Dialogue and war

The recovery of invention and audience in Lauer and Porter’s texts says a lot about not just where rhetoric was at a certain moment, but where it had been and where it would/will go. If we take that one moment and look at it we can tell that rhetoric was “lost” to academia for sometime. (Thanks, Blair.) What had been at the heart of classical rhetoric had been moved outside of the English department as we’ve discussed in the last couple weeks with the rise of the speech department. Audience and invention are moved out of the discipline and at that same moment we can see the trajectory of rhetoric at this moment. Then the New Rhetoric arrives (taking its cues from centuries before) and the term “renaissance” that Porter emphasizes on page 55 might be the most apt descriptor, for this is a rebirth. And the rebirth comes at a time when we are doing this looking forward and backward, being self-reflexive and questioning our motives. In a sense, we begin dialoguing our histories—quite literally in the Octolog.

Burke’s pentad analysis gets mentioned a few times in this week’s readings. I think of his pentad as especially emblematic of postmodernity with its changing motives and call for invention to address not just the writer, but also the critic (Lauer 87). By expanding invention into the realm of the critic and not just the writer, Burke subverts the Romantic notions of the solitary writer and embraces the heteroglossia of Bakhtin’s postmodern world. Just as the English department was never truly the one entity perpetuating curriculum, the writer is never the sole author of a text.

What seems to be revived here is the idea of dialectic for invention. In Burke’s case he seems to be acknowledging the past by allowing us as writers to sit down and puzzle out a series of pentads that forces us to examine other perspectives—and those other perspectives also take the form of audience. Perelman and Toulmin engaged in more of a dialogue. The end result of Bakhtin’s dialogism, Toulmin’s dialogue, and Burke’s dramatism is knowledge. How I end up seeing these sorts of dialogues is much like Bakhtin talks about heteroglossia—as a bunch of voices conversing to create a unified voice. When audience is taken out of the equation the unity of the voice tends to break down and bad things happen. Sure departmental politics are a pain, but it seems like the effect might be much farther reaching.

Last week I floated the idea that the disappearance of rhetoric in academia post-Civil War might have been an indictment of the failure of rhetoric to prevent the atrocity of war. Looking back over the moves to marginalize rhetoric it seems that acts of violence seem to be a re-set on how we consider rhetoric. So historically I think it makes sense that we see the New Rhetoric—one of the biggest resets—come after two world wars, the Korean War, and the onset of our involvement in Vietnam. What seems to be missing leading up to all of these conflicts is the sense of dialogue that disappeared after the Civil War. (Consider the chain of events that led up to the trigger of WWI as opposed to the one-sided media used to put troops in Vietnam—the dialogue grows progressively more one-sided.)

So am I saying that rhetoric’s diminished importance caused the wars of the 20^th century and the rise of the military-industrial complex? Not really. I think the position that rhetoric took is symptomatic of the culture that felt audience mattered less than delivery (which was on the rise). Now here my big, over-reaching question: With the development of delivery and audience combined in Web 2.0 technology, are we going to see a new age in warfare? Have we already seen a preview of what’s to come with the media’s coverage of Benghazi or the revolutions last year in the Middle East? 

Inner speech as right to speak

As a master’s student I was interested in Vygotsky’s notion of inner speech and how it eventually would manifest in outer speech. Because of their overlap, Bakhtin and Vygotsky were often read together. What I want to do here though is relate Bakhtin (and to the extent that I can, Vygotsky’s) idea of inner speech to what we studied in last week’s readings—the right to speak.

Let me start here. I was harsh when it came to Christine de Pizan. My main criticism of Pizan came from the idea that through her rhetoric she reinforced the power structures of the day—just with a different embodiment. As some of you pointed out in your response, I was being too hard on her. She did, after all, do something novel in a time when women simply did not have a voice. I still maintain that the voice she spoke with was not entirely hers.

