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.