Old Rhetoric Vs. New Rhetoric

Pointing out the inaccuracy of four typically accepted distinctions between classical and modern rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede put forward three different distinctions between classical and modern rhetoric, which are interestingly based on three similarities between classical and modern rhetoric they value.

Their article is undoubtedly thought-provoking. However, their distinctions also seem simplified. As their discussion centers on Aristotle (“because the Aristotelian theory is the most complete of all classical rhetorics” (40)), my first question is to what extent can Aristotle represent the classical rhetoric. Admittedly, Aristotle is very influential and his systematic theory lays the foundation for the long tradition of rhetoric. But when one of Lunsford and Ede’s distinctions is based on Aristotle’s concept of knowledge, whether Aristotle’s theory alone can represent classical rhetoric becomes a question. According to Lunsford and Ede, one difference between classical and modern rhetoric lies in that in Aristotle’s world, knowledge results in clarity and certainty (“rhetor and audience come into a state of knowing which places them in a clearly defined relationship with the world and with each other”) while for modern rhetoric the nature of knowledge itself is questionable – knowing is never objective, always based on a human perspective (47). Moreover, in Aristotle’s system, there are two types of knowledge – knowledge of the necessary and knowledge of the contingent, and for Aristotle “Rhetoric’s realm is limited to the contingent” (47). Thus, Lunsford and Ede’s second distinction between classical and modern rhetoric is based on Aristotle’s rhetoric related to knowledge of the contingent, which I am afraid would not justly reflect classical rhetoric. Anyone familiar with Plato who is also very influential and echoed by Weaver later, would remember that for Plato rhetoric is a means to pursue real truth and absolute knowledge and though some people (like philosophers) can remember absolute knowledge they knew before in heaven, some other people fail. For Plato, rhetoric is also “the art of persuasion” (157), but it is a very different type of persuasion that “leads the soul by means of words” (156). In this sense, it might not be fair to equate Aristotle with classical rhetoric.

On the second place, Lunsford and Ede’s distinctions also seem ambiguous. Their first distinction is based on the similarity that “Both classical and modern rhetoric view man as a language-using animal” (45). Lunsford and Ede believe Aristotle’s works “indicate that Aristotle was aware of man’s ability to use symbols and that he viewed language as the medium through which judgment about the world are communicated” (45). Though in Rhetoric Aristotle talks about style and metaphor, language is not the focus of his rhetoric. And considering scholars such as Richards, Gates, and Bakhtin who analyze language in depth, it is difficult to say Aristotle’s awareness of symbol-using and language as the medium is comparable to the works of modern rhetoric. A major difference between classical and modern rhetoric, in my view, lies in modern rhetoric’s examination of language and its role in generating knowledge. While Lunsford and Ede stress viewing “man as a language-using animal” (45) as the similarity between classical and modern rhetoric and blur their difference, the importance of their corresponding distinction remains unexplained. They claim that “Aristotle addresses himself primarily to the oral use of language; our is primarily an age of print” (45). In Aristotle’s time, writing was still a new technology and he focused on speaking. We may say this distinction is primarily because of the limit of historical conditions. If Aristotle were born much later, he might have created a very different system of rhetoric. But what does this distinction mean? Why is it important? How is this related to the study of language? Does modern rhetoric simply ignore speech? How has an emphasis on written discourse shaped our understanding of rhetoric? Lunsford and Ede believe that this distinction is “potentially profound” (46) but refuse to explain why by stating that “Our understanding of the historical and methodological ramifications of the speaking/ writing distinction has been hampered by the twentieth-century split among speech, linguistics, philosophy, and English departments” (46). They indeed found an important fact, but without explanation, the meaning of this distinction remains ambiguous.

