New Rhetoric and I A Richards

 

 By raising the problem of trying to define meaning and the process by which we make meaning during communication, Richards introduces a “new Rhetoric” that he distinguishes from “old Rhetoric.”  On page 1280, Richard outlines both. For him, old Rhetoric sticks to “general themes,” and is in this way “macroscopic”; he calls it as a discussion of “the effects of different disposals of large parts of discourse.”  He also calls Rhetoric  “an offspring of dispute [that] developed as the rationale of pleadings and persuadings; it was the theory of the battle of words … dominated by a combative impulse.” This is what distinguishes rhetoric from exposition—persuasion rather than relaying a “state of view.” 

New Rhetoric, on the other hand, looks at communication on the “microscopic scale by using theorems about the structure of fundamental conjectural units of meaning and the conditions through which they and their interconnections arise.”    The very idea that language could be broken down into “fundamental conjectural units” resonates with Aristotle; we might view Richards as breaking down further what Aristotle broke down.  Even so, the notion of meaning born out of interconnection shifts focus to the reception of rhetoric instead of the persuasive act; or we might say, from the rhetor to the audience.

This is probably too long of a leap, but I wondered if the idea of rhetoric as “rationale” resonated with Plato on an extremely basic level.  Though Plato had that soul-thing going on, his understanding of how to reach the soul required rationality (as opposed to impulse and feeling).  Like I said, basic.  So, before we toss Plato out with all other thought we academics deem as essentialist, maybe we could at (the very) least acknowledge him as setting the rational stage for Aristotle to tap out his dance number.  That said, and like just about everyone else has said so far, Richards takes a giant leap from Plato in every other respect.  We will find no souls in Richards’s analogies and very little in the way of truth and virtue.

 Richards also diverts a bit from Aristotle, who, though he emphasizes knowledge, still clings to the idea of certain ideas being universal (granted, Aristotle’s universe was relatively smaller than Richards without all those New Worlds to contend with?).  In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines a Sign as "a complete proof" and "that which bears to the proposition it supports the relation of the particular to the universal" (184).  Richards, especially later in his career when he starts his translation work, moves away from the possibility of universal meaning. We get a hint of this on page 1293, when he describes how, in a foreign language, “proper expressiveness of the appreciation of a word … will be no matter of merely knowing its meaning and merely relishing its sound.”  Because meaning relies so much on interconnection of contexts, Richards suggests that we can’t fully know another person's intention because of variation in experience unless the exchanges occurs within a specific, mathematical mode of communication, such as music. (I think that music, too, has its cultural constraints--scales that vary from place to place-- but I guess I don’t really know that much about it.)

 I’ll chime in with the postmodern discussion—Richards’s lectures seemed to jive all right with the post-structuralists (post-modernists).  He writes:

“We shall find, preeminently in the subject of rhetoric, that interpretations and opinions about interpretations that are not primary steps of partisan policy are excessively hard to arrive at. And thereby we rediscover that the world—so far from being a solid matter of fact—is rather a fabric of conventions, which for obscure reasons it has suited us in the past to manufacture and support.” (1287)

The fact that he calls the support of conventions a thing of the past hints that Richards knew he was shaking things up with that statement and that a new line of reasoning was soon to follow.  Even so, he seems to set literary speech apart when he goes on about poetry and prose (1288-89).  He seems, from that short section, to believe that poetics can achieve more rigid and direct meaning than other kinds of communication, while its only a matter of time before Derrida will suggest that all meaning in language, poetic or not, is unstable.