. There was, as she puts it, “an explosion of feminist scholarship in the history of rhetoric over the last ten years” (95). I certainly don’t want to diminish the importance of this; however, this explosion creates certain markets and venues for publishing. In perhaps a more clearly capitalist story Lunsford outlines the publication process of Reclaiming Rhetorica. Here we have a grad class that subverts the conventions of a seminar class (at least as I know them) to write an important recovery of history. No publisher wanted it. Enter Lunsford and her academic currency. In terms of economics Lunsford and her ethos lent enough credibility to the project that, in the eyes of the publisher, this volume makes a saleable niche product. (Let me reiterate that this is the angle of the capitalist market, not necessarily how I feel about it.) The same market makes the more women-friendly edition of the Rhetorical Tradition possible. Now it could hardly be called a niche since it has proven itself profitable for publishers. I have to wonder what voices publishers decide are not profitable—are there minorities that, to the publisher, do not merit the time, effort and money spent on producing the material book? Is digital publishing with its low overhead and wide accessibility a venue for these voices? If so, why are some in the academy loathe to accept digital scholarship? Is it about more than being digital?

            Concerns about the push to publish are not new. Fifteen years ago Ferreira-Buckely outlined the “rush to publish” as one of her explanations on the lack of “thick description” in research (28). Today, the value of digital publication is hotly debated by tenure committees. The egalitarianism we’ve striven for in research is undercut by the capitalist system in which it is presented. Publishing in academia remains hierarchical and driven by profit—both in terms of money and prestige. To heed the words of Ralph Cintron, economic forces are eroding public education (125). Chief amongst its propagators are the publishers of these histories.

I was going to do another, shorter blog entry about layout and design. Instead I’m just going to tack it on to the end here:          

Additionally I have to be concerned about the hegemony of the publishing house. For years how people read information was mediated by technology (i.e. the alphabet, stone tablets, scrolls, codex, etc.). Each time technology “advanced,” literacy spread. It seems we’ve reached a curious point in academia. The publishers, who have historically been inextricably tied to the university system, have a stake in yesterday’s technology—the paper book. And it seems that the academy has bought into this notion in the most literal sense. Yes, Kairos and Enculturation and C&C online do challenge the monolithic publishing house dynamic; but the layout and design of these cutting edge journals still smack of print conventions. It’s hard to follow Vitanza’s call to “be wild” when so many of the conventions of (industrial age) print dictate what will contribute public knowledge and eventually history—elements like the value of alphabetic text, traditional page layouts, texts that engage only the audiovisual, linearity, “print” cycles, branded looks (fonts, spacing, photo formatting). Why do we restrict literacy with these print conventions when the technology is so obviously there?

Moreover, academia equates the medium with value (a la tenure portfolios and graduate admission processes). Take the Octolog I for instance. As a presentation it was quite popular. As an article, it becomes a site of study, a moment in history to be studied. This is great. It’s conversational. James Murphy makes some jokes. The crowd participates. Then a curious thing happens. In the following Octologs the presentation aspect of the, well presentation, comes through less. Gone are the transcript qualities. Now we have subheaders—a far more academicy convention. If the Octolog IV: The Journey Home were to happen today, how would it be presented? From my experience doing online teaching, I would like to see it as a Google Hangout with the broadcast feature, each of the participants live-tweeting as the others spoke.

In reality, it would be a presentation put into print—a thing made to look like a book chapter (for that is what articles are modeled after). We’ve sold ethos to publishing houses in exchange for prestige. This makes it hard to “cross border, lift rhetors, and study systems” as Burton puts it. I’m left wondering how long the Octolog III’s fascination with embodiment can sustain, when the places to discuss it are, on the whole, venues for capitalistic enterprise.

Octolog I, II, & III in 750 words? Can't be done

            In trying to explain the three Octologs to one of my buddies here in Dayton, I likened them to the Godfather trilogy: The first two are actually one story because they are intertwined and offer a progression that produces insight. The third one kind of floats off by itself and is interesting in its own way, though it doesn't seem to concerned with continuity or history. ...In fact the first two are so good, the third one looks bad in comparison. Had the third installment of each franchise not carried on the title, it might have been better received.