The material words Pizan spoke with in the Bakhtinian sense belong to the greater social context—that of a male-dominated oligarchy. For Pizan to join the discourse (which I often remind myself that Bakhtin might refer to it as a dis-chorus), she needed to internalize the word of society created through the various pressures of heteroglossia and reflect and refract it to bring about a new reality—one in which women spoke (1211). According to Bakhtin’s logic this initial act of Pizan’s speaking the word opens the door for further discourse: “Even if a word is not entirely his, constituting, as it were, the border zone between himself and his addressee—still, it does in part belong to him” (1215). The border zone in Pizan’s case was more closely linked with her gender identity. While this remains an issue through the rest of the readings about right to speak, we also see the border zone grow on one side of the discourse to include “popular assemblies, the bar, and the pulpit.” The discourse could only progress that far through a heteroglossic dialogue wherein women borrowed the word, used it, made it their own, internalized it, redefined it, and spoke again. Eventually speech became less influenced by male hegemony, and giving rise to the voice of women rhetors.

We see this struggle between the inner voice in Woolf’s “Professions for Women” when she describes killing the angel. The struggle between her voice and that of the male-dominated society is nearly palpable when she says,

“[Y]ou cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all of these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed.” (1254)

I have to agree with Woolf. In order to gain access to the public, in order to have a voice, women had to acquiesce for a long time, starting with Pizan and making very gradual progress. And the progress came through “finding common ground” and very slowly moving that common ground. When it comes to Woolf’s time, the decision to speak or not rests with her—she has to decide to kill the angel. My question is, are we past this yet? To speak what angels are we killing? What about the academy—what do we do to keep other inner voices silent and what are the costs of letting them out? 

Write to speak

So I was going to do a video to emphasize what I am about to write, but a few things held me up—presenting at the Watson conference, re-reading the rules for our blogs, and finally the time it would take to script and film my little diatribe. ...I’ll come back to these things.

As we delve deeper into the history of writing, the power dynamics become more convoluted and more insidious. Last week we began to discuss the right to speak. This week I want to focus on the idea of write to speak. More than just a simple play on words, it seems that once folks like Douglass, Wells, and the Grimke sisters began to secure the right to speak there was a shift from seeing spoken discourse as publishing to hierarchy of discourses with spoken being merely a tool for delivery and the written as the thing that legitimizes the act. The end of Ferreira-Buckley’s chapter when she talks of the blue stockings foreshadows the rise of written culture and its dominance over the spoken tradition. As women gained their public voices, the only way to delegitimize those voices became to advantage written discourse.

While Mailloux focuses his essay on the dynamics that took place in the English department, I want to focus on the larger societal effects that divided speech and written rhetoric. At first the dominance of print over oral tradition could be argued in that print allowed for a much wider audience. With speaking only those within earshot at a particular moment could access the rhetoric. Put those same thoughts into print and the moment is extended and the audience is no longer locked in by geography (a case made in Eisenstein’s book). What’s curious about the split between speech and print is that it happens around the same time we start recording human voices. At first the thought might be that speech is becoming its own entity because of the technology. In this case though, I am arguing that the technology became a tool to relegate speech to lesser than rhetoric. Need a modern day equivalent? Look no further than the technology of the web (especially wikis and blogs) where “any idiot can have a voice.” Written discourse found ways to promote itself over the spoken. In Bordelon et al’s anecdote about women speaking in public, they describe females only being allowed to read in public. So women would stand with a book in hand and deliver their orations. The right to speak is granted by the written word even though the written word is no more than an entry ticket. Another example of refining who is allowed to speak comes from Blair’s notion of taste. (See my blog from last week.)

The temple of public discourse is well-guarded.

The schism of speech and writing led to, as Porter notes, the diminished importance of the audience. The listening kairotic audience becomes lost on writers once speech is separated from the English department. It’s a bridge we are still rebuilding if the Watson conference I attended is any evidence. Yes, there was a lot of great discussion (my favorite part of any panel is the end where everyone talks off the cuff); however, the papers, for the most part, are merely delivered (and think of the startling difference in Villanueva’s speech and colloquial discourse in the Octolog). Papers are read. This is how we make it in academia—by reading papers that frame themselves as discussions. The influence also seems to come down to a micro-level. In order to perform a video that would have me speaking to the camera I felt impressed to consult the rules for our blogs. Though I could twist the blog rules for my purposes, those words, “paper,” “notes,” and the explicit word count (though it could be spoken) made me think twice. (I really don’t think Jim would hold my feet to the fire on an audio post, but my reluctance to go outside of print comes from somewhere—as did my decision to consult the syllabus about how to portray my thoughts.) But perhaps even more telling is my immediate desire to script the performance. That, I decided, would make it legitimate. (It would also double the work I have to do with the writing, filming, editing and posting the video file.)

