Aristotle Lives!!!!!

Lunsford and Ede’s distinctions—and overlaps—between classical and modern rhetoric are helpful in coming toward a (more helpful and unified) definition of rhetoric, one that brings attention to the presence of classical rhetoric (particularly Aristotle) in modern theories of rhetoric.  By divorcing Aristotle’s Rhetoric  from his full body of work, contemporary theorists of rhetoric tend to misrepresent and misinterpret Aristotle’s goal of rhetoric to the point where Aristotle’s and other classical rhetoricians’ theories of rhetoric are deemed obsolete for a modern context; Lunsford and Ede—and Zappan—demonstrate that theories of rhetoric from classical rhetoricians—Aristotle in particular—are still useful lenses to analyze language use in current, contemporary contexts. 

As Lunsford and Ede explain, Aristotle was interested in how the rhetor and audience negotiate meaning: “Aristotle’s rhetoric provides a complete description of the dynamic interaction between rhetor and audience, an interaction mediated by language” (44).  Meaning-making is then an interactive process—a social interaction that is negotiated with language.  This social, dialogic interaction that’s involved in creating meaning has often been attributed to modern rhetoricians such as Bhaktin and Burke—in our class specifically.  Lunsford and Ede go as far as to point out how Burke explicitly ties persuasion (in the broader sense), identification, and communication—Burke uses Aristotle’s conceptualization of rhetoric to contextualize it within the evolving contexts of the time.

I think that might be my “take-away” from the readings this week—well, I think there’s a few. First, as Lunsford and Ede explain, we—as contemporary rhetoricians—shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” In other words, Aristotle and the other classics have something to offer; their theories are not wholly obsolete in the changing contemporary contexts.  The second “take-away” is closely tie to the first: just as Burke and Zappan, we should take the essence of Aristotle (through his full body of work) and contextualize it.  As Zappan points out: “dialogue—conceived not as a mode of persuasion, but as a testing of one’s own ideas, a contesting of others’ ideas, and a collaborative creating of ideas—is possible in any medium: oral, print, digital” (320-1).  I liked this excerpt particularly because Zappan is not fashioning the Digital environment as a wholly unique and different point of study; with the emergence (and ever-emergence) of digital environemnts and digital communities, the digital is still a medium of communication where dialogue takes place. While the digital environment is, in fact, unique and different, it is not wholly unique as to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”  Understood fairly, Aristotle speaks about dialogue and negotiation of meaning—what better place for this to occur than in digital environments?  But as Zappan points out, we should contextualize Aristotle’s conceptualization of rhetoric to account for the affordances and constraints of the digital forum: speed, reach, anonymity, and interactivity. 

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.

Classical Rhetoric and/as Digital Rhetoric

     Lunsford and Ede provide a revised understanding of the rhetorical tradition, one in which the clear boundaries between classical and modern rhetoric dissolve through a re-examination of the theories and contributions of Aristotle. Aristotle, they claim, does not merely address persuasion as the manipulation of an audience to the will of the reader. Instead, they suggest “[his] metaphysics intrinsically rejects exploitative or ‘monologic’ communication from speaker to listener” (41). This reductive understanding of Aristotle is the direct result of divorcing his Rhetoric from the rest of his philosophy. Too, a reductive positioning of Aristotle within the tradition is not the fault of Aristotle’s theory, but rather a fault in historical methodology – they note a new way of doing history would be to position ourselves in consonance with the past instead of opposition. I’m not entirely sure what that would look like (especially in terms of Ramus), but I’d like to see that proposition carried over to the rest of our key thinkers. This piece made me wonder what the study of Rhetoric might be if we troubled our canonical categories of figures, movements, and periods. Lunsford and Ede’s assertions about the traditional positioning of Aristotle in a rhetorical education are fair (I must confess that, before this article, my thoughts on Aristotle and Plato were the exact opposite of Josh’s – I was not a big fan). However, a knowledge and understanding of Aristotle is dependent upon texts and experiences. It seems, then, that if we really want to challenge the dominant understanding of this classical thinker, we need a more robust representation of his philosophy in the canon.