Similarly, before discussing the second distinction, Lunsford and Ede point out the second similarity that “rhetor and audience may jointly have access to knowledge” (45), which blurs another important difference that their second distinction avoids addressing. The word “jointly” makes the relationship between rhetor and audience rather ambiguous. In classical rhetoric, it is easier to find a hierarchy – a rhetor can be intellectually or morally better than the audience. Plato’s Phaedrus depicts Socrates as a wise man who skillfully guides a passive, obedient listener. Aristotle’s rhetor should receive good training while the audience are “untrained thinkers” (183). Quintilian believes a “good man speaking well” (8). Also, classical rhetoric is not open to every citizen. In modern rhetoric, not only is the nature of knowledge questioned, but the relationship between rhetor and audience is changed. Foucault reveals the social structure and power relations in discourse as well as ideologies existing in knowledge, giving both rhetor and audience the opportunity to realize and change their positions. Bakhtin emphasizes dialogue, which allows the rhetor and the audience communicate with each other more equally. Gates, Anzaldua, and Campbell strive to add a new population to rhetoric and issues related to race, gender, and culture get more attention. Valuing participation, digital rhetoric in the 21^st century may lead to a more democratic relationship between rhetor and audience. Hence, though I agree that modern rhetoric begins to question the nature of knowledge, classical rhetoric does not simply place rhetor and audience “in a clearly defined relationship with the world and with each other” (45). The more important distinction lies in that in modern rhetoric things like who can be a rhetor, who is the audience, and what kind of relationship they can have are rediscovered and redefined.             

Finally, it cannot be ignored that the scope of modern rhetoric is radically different from the scope of classical rhetoric. Though Lunsford and Ede emphasize that Aristotle’s persuasion cannot be understood in a narrow sense (44), which also includes interaction, modern rhetoric covers much more than persuasion. Richards sees rhetoric as exposition and communication; Burke introduces identification to rhetoric; Foucault and Bakhtin bring in discourse and dialogue; Gates, Anzaldua, and Campbell add race, gender, culture and identity. More interestingly, James Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory” reveals a new field. The new digital media may lead to numerous new possibilities and change our current understanding of rhetoric. For example, the new goal of rhetoric can be “self-expression, participation, and creative collaboration” (321) as the new digital space gives individuals more freedom and results in a participatory culture. The traditional division between reader and author is also challenged because in video games, players can be authors and readers at the same time (322). And rhetoric begins to include “both the Web author’s choices of topics, arguments, sequences, and words and the reader’s processes of selection and semiosis” (322). Even interaction has a different meaning now: “interactions among multiple versions of our online selves and between these and our real selves” play an important role in identity formation, which points in a new direction for rhetoric. Therefore, though we may use the same word, it is clear that Aristotle’s interaction is essentially different from interaction in the digital age.

spaces blurred

At first glance, Lunsford and Ede’s table 2 seemed just as simplistic as the table they negate; however, after further reviewing, I understand the need to break it down in this way. It seems adequate to agree with these distinctions, but in light of Zappan, the distinction garnered by modern rhetoric doesn’t hold.

“Classical is to oral, as Modern is to print.” Now we must redefine the print age in terms of digital access; Books are now digital, letters digital, speeches are accessed digitally. The components of print and oral are blurred through the digital space that affords all symbols, visuals, written texts, and verbal.

In terms of the field today, lacking any “systematic, generally accepted theory to inform current practice,” I’m not sure I agree with this hold heartedly. Yes, the field is fragmented, but does this also mean there are no systems for these fragments. Modern rhetoric has to contend with so many new ways of knowing. Are we not using the classical rhetoric to ground this new rhetoric? Zappan offers plenty examples of this work? Is this not a system to understand the practice? We make distinctions through the system of knowing the old and then knowing anew.

Even to this end of collaborative work mentioned above, there is a clear difference in terms of rhetor and audience. Zappan acknowledges this in the form of anonymity. If we simplify space in terms of oral, print, and digital, the rhetor has clearly changed in modern rhetoric. We especially find this difficult when teaching our students to research online: who wrote this text? Is it credible? In another instance, there is no way of knowing who the rhetor is or how many, because of the interactivity allowed through digital spaces.