            I read the Octologs and was initially a little confused how all three worked together. I felt better after I read the reviews for Octolog III as I shared many of the same sentiments. The first Octolog made some important points about how we construct history—mainly the idea that history is itself a construction born of a sociohistorical rhetorical situation. With this in mind the scholars engaged in the eight-person dialogue (sorry, I find “Octolog” as a name to be all kitsch and pretension) also make some advances in the areas traditionally used to support the monolithic History. Conners makes a valid point when he notes that our hypotheses—of the empirical method—are tainted with our biases and presuppositions. Likewise, Enos calls our idea of what constitutes proof into question—a sentiment I hear repeated by Jarrett when she notes that mere text selection can reveal politics.

            All of this really asks: what should be the academy’s role in the creation of history? Crowley, in her initial statement, says that the historian’s ethos is of paramount importance. Later, in her response section, she states that the authors of history are often isolated by the academy. Unanimously it seems the panelists of the Octolog call for the forgotten texts to be re/discovered. For Swearigen this means looking at the women excluded from history and asking why they are excluded. For Vitanza this means a closer examination of embodiment—something that comes into prominence by the third Octolog. And for several panelists the recovery of the Sophists is also of importance.

            [I have to note here that my favorite part of this whole interaction is when Murphy says he will tell the audience what was said right after it was said (11). For me this just about sums up what the entire panel was saying: history is selective; history is recorded by those with power (the moderator); history is subjective and depends on ethos; history is isolated by the academy (as symbolized by Murphy). Really, it was a nice moment, whether intentional or not.]

            While the idea of constructed history doesn’t strike me as particularly original, questioning the authority and methods of academy at CCCC in 1988 must have been a big moment. The waves that it caused, and the events it must have put into motion, were felt nine years later when a second Octolog convened. This time around the conversation only glossed over the main topic raised by Octolog prime—the idea of objective/subjective histories. Instead Atwill sets the tenor of the discussion by raising the secondary concerns from the first panel: methodology, gatekeeping, and identity. Indeed this Octolog seemed to operate off the base established by the original panel to interrogate methods, methodologies, and critical gazes. Mountford notes that nine years after Enos calls for new methods and we, as a field, still do not have them. While the other panelists aren’t as openly critical of the lack of progress, the notion of institutional hegemony does seem to become a recurrent theme in this conversation. Ferreia-Buckley, like most of the other panelists, is concerned with disadvantaged voices—a problem that is compounded by the power structures in the academy (the rush to publish, the lack of methods, funding, etc.).

            To me the entire conversation is self-reflexive. As Glenn notes (both in the panel and in her article this week), history is written by “white men” (and here I mean to use white men in a more generic sense; let “white men” read here as the hegemonic force in culture. Today’s white men are the universities). In challenging the politics of historiography the boundaries between the academy and “the real world” are hardened (something Cintron makes a note of in Octolog III). Schiappa notes that the idea of “history is rhetorical” is commonly used as a trope used to cut down opposing viewpoints. Miller further problematizes the rhetorical nature of history by giving a concrete example of how history can be represented by CCCC’s work.

            Getting the short end of the stick are the folks outside the academy—or even folks from other disciplines. Atwill says that disciplinary paradigms shape experience. Mountford puts this idea into greater context when decries the constant pushback in rhetoric for writing instruction over civic discourse. Perhaps the hardest reach for historiography outside of the academy came from Welch, who advocated or TV and its constructions to be more seriously considered.

            Given the progress (and in some cases the lack thereof) from Octolog I to Octolog II, I expected to see more concrete results in the third Octolog. I expected to see the power systems of the university subverted and new methods developed. Then I realized Octolog III takes place in this universe just two years ago.
[Aside: I was disappointed that, after all the credence given to the dialectic in Octolog I (Enos) and talk of talking and telling in Octolog II (Lauer), the format of Octolog III facilitated far less conversation between panelists. Instead the session comes off as more or less a series of presentations on each scholar's research area. This could be why it seems things have stagnated--they have stopped conversing on a larger level.]