    I am hesitant, however, to buy into all aspects of their revised distinction. Particularly, the claim stating that the focus of rhetoric in the modern period as the rhetoric of print gives me pause. Rhetoric, in all times and in all movements, has addressed multiple modes of meaning making, including the body as a mode of performance, delivery, and reception. It seems like a glaring gap to not include a discussion of technology, especially when they claim of Aristotle, that “he viewed language as the medium through which judgments about the world are communicated” (45). The medium of rhetoric matters; the technologies of rhetoric matter. The intersection of those two need to be incorporated into this repositioning of Aristotle.

     Too, I’m uncertain what Lunsford and Ede mean when they say, “despite the efforts of modern rhetoricians, we lack any systematic, generally accepted theory to inform current practice” (45). Do we not have a canon? Do we not have a rhetorical tradition? Can we not expect rhetorical theory classes across the country to include the same 2-3 texts regardless of the focus, history, historiography, and methodology of the instructor/program? I agree that there is not one central theory of rhetoric, that we all share different understandings of what it means to “do” rhetoric, but isn’t that we want? And if not, why?

     Zappen makes several interesting points about digital rhetoric. What I found most provocative was his suggestion that we have the theoretical pieces of a digital rhetoric, but that we lack any productive theory, because it is difficult to adapt a 2,000-year old rhetorical tradition to modern technologies. This is, in part, why rhetoric must be extended beyond persuasion for these spaces and technologies. I think Zappen raises an interesting question that gets at what digital rhetoric might look like: what if, he asks “scientific inquiry were situated within the context of digital spaces with the characteristics and potential outcomes and the strategies of self-expressions, participation, and collaboration we now associate with these spaces” (323)? However, are these not the questions that we should ask of rhetoric and the voice? Of rhetoric and the scroll? Of rhetoric and the manuscript codex? Technologies and histories are constructed of layers. To understand better digital rhetoric(s), we might need to ask these questions of rhetoric in its previous iterations. 

Classical Rhetoric in the Digital Age

                 I remember being very disappointed when we started the semester. Although we opened with the classical tradition, few of my colleagues seemed to enjoy the theoretical tag team of Plato and Aristotle. This wounded me because I love Aristotle’s Rhetoric so much that when I returned from my home state of Indiana at the beginning of the semester, I spent the entire drive listening to an audiobook of it read by a sleepy-voiced British man. Considering that fact/confession, it should come as no surprise that I really appreciated the work Lunsford and Ede, along with Zappen, did to argue for the relevance of the classical theorists in our digital age.

                Lunsford and Ede highlighted four major distinctions which typify the way scholars tend to distinguish the “classical” from the “modern” period of rhetoric. These distinctions speak to competing definitions of man, different kinds of appeals, the process of communication, and the goal of rhetoric. The distinctions they make present these two periods as two poles on a spectrum, a dualism, which they spend the majority of the argue complicating.

                The most significant point they made is that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is often viewed in isolation from the rest of his philosophical system, which theorized rhetoric within the scheme of an entire system of personal ethics, political organization, and metaphysics. Extracting rhetoric from its relationship to these other fields of inquiry, they argue, distracts us from the fact that Aristotle considered many of the issues of meaning and power that scholars often consider a particularly modern concern. To answer first question of this week’s prompt, then, I do not think the distinctions they mention hold, and I think that viewing Aristotle’s Rhetoric light of the rest of his system makes that case.

                Although Zappen’s work on digital rhetoric and online spaces might seem to challenge the relevance of the classical theorists, I don’t believe it does. True, he points out the relationship between text, audience, rhetor, and other important concepts has changed, it’s worth remembering that for theorists like Aristotle, rhetoric was a discipline of oral communication. That the classical theorists could not address the kind of texts that he does is a limitation, to be sure, but one that invites us to re-theorize their concepts, not dismiss them.

                Finally, these articles suggest questions about the way we make distinctions between periods, narrate the history of the discipline, and explain how what we are doing is alike, different than, advancing, or otherwise distinguished from what our scholarly antecedents have achieved. Beyond the four categories of distinction that Lunsford and Ede address, what other categories do we use to make distinctions between “periods” of study? What use, anyway, is grouping different authors/ideas together under a single name? What do we gain and what do we lose? These are the questions these readings leave me with, and I hope they are questions that we can discuss in class.

