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?