What has not changed is the constraint of access. Though this constraint is less apparent (political, ceremonial: elite thinkers, like that of classical oral and print) in terms of who can produce and gain knowledge, access is still a fundamental issue as it relates to who can successfully use digital spaces for both persuasion and communication.

Qualifying the "Qualifying Distinctions"

In Lundsford and Ede’s “On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric,” the authors argue that classical and modern rhetoric are much more similar than we usually think. Lundsford and Ede boil their argument down to a list of three similarities between the two eras of rhetoric, and then include three qualifying distinctions to these similarities. Although I find their argument quite compelling, I think that we should make some revisions, additions, and/or redactions to their qualifying distinctions in order to have them fit with Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric.”

The first similarity that Lundsford and Ede provide is “[b]oth classical and modern rhetoric view man as a language-using animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with one another” (45). Similarly, Zappen synthesizes Fogg, Warnick, and himself, and says that the computer is also a medium in which “credibility (ethos)... and other kinds of persuasive appeals, including appeals to the emotions (pathos)” are used (320).  Lundsford and Ede’s qualifying distinction for this similarity is that “Aristotle addresses himself primarily to the oral use of language; ours is primarily an age of print” (45). While this certainly could still fit with Digital rhetoric, I think we should amend the distinction to say that “ours is primarily an age of print and digital—or new—media.” To leave out digital or new media from the distinction would exclude the new ares of composing that Zappen is deals with in his article.

The second similarity is “ [i]n both periods rhetoric provides a dynamic methodology whereby rhetor and audience may jointly have access to knowledge” (45). Their qualifying distinction is that Aristotle claims their is a clearly defined relationship between rhetor and audience and what, whereas the modern view is that there is “no clear distinction between the knower and the known” (45). I think that, for the most part, this qualifying distinction holds up with Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric.” I think that the argument could be made that there are visible distinctions between the “knower and the known” in online spaces (e.g. the user who posts the question, and the user who answers on a forum), but the relationship is fluid and informal. The person who answers the question’s position can quickly change if another user has more knowledge about something than the original answerer does. 

The third and final similarity is that “[i]n both periods, rhetoric has the potential to clarify and inform activities in numerous related fields” (45). I believe that Zappen’s  “theory of digital rhetoric that recognizes how the traditional rhetoric of persuasion is being transformed in digital spaces” (324) is an example of “eschew[ing] the false distinctions that have been drawn persistently between classical and modern rhetoric” (49) that Lundsford and Ede call for at the end of their article. Although I like their argument at the end of the article, I don’t really like their qualifying distinction in which they say “Aristotle’s theory establishes rhetoric as an art and relates it clearly to all fields of knowledge,” but “modern rhetoricians... lack any systematic, generally accepted theory to inform current practice” (45). I think that this distinction should be removed, because I think it’s kind of a false equivalency. They’re comparing Aristotle, a single classical rhetorician, to many modern rhetoricians; and they’re comparing a corpus from which many texts were lost, to a corpus from which we have lost few texts. Because of this, I think we should get rid of the distinction.

Lunsford, Ede, and Zappen

Lunsford and Ede take on the "task of eschewing the false distinctions that have been drawn persistently between classical and modern rhetoric" and "building instead on their powerful similarities" (49). As someone who has, throughout the semester, struggled to reconcile classical and modern rhetoric, I found this reading particularly helpful. They point out distinctions typically drawn between classical and modern rhetoric (man being either a rational or symbol-using animal, emphasis on logos versus emphasis on pathos, the either antagonistic or cooperative nature of the rhetor-audience relationship, and the ultimate goal of either persuasion or communication). These are certainly distinctions that I myself have attempted to make — perhaps not in as nicely distilled a form as they are presented here — but I appreciate the way Lunsford and Ede find common ground in these "false" distinctions. In both classical and modern rhetoric, man is a language-using animal, there is a dynamic interplay of some kind between audience and rhetor, and rhetoric has the potential for application to numerous fields. I wonder, though, if these similarities aren't too simple. I agree, though, that to separate Aristotle's writings from their context within his overall philosophy may be what leads to such unnecessary distinctions (which I might even call binaries).