Zappan, Lunsford, and Ede

Do the Lunsford/Ede distinctions between classical and modern rhetoric hold? Do we need to revise them in light of Zappan’s observations about digital rhetoric?

I do agree with the chart that Lunsford and Ede propose on page 40 in the article. I thought it was particularly interesting how Lunsford and Ede mentioned Aristotle and his emphasis on logic rather than emotion, because while Aristotle does mention emotion, he sees it something that interferes with reason and thus with rhetoric, and prefers logic as a more reasonable argument. This never sat well with me as I always found passion a great motivator; as a teacher, I always hear that as long as you are passionate about teaching, you can interest kids in pretty much anything. Lunsford and Ede point out how this logic/emotion is flipped on its head in modern rhetoric; the emotion that is portrayed really is vivid in more modern rhetoricians texts. I feel like Anzeldua is one that jumped to my mind immediately as an example of a psychological proof, as Lunsford and Ede called it.

As for Zappan, I feel that his ideas would have paired nicely with Lunsford and Ede’s table, particularly with the idea of the relationship between the rhetor and the audience and the goal of being communicative (last two points). I got excited when I saw that Zappan wrote “She notes their success in persuasion, effected, however, through a heteroglossic cacophony of voices, offering opportunities for reader participation and interactivity...” (p. 320). I thought of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and thought of how essential this theory has become to online and digital communication. The idea of many voices can be found in many digital outlets, such as blogs, wikis, websites, and online communications like email and Google Docs. This also ties back into the idea of Lunsford and Ede’s table where they say that the rhetor-audience relationship is cooperative, characterized by emphatic, two-way communication (pg. 40). This, of course, is the opposite of the traditional top-down rhetoric but is essentially so; the difference of context has made it hard to appear authoritative, and with the amount of information within our reach in the digital age, there is no longer such a distinct divide between scholar and student.

Zappan also speaks to the idea of the goal of communication that Lunsford and Ede mention in their comparative table. 

This is emphasized when Zappan mentions the simplicity of the digital world in combining physical, social, psychological, and linguistic cues into something like a website that is interactive and communicate in function. If Zappan would add anything to the differences between modern and traditional rhetoric, I feel he would add anonymity and interactivity. I feel like the idea of anonymity on the Internet is something that is very non traditional; typically, even if in text (as compared to oration), the audience knows who the author is, but online, “No one knows you’re a dog,” to borrow Dr. Yancey’s/New York Times’ phrase.         

Apologia Accepted

After all of our reading, what remains, finally, of rhetoric? Has the hyper-rational, agonistic, elitist, arguably manipulative rhetoric of Aristotle been entirely replaced by a thousand other rhetorics of technology, place, culture, gender, race, creed, sexuality, or ability?

Not so fast, Lunsford and Ede caution. Much of our discomfort with classical rhetoric seems to have stemmed from certain reductive readings of Aristotle and others, with the result that we tend to read the aforementioned qualities into the rhetoric, whether they are there or not. This makes it easier to claim that the classical categories are no longer sufficient to describe rhetoric in a modern context.

For instance, an insistence that classical rhetoric is hyper-rational, a relic of a worldview based on Platonic ideals, misses much of the nuance of Aristotle. In reality, he saw logos (rational appeals in the form of enthymemes) functioning alongside pathos (emotional appeals in the form of enargeia and honorific/pejorative language). Humans are not merely rational, but both rational and emotional.

And I thought this was a good response to a pretty bad argument. It’s hard to claim that Aristotle’s rhetoric is hyper-rational, disconnected is it is from dialectic; enthymemes are, by their nature, probabilities, not verities. Classical rhetoric was never meant to replace scientific demonstration, though I think Aristotle might be persuaded to agree with Kuhn that scientific demonstration contains rhetoric.

Similarly, Lunsford and Ede point out that accusations of rhetorical manipulation fail to take into account the juxtaposition, in Nicomachean Ethics, of morality and emotion (41). Again, the defense seems stronger than the claim it tries to refute; on what basis does postmodern rhetoric, which, most have settled, is “cognate with language” (see Weaver and Richards), and therefore, as such, is part of a system of control (see Foucault) see classical rhetoric as manipulative?