            The biggest gain in the ten years between II and III sees a rise in recovering forgotten histories—namely women, disabilities, and multicultural studies. But the theme also became significantly more focused with nearly everyone talking about embodied rhetoric. At first this seems cool and innovative, a new way of looking at rhetoric, the answer to the method(ologies) call put forth in the first two Octologs. Then I realize that the idea of embodiment is the new “white men” approach. It’s what’s in academic vogue. History is still being compiled and read using traditional methods—only the object of study is now a group the academy calls Other.

            The panelists have some neat ideas in Octolog III: Burton wants to turn archival research on its head and Dolmage wants to engage the body rhetorically. Mao’s approach of recontextualized history offers a lot in the way of re/viewing historical constructions. Meanwhile Cintron suggests perhaps to move out of the English department. All valuable ideas, sure. Many of the ideas are also missing the political part—or maybe they are too politicized. Given my reading for Lit Theory this week, I have to come at this last panel with a Marxist perspective. I wonder what is obscured. Twenty years after Octolog Prime, it seems like the white men academy owns history and its methods. The forces that shape history are too hegemonic to be reckoned with and actually end up shaping the discourse on how to change it. I’m afraid to say we are trapped in the machine of our making. The question of why these forgotten histories are in vogue (yes, I’m being flippant) needs to be examined more closely. I believe part of the answer might lay with Jarrett’s notion in 1988 when she says that histories arise out of barriers and authority (44). What barriers have we built in our quest to move beyond monolithic history? Who is the authority now and how it is constructed?

Kairos, literacy, and art

            In my 171 class (Humanities and Technologies) we are looking at two different views of media put forth my McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage) and Wesch (An Anthropological View of YouTube). As I comb through my students’ blogs about the impact of technology on communication, I keep coming back to the idea that writing itself was considered an invention. Where my students read McLuhan’s commentary about the isolating effect of TV as a bunch of malarkey, the claims put forth by Aristotle and the “conservative citizens” of Athens (Murphy, 26) that writing would ruin education seem equally ridiculous. Writing is an art form after all, right? As the teacher, I have to slow the students down from their either-or reasoning and have them consider McLuhan’s view. I guess I should do the same here.

            Writing, like most technology, was at first a completely utilitarian tool. Calling it an art would be a bit of a stretch. Murphy describes the basic early Greek writing system as merely an “aid to memory” (16). It was a way of record keeping. The truest art was speaking. So then some wiseguy says, “Hey, this recordkeeping system can do the same thing as speaking!” and there’s this societal gasp. This has happened relatively recently in academia as educators debate the value of online versus print publications for tenure. The technology of the computer had historically been as a word processor, a place for data storage (i.e. memory), and a place for informal correspondence. It lacked the agility and gloss of more sophisticated interfaces of the time (like newspapers and magazines—ha!).

            So what closed the gap between oral and written literacies? (And, here I am also looking primarily at what helped define written rhetoric as an art.) Off hand, I would have to say it is the immediacy and engagement afforded by the medium. Writing became relevant and artful when it became more than a recordkeeping device. Once writing became involved in the world and commented on happenings of the day—once it formed a dialogue—it became art. Here I am speaking mainly about kairos (and how fitting that the leading online rhetoric journal is called Kairos). Kairos acknowledges the affordances of the dialectic—it allows response; it gives reference to its positioning in a certain time and place; it recognizes its own temporal impact. (And at the last CCCC I heard Jennifer Rice make a convincing argument that Selena Gomez’s “I Love You Like a Love Song” is actually more mature than the Beatles/posthumous John Lennon song, “Free as a Bird” because it lives in the moment, recognizing its temporal significance.)

            Poulakos also notes the importance of to prepon to the creation of rhetoric (41)—how much the rhetor/rhetoric recognizes the formalized structures of its context. These two elements—kairos and to prepon—end up bridging rhetoric. Written texts in the classical period are made to emulate the spoken genre, hence the dialogue. In the digital age our online journals are set up to mirror the print genre while the less academic genres of YouTube and email are made to resemble TV and letter writing. It’s the tension between realizing the abstract context of the moment (a sort of reading your surroundings) in conjunction with the nuanced sense of history that makes rhetoric artful. Writing, as the Greeks come to find out, can do both. Digital technology, as the university is loathe to fully realize, can do both. There are no hard-and-fast rules for these abilities. As Poulakos notes this sense of rhetoric is “unlike scientific principles, the two are more a matter of feeling” (42). So the creation of a speech might not be creative—all the words at one point in time have been said—but rather the delivery of it makes it artful. As Jarrett and Ong say, speeches are made from “common materials arranged with some spontaneity for the occasion and purpose at hand” (16). It’s the arrangement and the idea of context that lends the rhetor to being an artist. 