Similarly, Zappen brings Aristotelian ideas of persuasion into the digital realm and discusses how "traditional rhetoric might be extended and transformed into a comprehensive theory of digital rhetoric" (319). It's an interesting thought experiment to apply logos, pathos, and ethos to online debates, and I'm intrigued by Zappen's discussion of Fogg's rethinking of the computer as a "persuasive technology" (320). I think of the so-called "cult of Mac" and the ways in which a new MacBook itself seems brimming with productive possibilities or an iPad feels like a stepping stone into a higher social strata just by virtue of its being. I wonder, though, how much we can ascribe persuasion to the computer (or whatever technology) itself and not to the designer or the marketer of that product. I may be misreading Zappen here, but I wonder where each of these pieces might fit into a Burkeian ratio. I also think there is something to Zappen's discussion of the creation of identities and communities; he is discussing in terms of digital rhetoric what Richards and Weaver did in extending rhetoric to include conversation and community. The bottom line, I think, is that it is not only persuasion at play in digital spaces, but conversation. 

One personal caveat, though: In my experience, I have to wonder if theorists like Zappen aren't too naive about online communications. I wonder what Zappen would do with internet trolls and the rampant negativity, homophobia, racism, etc. of YouTube and blog comments. Just something to think about...

Images and Fluid Identities Shaking Things Up

Lunsford and Ede’s dismantling of the four distinctions they set up between Modern and Classical rhetoric offered a nice, thorough review of Classical Rhetoric and its relationship with the authors we’ve read since the start of class.  While reading, the proposed distinction between audience and rhetor relationship as changing threw me off a bit; it was clear to me, reading Aristotle, that his idea of rhetoric had something to do with a dialogue.  I did not find a clash with Aristotle while reading later theories from Burke and Bakhtin, both which rely heavily the exchange between rhetor and audience. Though Aristotle did emphasize the speaker (and hence, the “practice” part of rhetoric), he had a clear understanding of the relationship between rhetor and audience (why certain strategies would work in certain circumstances, etc).  We’ve noted in class that Aristotle’s strategies are tied to various occasions—occasions provided by the social arena-- and we’ve used this as a sort of distinction of our own in trying to understand his relationship to the others we’ve read.  Lunsford and Ede challenge this a little bit when they explain Aristotle’s emphasis on language: interdependence of rhetor and audience, and his “goal of rhetoric” as “interactive means of discovering meaning through language” (44). Put that way, one might more easily connect Richards to Aristotle (despite the fact that Richards claimed himself that he was introducing a new rhetoric). Though they might form different shapes, they are both using the same kind of play dough to sculpt.

            In summary, Lunsford and Ede critique the distinctions made between fundamental or internal aspects of rhetoric, i.e. what’s at the root of goals and strategies; they do not, however, fail to note how the external aspects like medium, setting, even occasion of rhetoric change how the fundamentals play out in the modern world.  For instance, though both classical and modern rhetoric emphasize language as means of persuasion, Aristotle’s came from an oral society and most of our language communication occurs in print (45).  Meanwhile, with Zappan’s introduction of digital rhetoric, we are starting to see a change in medium once again.  We still have the same rules about language, but language appears not in print but on a screen. Not only that, but many of our messages come at us via images instead of words.