Are we moving past the point in academia when we tell people, “If you have something important to say, write it down”? How do the things that contribute toward tenure still betray our bias toward print over orality? And, of course I am wondering if English will ever again encompass speech or vis-versa (why not?). 

Industrial Revolution revisited

Given the amount of attention we paid to the invention of the printing press over the last two weeks, I have to say I am a bit taken aback by the lack of attention the Industrial Revolution receives in A Short History of Writing Instruction. Yes, I know the printing press was mainly discussed by Eisenstein’s book and far less by The Rhetorical Tradition and SHWI. That said, I have to employ Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious here—a move that examines the social, political and historical forces at play during this revolution. While there is no direct causal relationship in this revolution, the relationship between the materiality and society is far more complicated than described by SHWI.

            In the Short History the Industrial Revolution is most noted for making the materiality of literacy really cheap. The authors also note that the classrooms of the Industrial Revolution “asked students to demonstrate original contributions” (217). I have to take issue with this. Last spring I read Collins and Halverson’s Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology that examined the effect of the Industrial Revolution on classrooms in far more detail. The direct effect of the Industrial Revolution on the school system according to Halverson and Collins is that universal schooling became a thing—a notion not altogether foreign in this week’s readings (54-60). But more important than universal schooling is that the school system reflected the mechanization of society. (i.e We have students at their stations/desks performing tasks from rote memory a la the factory laborer.) The point of view afforded in Murphy’s book seems to gloss over the implications of the capitalist mentality that (yes, according to Fred Jameson) is symptomatic of the twentieth century. (And, in a separate argument I may posit that it is overlooked because Murphy & Co. are too invested in the capitalistic university system.)

            While I don’t see the effect of the Industrial Revolution stated outright in this week’s readings, I do see the implications manifesting elsewhere. Gold, Hobbs, and Berlin note the rise of Current-Traditional Rhetoric and its lack of attention to invention, and concern with style and arrangement “with instruction emphasizing the modes of discourse, clarity, and correctness” (237).  Like the mechanization described by Halverson and Collins, the Industrial Revolution takes writing from the more artful (something reclaimed by the expressivists in the 60s and 70s) to what Gold et al call “more objective scientific rhetoric” (237). This sort of divide between the perspicuity of Blair and the belletristic rhetorics and the romantic expressivists also creates class. In the former we have a working class—an industrialized workforce to produce the mechanized prose—while in the latter we have an artful class endowed with the gift of writing as an art form. I do not see them as one or the other—or as two competing schools of thought cropping up out of two distinct time periods. History is too interlinked and fluid for that. Rather, the revolutions work together through the unconscious to create what would ultimately plague the university system for the rest of the century—class conflict. 

It's my God-given right, if that's okay with you...

So who exactly gives the right to speak (or write, as the case may be)?

In the medieval ages, through the Renaissance, up through the Enlightenment, the right to speak seems to be God-given. Or maybe God-selected. As I continue to argue in nearly all of my blog posts, the power structure is the mediator of “God’s word.” This comes mostly in the form of the Church—an organization that gave Augustine his right to speak and limited de la Cruz’s right to speak. So maybe the right is God-given, but organizationally selected.

The invention of the printing press was a major blow to the power structure of the Church (hence a large part of Eisenstein’s argument). Much of the power of the Church derived from controlling holy text (from which laws and customs were drafted) and controlling the modes of production (since the most literate bunch around happened to be clergy). Just as the Church’s followership split with the advent of print in Lutheran Reformation, so did the ideology concerning the God-given right to speak. Those who still believed in a sacred text that could not be tainted by print continued to see the right to speak as something endowed solely by God—a principle reflected in the American notion of God-given rights. In this group I might include Maria Stewart’s verse-heavy Biblical rhetoric as well as the Grimke sisters’ more analytical readings of the Bible. The women here, like Pizan, rely on the power structure already in place: an organization of men using a male-dominated text. (And, in no way do a say this disparagingly; turning people’s own words on them is quite a talent.)

(I realize here that I am setting up a dichotomy.  This is somewhat intentional, as I want to show the two major ways I see people claiming their right to speak. For the record, the distance between the two views is less that I am making it out to be. As Stewart remarks, “All that man can say or do can never elevate us, it is a work that must be effected between God and ourselves” [1043]. Rather I am concerned with where people saw the right to speak originating.)

