Lunsford, Ede, and Aristotle: We're Not So Different, You and I.

I think it was wise of Lunsford and Ede to reconcile our most common criticisms of Aristotle with a more nuanced reading of not only the Rhetoric but his entire philosophical system. As Dr. Yancey has often mentioned, it is a bit foolish on our part to speak about a thinker when we do not have a grasp of his/her entire system. Lunsford and Ede do a good job of parsing out a closer reading of Aristotle, pointing out that the classical rhetor need not manipulate an audience's emotions in a monological act. Instead, drawing on Bitzer, they point out that “Enthymemes only occur when speaker and audience jointly produce them...[they] intimately unite speaker and audience and provide the strongest possible proofs” (44). This reading of the enthymeme closely resembles how I've always thought about them, as they are wholly dependent on audiences to complete the syllogism, by providing either a premise or conclusion through the doxa of a given time and place. In this regard, I see how one may read the use of enthymeme as a sort of consubstantiality, as enthymemes take for granted some sort of common ground between rhetor and audience.

This re-envisioning of audience is also at play when Lunsford and Ede zoom out to examine the whole of Aristotle’s systematic philosophy; as the man wrote treatises on anything and everything, Lunsford and Ede assume that each treatise could interlock with the next, as they point out a major principle of Aristotle's philosophy was that of integration (40). Since his writings present a comprehensive philosophical system, it is erroneous to consider one writing in isolation of the rest, hence why we see a classical rhetor as being manipulative. But we see that a rhetor is not manipulative when we look at the concept of animism, the idea of “dynamic interaction between an agent and an object undergoing change” through the process “...in which an object acquires characteristics or properties” (41). While this phrasing does seem to privilege the agent over object, if we read it through the enthymematic lens of cooperation between rhetor and audience, I think we can see that both are changed and can acquire new characteristics through rhetorical acts. Hence, the rhetor acts a mid-wife who “focuses and directs energies inherent in the listener...” rather than maliciously manipulating them (41).

While it is true that Lunsford and Ede only make mention of two media, speech and print, I don't think its necessarily an oversight on their part. Without any signifying dates in the PDF, it is quite possible that their article was published before the field's “multimodal revolution,” so it wasn't relevant to the conversations we were having at that time. But, if you agree with Logan's contention that writing has always been multimodal (and I'm inclined to do so), Lunsford and Ede fall well within the parameters of multimodality. As we have increasingly turned our attention to the digital, I think the reconciliation between classical and modern rhetoric holds up, as multimodal texts sometimes allow for even more audience participation than speech or print. Just as the world continues to change, we must adapt with it to compose a variety of new texts that will rely on the doxa of our audiences; this is just as true today as it was 2,000 years ago.