            Zappan says that today’s rhetorical scholarship, due to the introduction of digital media, will analyze “how traditional rhetorical strategies function in digital spaces and suggest how these strategies are being reconceived and reconfigured within these spaces” (319).  My understanding is that perhaps language will become less of a focal point, and our classical tools of analysis (like ethos, pathos, and logos, finding the enthymeme, etc) must be understood with a visual, rather than verbal, set of terms for description.  The difference between the society that brought the printing press and the society that spends hours each day on the Internet is that we rely more thoroughly on visual aspects of communication. Not that Aristotle relied only on language; I'm sure the rhetor's posture was important to him. I know the rhetor's age was, and that's partly visual... Still, I think visual communication is more prominent, thanks to the photograph and the arrival of motion pictures.   We can rhetorically analyze films, photographs, and videos with the same strategies introduced by the classical rhetoricians, but we will have to develop a new set of vocabulary in order to accommodate for the visual aspects of the argument we’re analyzing. I’m guessing that vocabulary has already been developed by now for the most part.

            Zappan also notes the way that identities morph in the digital sphere, and so, as we’re all prone to conclude after we’re introduced to a new rhetorical theory, things do get a lot more complicated once rhetors get to hide who they are, especially in terms of their dialogue with an audience.  I’m thinking mostly of internet trolls, here—people who like to go around and stir up arguments, drawing motivation from the fact that nobody knows who they are.  We are able to manipulate our identities and how people perceive us now more than ever before.  This definitely complicates things—how much of our response to a dialogue depends on what we know about the person we’re in dialogue with?  I’m sure this was always true—that in rhetorical dialogue, notions of the participators change while the dialogue continues, but the digital space must amp up the fluid relationships between identities of rhetor and audience.

Aristotle is typing…. Aristotle says: BRB AFK

My friend made this for me. I think it's
the greatest thing there ever was. 

Lunsford and Ede claim that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is not so different from the modern rhetorics of Burke and Richards. To do so, the authors contend that Rhetoric is often reductively read and oversimplified. The major problems with these reductivist readings, the authors note, is a misunderstanding of enthymeme and pisteis and a modern failure to link Aristotle’s other philosophies with Rhetoric. Most interesting to me is the problem of the pisteis. My final project this semester focuses on the relationship between pathos and ethos, emotion and ethics, in delivery. This project came out of some reading I did that I felt vastly minimized, if not eliminated, the work of pathos in activism and spokesman-ship. As I continued the project, I found that ethos, pathos, and logos were not so easily divisible in analysis or practice. If we’re being honest, though, anyone who has taught rhetorical analysis to freshmen knows that the appeals simply aren’t that easily distinguished. Often times, whole pieces of a composition will slip between the cracks of logos and ethos. Students are often more apt to recognize pathos poorly executed because of the effect it has on a rhetor’s ethos.

I’m inclined to agree with Lunsford and Ede’s claim that reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric requires depth and nuance – the same courtesies we afford more modern theorists. However, I wonder how we might read Rhetoric without Burke’s influence. Is it Burke that allows us to see the complexities and interconnectedness of Aristotle or was it there all along? Moreover, the authors’ assertion that Aristotle’s Rhetoric must be read in the context of his other theories is a bit concerning to me. Aristotle was a man with many ideas – some of which tend toward the misogynistic.

I wrote in my reflection at length about my own reductive definition of rhetoric that saw audience and rhetor clearly divided. I even scapegoated Aristotle for the idea. However, reading Lunsford and Ede’s discussion of Aristotle’s position of rhetor and audience, I see that I can’t really hold him responsible (my bad, Ari). This more porous understanding of the boundary between rhetor and audience and ethos, pathos, and logos is useful in the digital turn as well. As Zappan indicates, digital technologies ask us to rethink some of the ways in which we establish our identities, communicative networks, and language patterns. In order to investigate these patterns, rhetoricians can continue to benefit from an Aristotelian framework. However, like any terministic screen, that framework may be more useful in analyzing or exploring methods of production than for exploring effectiveness or constructiveness. 