On the other side of my false dichotomy are the self-determined speakers like Wells and Douglass who seem to take up the idea of humanism. A most notable lingustic feature amongst this group is their acknowledgement of the “I.” Whereas the speakers who view their agency as being born of God rarely acknowledge themselves, Douglass makes his entire case on the use of I. The autobiography / slave narrative is a first-person-driven form of discourse meant to empower the speaker. [Aside: This is a common pedagogical issue faced by teachers when FYC students have an identity crisis of sorts, asking if they have the authority to refer to themselves as I in an essay. It sounds ridiculous until I look back at my Catholic High School upbringing and realize I was never allowed to use I.] Royster certainly puts Wells into the group of self-defined speakers when she says, “Wells looked closely at her life, named herself, claimed her own vision of reality, claimed her own authority to speak the truth she saw...” (173). Testimony from the Bible is, in this group’s case, more impactful than the Bible. (Again, this is reductive in the Hugh Blair way. We, of course, would also need to take into account audience, kairos, and delivery when differentiating these groups.)

Like I said, I don’t want to be too binary. The move of borrowing God’s ethos is a good one learned from centuries of people (like popes) doing so. Moreover, in prohibiting a person’s right to speak, the word of God is often used as justification (and still is, in the case of many social issues). But I also see this rhetorical move as the “common ground” move we first witnessed in de Pizan’s work and will see again in Rogerian argumentation. By meeting on the Bible—or God’s word (depending on whether you value text or oral tradition)—the speakers are finding a common source of agreement and building from there. 

Taste: the gentleman's discrimination

So literacy grows and everyone becomes equal. Reading is truly needed for access. It’s the key to success. Yay! Reading!

...So I’m going to go get my Dean Koontz on... Maybe some Janet Evonovich. Whatever they sell near the authentico Mexican food at Kroger.

What? That’s not scholarly of me. I have no taste? If I’m reading some paperback trashy thriller I must be some sort of muttonhead. How awful. How Hugh Blair.

Now I’m not going to completely blame Hugh here. Much of the blame can be shouldered by the capitalist mindset instilled in society since the beginning of beginnings. Rather I just want to make note of a trend that I’m brought up in several of my blogs (a lineage that goes back some 2,000 years now—the subject, not the blog). The trend is that language continues to grow and with each iteration some one or group tries to create a hierarchy where they can establish themselves at the top. It seems that universities are especially adept at doing this. Even BizBerg concedes there is a devaluation of common things in the classroom that persists even today (RT 948).

Taste according to Blair is “deeply founded in the human mind” and “it is no less essential to man to have some discernment of beauty, than it is to possess the attributes of reason and of speech” (955). So it is ingrained in our being as well as being essential. The claim Blair lays out on 957-8 is pretty much a catch-22: You can have taste, but it could be the wrong type (i.e. the “accuracy” he mentions on 958). The exact criteria for what is good taste versus bad taste is not exactly illustrated (though it is “reduced” by Blair to delicacy and correctness on 957).

Like I said, it’s not the idea of taste that I want to note here as problematic as it is. BizBerg notes that the eighteenth century saw the rise of private and public school systems—a divide that implies a Blairesque idea of taste. The idea is repeated (as I plan to outline in my next blogpost) in the right to speak—a key question being if someone has taste or social class or a penis. Or all of the above. Taste, because the literacy playing field had been leveled by the printing press, is now the grand decider of social class.

Now I’m interested in how this is reflected in today’s structures. Taste, despite Blair’s claim, is too arbitrary. Schools still define themselves and their students in terms of class. Materiality, as Ferreira-Buckley points out, is still a major factor in the production and ownership of texts (183)—a force that will surely only amplfy and complicate as we work our way into the 20^th century. Perhaps is the divide of class in terms of education nowhere more obvious than when Ferreira-Buckley describes the schooling of nobles in England. When the English nobility is put into conversation with the Scottish university that admitted all the talented folk (194), it’s hard not to wonder who Blair would say had taste.  

Science, religion, and publicity

The Enlightenment seems to be mostly about the formation of communication systems (the same systems that not much later just become extensions of the Medieval systems of power). Here I am defining system broadly—a network formed by affinity spaces essentially (to borrow from games scholar James Gee). As Bizzel and Herzberg note in their introduction to John Locke “complex ideas are formed by the connections among simple ideas” (815). While this is just a network of thought, it’s the connections that fascinate me. Locke, Vico, and the scientists of the Enlightenment are concerned with connecting and synthesizing their thoughts through language and reflection. In networking these thoughts, new ideas are derived at through synthesis.  

