Poor Richards' Contexts

Richards’ chapters seem a radical departure from Aristotle’s and Plato’s conceptions of rhetoric. As Jacob’s post points out here, there is some overlap between Richards and the ancients, perhaps Aristotle in particular, but Richards takes a starkly new ontological and epistemological stance. Unlike his forefathers, Richards rejects the soul and its truth seeking narrative, effectively calling faith a childish endeavor, and turning to toward scientific explanations of the human brain and its role in human communication. Moreover, language, in Richard’s definition, is no longer representative of the world. Rather, all language is contextual – even individual words are constantly interanimated with one another and cannot be separated from a reader’s lexical context.

Although Richards does not take an absolute social constructionist approach, he is adamant that because language operates as part of a complex system, words and their meaning are contingent on a “general conformity between users.” Because words operate as empty vessels, reliant on a reader or listener to fill them with a contextual and subjective meaning, it is impossible to communicate the clear and absolute truths that Plato imagined. So too, given the ambiguity Richard’s points out in words such as “good,” does language fail to deliver Aristotle’s flawless and seamless logic, constantly building on the concrete and static definition of a term or idea. In light of this, Richards seeks to reunite rhetoric and poetry in a shared celebration of ambiguity.

Although it might seem unimportant, the best line of this chapter is “this pedantic looking term” (1292). These chapters signal an increase in sensory awareness and the embodied experience of the world. I was excited that Bruce picked on this theme as well. The emphasis on sensory here, coupled with Richards’ assertion that meaning requires “general conformity,” seems to begin to establish that language is constructive, rather than representative. If we take that each person’s sensory experience will be variant, and therefore his or her account of the experience will be variant, then we can begin to argue that there is no universal experience, truth, or reality. I don’t know that Richards’ would have gone this far, but I don’t think he would have argued for a universal experience.

As Bruce and Jacob engage in a dialogue re: Richards & Postmodernism, I’d like to point out that Richards is laying some groundwork for what’s to come, but I agree with Jacob’s assessment. Although his work may have been well received, to return literature and rhetoric to the same sphere was, at the time, a bold proposition. Too, he asks us to consider context and seems to reject the idea of clear, perfect language, and he doesn’t seem a formalist. Richards’ narrowing of context to linguistic factors and lack of attention to other social factors (in fact, he seems to limit this analysis to experiences with written text in moments of reading a book solely), lands him steadfastly with the modernists, though, in my book, and perhaps, as Jacob says, even on the conservative side.