Distinguishing the Classical from the Modern

Lundsford and Ede make an interesting argument about the distinctions typically drawn between classical and modern rhetoric. Their biggest contentions lie in the four major distinctions typically made between classical and modern rhetoric: 

1. Man as a rational animal living in a unified, stable society vs. Man as symbol-using animal living in a fragmented society.

2. An emphasis on logical proofs vs. An emphasis on emotional proofs.

3. Antagonistic rhetor-audience relationship (one-way communication) vs Cooperative rhetor-audience relationship (two-way communication)

4. Goal of persuasion vs Goal of communication.

I think they make a strong argument by saying that Aristotle's texts should not be interpreted in isolation because taking statements out of context almost always changes meaning; I think back to Obama's "you didn't build that" fiasco. I can agree with Lundsford and Ede that Aristotle's emotion and logic are probably not as distinct from each other as critics have made them out to be and perhaps believing that Aristotle thought society was unified and stable when his own country was in total upheaval seems unrealistic. However, like Jacob, I have trouble believing that the rhetor-audience relationship Aristotle describes in Rhetoric is interactive and generative with a goal of communication and not persuasion.

While writing my reflection on rhetoric, before I read Lundsford and Ede's article, I myself made similar distinctions, as I grouped classical rhetoric with one-way persuasion and modern rhetoric with collaboration and social interactions. We most recently saw this grouping also in Campbell's piece, when she discussed women's liberation rhetoric as distinctive from traditional concepts of the rhetorical process, namely the persuasion of audiences by an expert leader. Aristotle says in Rhetoric, "The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory" (179). He also says in Rhetoric that "rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (181). It seems pretty clear to me that rhetoric is heavily concerned with persuasion for Aristotle. To say that it is not persuasion and instead generative communication seems like a stretch. Travis makes a point that there is a sort of consubstantiality in enthymemes as the rhetor and the audience jointly produce them. However, enthymemes have a conclusion that has been established. While part of the argument is missing, and it is up to the audience to fill in the unstated assumption, once they do it will lead them to an already determined conclusion. This hardly seems generative to me. What I consider to be generative is Campbell's discussion of the small leaderless groups of women who talk about private experience which raises public consciousness; I consider this generative. So, I think Lundsford and Ede may have a point with their contentions on the first two distinctions (man as rational being and the emphasis on logical proofs), but I am not convinced by their contentions with the latter two (one-way communication and goal of persuasion).  

Pretty early in his article, Zappen characterizes classical rhetoric in the very way that Lundsford and Ede find contentions with, as a strategy of persuasion. Zappen says that dialogue occurring in new mediums challenge the view that associates rhetoric exclusively with persuasion (321). Instead of simply a mode of persuasion, dialogue could be conceived of as "a testing of one's own ideas, a contesting of others' ideas, and a collaborative creating of ideas" (320). By making this distinction between classical rhetoric and modern rhetoric, Zappen reinforces the typical characteristics that are assigned to the two: persuasion as the goal of classical rhetoric and collaboration, self-expression, and participation as the goals of modern (digital) rhetoric. Zappen goes on to further express the typical distinctions of classical rhetoric and modern rhetoric: "Studies of the new digital media also explore some of the purposes and outcomes of communication in digital   spaces: not only persuasion for the purpose of moving audiences to action or belief, but also self-expression for the purpose of exploring individual and group identities and participation and creative collaboration for the purpose of building communities of shared interest" (322). 

Modern rhetoric needs to be collaborative and generative since society functions in public, shared spaces more than ever because of the internet. It seems that definitions of rhetoric have evolved with historical contexts. To say that classical rhetoric was collaborative seems to be forcing an unlikely definition on the context. A few, privileged people had the authority to speak in Aristotle's time, and the rest did not. Now with the "speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity" of digital communication, everyone can speak. While I agree with Joe that we have to let Aristotle live on because he has a lot to offer to our understanding of rhetoric, I don't think we need to stretch interpretations of his rhetoric to account for how we understand rhetoric in the present.