             I guess what I’m concerned with here is relating (networking) the larger societal movements with the ones going on in the heads of the Enlightenment folks. As print became a dominant force, it would be easy to paint the Enlightenment as a panacea of shared knowledge—a lofty notion Ortelius floats when devising his atlas (Eisenstein, 85). But the connections between ideas effect more than knowledge. Eisenstein notes that the advent of print brought “together intellectual and commercial activities which reinforced each other and thus created an especially powerful, almost irresistible drive” (75). The result is aptly described as “a knowledge explosion” (83)—a term fitting something that happens so quickly and has so much potential to clear a path or destroy or both. Print created new relationships which I examine here in the next paragraph; however, print itself became a system that muddied how we arrive at truth. For science and religion—two systems engaged in the pursuit of Truth—print acted for and against them.

            In the later chapters of Eisenstein’s book, she notes how print put religion into conversation with science. The relationship, despite some commonly-held beliefs, was not entirely antagonistic. Some science set out to “prove” or build onto religious ideas. Eisenstein poetically refers to this as “spreading God’s words” versus “deciphering His handiwork” (298). Scientific notions could be shared through dessemination, negating the need for the “wandering scholar” (47). On a darker note, print also facilitated the “output of polemical tracts to sway opinion,” a key tactic used by both the Catholic and Protestant Churches.  What I see here is the first effective use of propaganda. (Yes, there had been smearing and rumor before, but the ethos print lends itself to ideas like “popular opinion” and “news” in ways orality could not.) And with the dawn of new media and propaganda (now an old idea), we have the formation of publicity. Venues for certain types of print become reconsidered, much like Luther’s tacking of theses to a church door (168). Probably most significant though is the “deliberate exploitation of the new medium” (170).

            Toward the end of her book, Eisenstein explicitly notes the impact of publicity on science and religion as well as the effect it had on the relationship between the two systems. As the Churches grew accustomed and adept to print publicity, science begins to distrust it. The very thing that put ideas in conversation becomes something to be feared (298). Repeatedly, Eisenstein uses the word paradox in describing the print revolution, another fitting term. Perhaps most paradoxically is the idea she advances early in the book—that “printers not only compete with rivals and improve on their predecessors. They are able to improve on themselves” (81). The networking allows for advancement. Yet, the network formed with and by economies stymies pure growth while being stimulated. (i.e. The idea that the second edition could improve on the first—a way of sandbagging knowledge. Ahem, textbooks...) 

Reading (con)text metatextually

James Gee describes a classroom activity wherein he has students write down the tools they associate with work. When the students are finished, they examine what the tools say about their conceptions of work and how this speaks to social class and personal history. I couldn’t help but think of Gee’s exercise when reading about the type of work modern authors do in relation to the work of the first printers.

Let me take a step back from the previous paragraph for a second and note how intrinsically linked our notion of language is to life. (And life/death, it seems, is really what text is all about [Ong, 81].) I use the word describes to relate an activity. In a more literal (hence less linguistically abstract) reading of the word, we see a (re)mediation of scribe—a turning from action to text and text-into-action. But later, I use the words say and speaks to convey what students wrote and were thinking (and here we should also note the tense changes). And even now, in this paragraph I note the appropriations of these words. Let us just agree that any puns involving the interplay between the constructed word and its abstract meaning are, at once, entirely accidental now, but intentional at one point[1] in time.

The tools of the trade for the first printers[2] dictated[3] their roles in the work of reproducing[4] texts. As Eisenstein writes, “Even before a given reference work had come off the press, fruitful encounters between typefounders, correctors, translators... and others engaged in editorial work had already occurred” (49). These sorts of meetings and interactions, Eisenstein comes to term as “combinatory activity” (49). Indeed, the combined knowledge as well as the power dynamics created by putting these forces in conversation[5], leads[6] to even the singularly-authored[7] text as a collaborative piece.[8]

            Because the human element is always at play in interpretation, copying, and producing, the language within a text is never truly dead as Plato might have feared. The written word continues to live because it is reproduced/is a product of a system based in materiality. The material might shift though. And I mean shift in the most textual of senses (i.e. pressing the “shift” key). Plato describes transcending as meaning is made into Meaning. Perhaps as the word is recopied and its Meaning is lost, but we come to understand it in its new heteroglossic context as Word with meaning(s)—its context enveloped around it. This is why transcendence is unachievable—because we are being torn (like a sheet of paper) between two realities: one based in materiality, the other based in time.