What memory says about culture

Thinking a lot about memory this week, especially memory in regards to history. History is conventionally thought of as the record of events—it’s what happened once upon a time. And when an audience reads a history there is a strong tendency to see it as truth. That’s it; that’s the way it happened. It seems the more complete view of history is constructed through looking at the historical footnotes and trying to determine why they have been relegated to footnotes. So why is Aspasia lesser known than Socrates? We have the same amount of written material from here as we do Socrates; she was incredibly influential; she even ran with the right crowd.

            It’s too easy to throw the “well women weren’t prominent enough at the time” argument at Aspasia’s exclusion from history. (Plus, dismissing the historical role of women with that sort of argument makes it suspect if we are willing to change our method of constructing histories.) Jarrett and Ong note that women are often defined by their relation to men (12). They also go onto note that Aspasia—a woman most unusual for her time—fit none of the traditional roles of a Greek woman. And right there, it seems, we have an answer: Aspasia is recorded because she was an oddity. This line of reasoning just doesn’t work.

            Just as Welch decries the current state of writing as a “Romantic devolution in with clichés of an important intellectual movement prevent[s] students and other writers from participating fully in literacy as consciousness,” I am making a case for overly simplified systems of memory as shutting out the critical thought needed to examine culture both past and present. Sure, Aspasia does not fit the mold of the traditional Greek philosopher/rhetorician. Is the record of her presence a way of exoticizing her? Is she playing the part of the mystery woman—a level of sexual and cultural intrigue—in much the same way more modern literature has contributed to colonial (mis)conceptions like “black wisdom”? Or has Aspasia fought her way into history—only to have her work diminished because of her gender? Either way, what we end up with as readers is a less complete, less dimensional history. When it comes to learning, we have less to build with and less to build on.

            The larger example here is of course Rhodes. As Enos notes in his chapter, “our history of Greek rhetoric is inordinately disproportional” (183). Most of the rhetoric studied in the modern context is born out of Athens and then labeled broadly as Greek, leading to the misconception of rhetoric as a whole. By broadly defining dynamic movements in history, we turn interaction into artifact—a move that, in turn, lessens our understanding of rhetorical nuance. At the present moment we see rhetoric as something handed down like a family heirloom—from Classical to Medieval to Renaissance. Just look at the title of our authoritative text, The Rhetorical Tradition. The—as in the one and only—singular Rhetorical Tradition. It’s almost to say, here is the one true path to rhetoric knowledge; now go on to study it as a holy text. (Ignore the part where the European Dark Ages rehashed Classical Rhetoric without progress while Mideastern Rhetorics exploded with new concepts like algebra by looking at—and engaging with—the “footnotes” of Classical rhetoric.) Why do we have this tradition if it is so stifling?

            Let me sidetrack for a moment: Look at our own conceptions of history. Who is the first president of the United States? It’s not George Washington. Yes, we might know him traditionally as Number 1. But a more discerning look at history shows some gaps: The US became independent in 1776. George was elected in 1789. So what happened for 13 years? Well, that was the period of time where we had the failed experiment of the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles we also had a president—a new one elected by congress every year. So the first president was a guy named John Hanson. There were a whole mess of other presidents before the Constitution was drafted and George came out of retirement for one last big job. It seems we’ve selected the successful parts of history and put them together to create a story that harkens back to the English Lady of the Lake.

            I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we record history to become a thing of myth. Aspasia’s presence as teacher and companion to Socrates ruins the holy (bearded) trinity of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Acknowledging the rhetoric of Rhodes also diminishes the mythic status of the birth of rhetoric. It’s a same really. At the end of his chapter, Enos contends that there are still “rhetorical riches yet to be discovered on the island of Rhodes” (194). They’ve been discovered; they just need to be remembered this time around.