Finally, Lunsford and Ede argue that, in the enthymeme, the rhetor and the audience co-construct proofs, which is a strong, dialogical way of arriving at meaning—far from one-sided, far from centering only on persuasion. This, too, makes sense—although there are other ways to make meaning dialogically, and there are certainly others, like Bahktin, who stress this dialogue more, one would be hard-pressed to call this one-sided.  

I think that I would contend that the centuries-long conversation about rhetorical theory would be largely incoherent without the terminology of classical rhetoric—audience, rhetor, ethos, pathos, logos, topoi, kairos, etc—and that suggests that conceptually, there is still some coherence to the classical system. It is a remarkably robust set of concepts.  Even Kenneth Burke, who posits a rhetoric of identification rather than persuasion, is quoted by Lunsford and Ede as admitting, “there is no chance of keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification (‘consubstantiality’) and communication” (44).

This, for me, is true of the theorists we’ve read this semester (including Zappen): they expand on classical rhetoric, modernize it, clarify it, or challenge it on certain points—and these are helpful, necessary additions and corrections—but the classical system does not go away. In fact, I’m not sure what would be left without it. Maybe someone else could answer: if we did away with Aristotle, where would the new rhetoric begin?

Classical, Modern, and Digital Rhetoric

Some of Lunsford and Ede’s distinctions between classical and modern rhetoric hold.  Both Aristotle and modern rhetoricians see humans as a “language-using animal,” both rational and emotional (45).  Lunsford and Ede argue that the modern age is “an age of print” (45).  They leave out visual and multimodal texts that abound today. Zappan points out that dialogue can take place “in any medium: oral, print, digital” (320-321).  While print is important, it is one medium people use to communicate.  While Aristotle sees the audience as rational and emotional so the rhetor can find the best means to communicate with the audience, modern rhetoricians see people as rational and emotional so that rhetoric can be participatory and collaborative (Zappan 322).

Lunsford and Ede argue that, “According to Aristotle, rhetor and audience come into a state of knowing which places them in a clearly defined relationship with the world and with each other, mediated by their language” (45).  Certainly Aristotle envisions a rhetor reaching an audience, and it is the rhetor’s job to figure out how to persuade the audience using language.  I read Aristotle’s audience as a passive audience, there to be reached.  When Lunsford and Ede say that in both classical and modern rhetoric “rhetor and audience may jointly have access to knowledge,” they argue that audience has more agency than I think Aristotle gives audience (45).  Digital rhetoric, according to Zappan, allows us to “understand the processes by which authors and readers work together to achieve self-expression or creative collaboration” (322).  Zappan’s relationship between rhetor and audience is dialogic, not one-way communication.  I’m not sure Aristotle sees rhetoric as dialogic in the way Zappan considers digital rhetoric to be dialogic.

Lunsford and Ede claim that, “Aristotle’s theory establishes rhetoric as an art and relates it clearly to all fields of knowledge” (45).  When Aristotle establishes rhetoric as being used in the three occasions of ceremonial, forensic, and deliberative, I don’t read his rhetoric as relating to all fields of knowledge.  Aristotle limits where rhetoric happens.  Not all fields of knowledge would be discussed in the three occasions Aristotle lays out.  I think that the theorist who relates rhetoric to all fields of knowledge is Burke.  Digital rhetoric relates to anything that can be discussed in a digital space.  Zappan argues that digital rhetoric builds “communities of shared interest” (322).  That’s a wider scope than Aristotle’s three occasions.

Lunsford and Ede are correct to argue that the dichotomy between classical and modern rhetoric they lay out at the beginning of the article is oversimplified and “seriously flawed” (40).  Classical rhetoric is not solely manipulative, just as modern rhetoric is not always interested in true cooperation and communication.  Aristotle was interested in public speech, in moving audience in a morally right way, as Lunsford and Ede point out (41).  Modern rhetoric takes a broader scope, interested in communication public and private.  Both classical and modern rhetoric see people as rational and emotional and are concerned about knowledge.  Digital rhetoric gives us new spaces to express ideas, shape identity, and collaborate around shared interests (Zappan 322).