Rethinking Rhetorical Theory

Out of the rhetorical tradition, then, have come not just concepts, methods and perspectives used in critical analyses of scholarly practices but also guidelines for communicators--on invention, argumentation, stylistic adaptation, and the like--that might be used recorstructively in the development of rhetorical alternatives to objectivism. Moreover, as the boundaries of rhetoric have been pushed outward--as rhetoricians of inquiry have evidenced its relevance to the discourse of the academy and not just to public address--rhetoricians have had of necessity to rethink rhetorical theory's intellectual history, in some cases identifying as rhetorical theorists persons who would never have labeled themselves as such. One consequence of this revisionist history has been the elevation in significance of the ancient sophists and of the doctrines and perspectives that bear their name. More will be said about this shortly. Another consequence has been a renewed interest in the rhetoric of boundary relations among disciplines, a subject no less applicable to the history of rhetoric itself. (33) For the most part rhetoric has subsisted on the margins of some other field--as jester to philosophy the king, for example, or as tool of religion or politics or law. But for large periods from the fourth to the fourteen century A.D., according to Richard McKeon,

the art of rhetoric contributed not only to the methods of speaking and writing well, of composing letters and petitions, sermons and prayers, legal documents and briefs, poetry and prose, but to the canons of interpreting laws and scripture, to the dialectical devices of discovery and proof, to the establishment of the scholastic method which was to come into universal use in philosophy and theology, and finally to the formulation of scientific inquiry which was to separate philosophy from theology. (34)

There is a sense, then, in which "the rhetorical turn" is truly a "rhetorical return." However, from the time of the seventeenth century Enlightenment until our own, rhetoric's status was greatly diminished, its doctrines and functions having been taken over by other sciences and other formal disciplines. Still, even through the worst of times for rhetoric, "underground" rhetorical tradition persisted. Gaonkar (this volume) credits Burke with having resurrected that tradition while at the same time extending the reach of rhetorical theory by way of Burke's own concept of identification. Among the post-Enlightenment figures whom Burke cites as having contributed to his own expanded view of rhetoric are Carlyle, Coleridge, Diderot, Freud, Nietzsche, De Gourmont, and La Rochefoucauld, as well as such ostensibly "anti-rhetorical" theorists as Marx and Bentham. (35)

But it is within our own century that the intellectual climate for a new rhetoric of inquiry seems to have proven most hospitable. Gaonkar speaks in this connection of "implicit" rhetorical theories--not labeled as such but clearly relevant to the purposes at hand. What theories ought to qualify as implicit rhetorics of inquiry is an interesting question. Does Roland Barthes' critical stance as a structuralist qualify him? Does Levi-Strauss' more scientific stance disqualify him? Hayden White's Metahistory marks him clearly as a rhetorician of inquiry, (36) but what of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (37) in light of White's masterful reading of Foucault as having wittingly or unwittingly organized the archaeology of knowledge around the four master tropes? (38)

Surely the candidates for implicit, if not explicit status as contemporary rhetorics of inquiry would have to include Kuhnian post-positivism, (40) strong programme SSK, (41) Gilbert and Mulkay's discourse-analytic approach to scientific texts, (42) symbolic anthropology, (43) the critical legal studies movement, (44) Habermasian critical rationalism, (45) critical pluralism (46) deconstructionism, (47) and a good deal of feminist, neo-marxian and neo-Freudian criticism. (48) Even this list paints a very incomplete picture. Nelson has gone so far as to suggest that a "new sophistic" has been taking shape since at least the time of Vico and Nietzsche, and that this "counter-tradition to objectivism" includes such figures as Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Hayden White, and Kenneth Burke. (49)