            Eisenstein traces the notion of textual corruption to its liveliness—the perishability of its material components and the flexible contexts of interpretation and reproduction (87). The following sentence is my own spin on Eisenstein’s idea as I act as scribe to reproduce the idea she stole and claim it as my own Words. As paper dies, the text has to live. Once text becomes cemented (like the initials I carved into the sidewalk where I grew up), it is as dead as my childhood. Again, we see/read/experience/interpret/whatever that at once we are constrained by the material, yet the material pushes us to move beyond it. The point[9] is that we can look[10] behind[11] the text to more accurately read what the (con)text is saying.

---

[1] A point being, of course, one twelfth of a pica. The text here in Word is twelve point. If you multiply, you can get the product in picas (or see—by which I mean read—footnote 4). I have no idea if Blogger will convert the text into a different type and make it a product of their own design. I should also note that a point, mathematically speaking is plotted out as a dot (.), the same mark used to end a sentence.

[2] By printers, I mean, the people, not the machines. Though, as I note in a posthumanist move, there isn’t much difference between the two in footnote 3. More interestingly is the use of the brand name Xerox to identify paper photocopies from scanned copies. 

[3] And here/hear I have a word that describes the didactic action that we commonly associate with power—the author speaking her manuscript to a lowly assistant who performs the function of writing it down (as a scribe). Yet, the players in my example are mechanical and people-as-defined-by-their-machines. Maybe these are the conversations I describe—ha!—in footnote number 5. (And I have to wonder as I move this text from Word to Blogger if "footnote" is really the correct term or if I need to change it as I act as the printer/poster [poster still being a term derives from print culture] [see footnote 2]).

[4] Because the product (a mathematical term describing—that word again!—the final number arrived at in a multiplication equation) is really what happens when we combine and multiply work forces.

[5] Conversation is a common trope in academia when two texts by long-dead authors are juxtaposed by a living party. These conversations are said to produce insight. 

[6] And the leading required between single-spaced lines like this is typically 13 points.

[7] That is, a text where a single person is the authority. 

[8] And now I’ve juxtaposed “text” (typically seen as a whole) with “piece” which insinuates that it is merely a part of something bigger. I hope that putting these two words in conversation produces some insight. 

[9] In the non-pica sense.

[10] By which I mean “read into” as opposed to reading over or looking up. Maybe a vision that looks deeply--like "insight!"--would best describe what I am hoping to say here.

[11] And by “looking behind the text” to discover meaning, I am unintentionally referring to looking in the back of the book at the meaningful indexes of glossaries and appendices. Or it could mean a footnote. I guess it depends on the sort of reading material you’re working with. 

Standardization, schooling, and Vico

After this week’s readings it becomes far more understandable how the current education system came to be shaped. The question that came up repeatedly in my games course last semester was, “Why are we doing education like this?” We looked at current models of schooling and their limitations and how gaming structures might help. Given more time, it might have helped to do a historical perspective that begins with the Enlightenment.

            The Enlightenment is the dawn of many influential ideas that still hold sway over politics and society today. The one that I want to focus on is standardization. I see the move toward standardizing discourse (both oral and written) as being symptomatic of the 20^th century model of schooling.

            In my last blog entry I talked about the societal norming of women—that female rhetors had to find common ground and build their ethos in relation to the male-dominated power structures of the day. But again, these examples are symptoms of a larger movement. Bacon’s taxonomies do reflect the tendencies of Aristotle (including the restoration of invention) (793); however, the Baconian taxonomy is not divided into areas of skill so much as it anticipates the areas of usage—or its job in other words. This idea of functional rhetoric is further exemplified by Bacon’s dismissal of style.

