IRRS: Gaonkar's First Essay - Summary

"Can a rhetorical hermeneutic, or way of reading texts as rhetoric, be anchored in coherent and enabling theory?" So begins Gross and Keith's introduction to IRRS. I rely heavily on that introduction for its summary of IRRS lest the critic in me get in the way of a fair reading of the Gaonkar essay. Correctly, I think, the editors set IRRS in the context of the two conferences--Wingspread and Pheasant Run--that were represented together between the covers of Black and Bitzer's (1971) The Prospect of Rhetoric. (2) I was present at Pheasant Run and recall vividly the discussions leading to the conclusion that "rhetorical studies be broadened to explore communication procedures and practices not traditionally covered" (Black and Bitzer, 238, emphasis in original). (3) Say Gross and Keith,

In this, Wingspread [and Pheasant Run] recognized that, as of 1971, rhetoric's globalization was not generally recognized. It is hard to doubt that the globalization of rhetoric is now complete. How quickly it has happened--how easily rhetoric has become a universal hermeneutic! In his essay, Gaonkar teaches us to reflect on the consequences of our disciplinary haste (5).

But why the choice of rhetoric of science? Say the editors, "Gaonkar intends to test the assumptions underlying rhetorical theory and criticism for coherence, and so his best choice will be a[n] interpretive practice confined to a single disciplinary community" (1). Gaonkar has chosen the rhetoric of science literature to test the scope and depth of these assumptions because this vanguard discipline is most likely to put the greatest strain on a globalized, hermeneutically oriented rhetoric's underlying theses, "forcing the underlying assumptive cracks to appear" (1). Responding approvingly to Gaonkar's challenge, the editors say, "If rhetoric can prove itself of explanatory value in the inner sanctums of physics and chemistry, its claims to wide scope become genuinely cogent" (6). Rhetoric of science is by all accounts the "hard" case (6).

The heart of IRRS's skeptical response to the tide of globalization is summarized by Gross and Keith as consisting of four claims (6-7).

1. Rhetoric's essential character, as defined by both Aristotelian and Ciceronian tradition, consists in generating and giving speeches, not interpreting them--and certainly not interpreting texts in general.

2. The productive orientation of rhetorical theory, as traditionally conceived, requires a strategic model of persuasive speech, one in which the agency of the author controls the communication transaction. Such a view is plausible only in ancient fora or their contemporary analogues....

3. As a consequence of its traditional focus on production, rather than interpretation, rhetorical theory is "thin." The amount of specification necessary for a handbook like the Rhetoric is less than that needed for a critical theory. Because rhetoric's central terms--e.g., topos, pisteis, enthymeme--elude precise definition, there are few constraints on them. Consequently, they are open to unbounded use. With so few constraints on interpretation, there can never be enough evidence for legitimate interpretive consensus. The thinness of rhetorical theory, then, enables its globalization, its extension to every instance of text, artifact, or communication.

4. Globalization, in turn, is tied to a disciplinary anxiety. If rhetoric is in need of revival, that's because its identity has been erased (by philosophy, science, the Enlightenment, or whomever) and there is therefore the danger that marginality could be permanent, that is, the "tradition" might be lost. But there is no need to worry: globalization is predicated on a circular strategy of recovering rhetoric as a universal phenomenon by prefiguring it as something suppressed or hidden. On this account, there are many "rhetorical" theorists [e.g., Thomas Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin) who only use the word occasionally and have no grounding in "the tradition"--but we can see their work is actually rhetorical anyway, provided we can (re-) describe it properly.

Thus does Gaonkar speak of the potential consequences of globalization and its corresponding decontextualization: of the possible loss of tradition, identity, and coherent theory; of terminological elasticity leading to meaninglessness as the price of ubiquity; of "inane" and "idiosyncratic" usage prompting the overwhelmed reader to "abandon the hope of ever finding out what motivates and steers rhetoric" (38-9). Thus too does Gaonkar speak of globalization as a symptom of disciplinary anxiety in the perennial quest for academic and cultural legitimacy. (4)

As Miller notes, Gaonkar uses exceptionally vivid language to characterize the "hypertropic" impulse toward globalizing or universalizing rhetoric, an impulse, she says, "that not only expands the scope of rhetoric but also makes it an interpretive 'metadiscourse'" (160). Rhetoric in the globalized sense, Gaonkar says,

is an "incredibly engulfing disciplne" (26), it is "ubiquitous" (30, 38, 77), "hegemonic" (35), "promiscuous" (37, 38, 47, 75), its use has become "culturally fervid" (38).

Adds Miller,

This is a strong version of an argument we have heard before, about whether rhetoric can be transformed to meet new cultural, communicative and disciplinary conditions, or whether it should be understood pretty much in the terms in which the classical tradition presents itself to us. Michael Leff calls versions of these two views "liberated rhetoric" and "restrained rhetoric" (1987:1), and D. McCloskey refers to "Big" and "Little" rhetoric (1994).

This, I hope most will agree, is an adequate summary of Gaonkar's concerns about our field's "disciplinary haste." Gaonkar himself puts the central question as follows:

Is is possible to translate effectively an Aristotelian vocabulary initially generated in the course of "theorizing" about certain types of practical (praxis) and productive (poesis) activities delimited to the realm of appearances (that is, "public sphere" as the Greeks understood it) into a vocabulary for interpretive understanding of cultural practices that cover the whole of human affairs, including science? (30, italics in original)

I will say much more by way of elaboration of Gaonkar's position, but now in the context of critique. I begin with five major concerns of my own about IRRS, then move to a review of the commentaries, then continue my own critique of Gaonkar's arguments, this time in the context of CRTK (Gaonkar's Essay Two).