            The elocution movement (802-03) is another example of standardizing discourse. By itself, this, I realize, is not great insight. But when coupled with the revival of delivery and put into the larger context of societal norming, we can see that the idea is not so much understandability as it is mass dissemination with the implicit intent of reproducing its original mode of production. In more concrete form, we see this with Johnson and the production of the first material dictionaries (lost page number, sorry). The mindset that is developing—and is reflected in Locke and Smith’s work—is typical of the age: Complex ideas are made of the simpler parts working together to perform an action. It’s mechanization. It’s the seed of the Industrial Revolution, which is ultimately what shapes our current, highly-standardized, education system. [Locke describes words as ideas that “are very complex, made up of a great number of ideas put together” (818). On the same page, he bemoans the lack of standardization in nature, describing words as “assemblages of ideas.”]

            If there is one thinker who fully realizes the impact of this societal movement, I think it’s Vico with his stages of history. If we look back at the rhetorical tradition outlined by BizBerg’s book, we can apply Vico’s stages (outlined on 800 and again on 863). The poetic stage with its development of knowledge through metaphor is probably best represented by the Classical thinkers like Plato who use allegory and fable to express their ideas. As we move into the heroic, I see the medieval thinkers with their subordination to the Church and formation of monarchies as representing this societal movement. Here, in the heroic stage, I see the contact between cultures (another form of othering and difference) as being essential. The contact with other cultures moves the society from introspection into the cultural dialectic I wrote about a while back. Now, in Vico’s final, human stage, the individual and democracy (humanism) becomes the societal focus.

            Vico predicts that after the human stage, everything pretty much falls apart and then the process starts over (864). Given the year of the revolution in 1848, it seems that he was onto something. I just want to know if we really revert all the way back to the poetic—is that what postmodernism is?—another iteration of the poetic? At what point can we move beyond the Industrial Revolution in schools? Or are we bound to the modes of production as my lit buddy Fred Jameson says? 

Women and the rhetoric of listening

So while I am glad that we are to the point in the Rhetorical Tradition where the mix of rhetors becomes a little more heterogeneous, I still have to note the overwhelming power structures that facilitate male domination—most notably those borrowed from the Bible (namely St. Paul). But in defying this type of oppression, I also see a return to a more classical dialectic. The women, in their disadvantaged positions within the royal court and/or theocratic government, were forced to dialogue with their oppressors in order to share power. (I am seeing their quest for equality as a vying for power here—even if the power is simply to be allowed the freedom of some restricted speech.)

            Christine de Pizan, for example, frames her argument in The Book of the City of Ladies as a conversation, refuting disembodied claims that women should not be educated. The conversation in the next excerpted piece, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, forms a dialogue by engaging with the power structures of the royal court. De Pizan still converses with an ambiguous entity, but in this case the entity is collectively gendered as male. Similarly, de la Cruz has to engage in dialogues with certain disembodied voices (the open letters to the re-gendered Sor Filotea) and governmental structures (the Catholic Church) in order to further her own standing. (This, I should note, acts like the precursor to the scientific method wherein a theory—and its theorist—gain reputability by testing the status quo.)

            Of course there is a lot that is problematic with this type of approach. Most notably, it reinforces gender roles. In de Pizan especially, the role of the woman is defined in relation to that of the man. The princess, servant, and proletariat woman are instructed to act in preservation of their male counterparts as well as those women who are societally elevated. This, of course, is a direct historical reflection of the patronage system that de Pizan benefited from and was servant to. A more striking example comes in de la Cruz when she refers to herself as an “ignorant woman” (RT 785)—a sort of linguistic hedging used to gain entry into a conversation. By referring to herself in the pejorative, she empowers the men and at the same time, takes a slice of the created power for herself. The irony of this rhetorical move is revealed in her litany of allusions on page 787.

            But out of the problematic dynamic created by the differentiation of the gender of the rhetor comes some benefits that further Humanism (and help push rhetoric into the age of the Enlightenment). One of the key notions comes from turning the rhetoric of silence into a rhetoric of listening. De Pizan opens the segment in Treasure by advocating for women to give “comfort by speech and advice” (546) and to “listen patiently” (547). In the right moment, it is also suggested that the counselor (for that is what we are talking about here) offers some guidance or help—in this context that is done through prayer (granted, to a patriarchal God). What is significant here is the role of silence is turned into actively listening and advocating to the Big Guy. Though women are banned from the pulpit (as de la Cruz concludes), they are able to perform as rhetors. At the same time, I’m intrigued—is this the beginning of counseling as a branch of psychology?