Transcript Should We Name the Tools? Concealing and Revealing the Art of Rhetoric Carolyn R.

Should We Name the Tools?
Concealing and Revealing
the Art of Rhetoric
Carolyn R. Miller
Carolina Rhetoric Conference
February 2010
For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words, ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talk'd like other folk,
For all a rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Canto 1, 1663
10/30/2015
2
Power is tolerable only on
condition that it mask a
substantial part of itself. Its
success is proportional to its
ability to hide its own
mechanisms.
October 30, 2015
3
We need to be able to recognize
as such the strategies which, in
universes in which people have
an interest in being disinterested,
tend to disguise strategies.
October 30, 2015
4
One of the effects of ideology is
the practical denegation of the
ideological character of ideology
by ideology: ideology never says,
“I am ideological.”
October 30, 2015
5
In accordance with the
rhetorical principle of
identification, whenever
you find a doctrine of
“nonpolitical” esthetics
affirmed with fervor, look
for its politics.
October 30, 2015
6
Ars est celare artem.
The (real) art is to conceal the art.
October 30, 2015
7
Authors should compose
without being noticed and
should seem to speak not
artificially but naturally. The
latter is persuasive, the former
the opposite; for [if artifice is
obvious] people become
resentful, as at someone
plotting against them, just as
they are at those adulterating
wines.
Aristotle
October 30, 2015
8
If an orator does
command a certain
art . . . , its highest
expression will be in
the concealment of
its existence.
Quintilian
October 30, 2015
9
© The New Yorker Collection 2000 Alex Gregory from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
October 30, 2015
10
© The New Yorker Collection 2000 Alex Gregory from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
October 30, 2015
11
Background assumption 1
Human relations are
adversarial.
10/30/2015
12
Suspicion
October 30, 2015
13
Suspicion: Longinus
“There is an inevitable suspicion attaching to
the unconscionable use of figures. It gives a
suggestion of treachery, craft, fallacy,
especially when your speech is addressed to a
judge with absolute authority. . . . So we find
that a figure is always most effective when it
conceals the very fact of its being a figure.”
October 30, 2015
14
Suspicion: Quintilian
“Care must be taken to avoid exciting any
suspicion in this portion of our speech, and
we should therefore give no hint of
elaboration in the exordium, since any art
that the orator may employ at this point
seems to be directed solely at the judge.”
October 30, 2015
15
Spontaneity
October 30, 2015
16
Spontaneity: ad Herennium
Certain figures involving word-play “are to be
used very sparingly when we speak in an
actual cause, because their invention seems
impossible without labour and pains.”
October 30, 2015
17
Spontaneity: Longinus
“Emotion is always more telling when it
seems not to be premeditated by the speaker
but to be born of the moment; and this way
of questioning and answering one’s self
counterfeits spontaneous emotion.”
October 30, 2015
18
Spontaneity: Cicero
Antonius’ “memory was perfect, there was
no suggestion of previous rehearsal; he
always gave the appearance of coming
forward to speak without preparation, but so
well prepared was he that when he spoke it
was the court rather that often seemed ill
prepared to maintain its guard.”
October 30, 2015
19
Sincerity
October 30, 2015
20
Sincerity: Quintilian
“Who will endure the orator who expresses
his anger, his sorrow or his entreaties in neat
antitheses, balanced cadences and exact
correspondences? Too much care for our
words under such circumstances weakens the
impression of emotional sincerity, and
wherever the orator displays his art unveiled,
the hearer says, ‘The truth is not in him.’”
October 30, 2015
21
Sincerity: ad Herennium
“We must take care that the Summary should
not be carried back to the Introduction or the
Statement of Facts. Otherwise the speech will
appear to have been fabricated and devised
with elaborate pains to as to demonstrate
the speaker’s skill, advertise his wit, and
display his memory.”
October 30, 2015
22
Adversarial relations
ARGUMENT IS WAR
dissoi logoi
October 30, 2015
“rhetrickery”
Rhetoric is “par excellence the
region of the Scramble, of insult
and injury, bickering, squabbling,
malice and the lie, cloaked malice
and the subsidized lie.”
23
What I seek
in everything
is to win.
Odysseus
10/30/2015
24
Background assumption 2
Language is mimetic
(or should be).
10/30/2015
25
Human relations are
adversarial.
Language is mimetic
(or should be).
10/30/2015
26
Mimesis: Aristotle
“Something seems true when the
speaker does not conceal what he is
doing.”
October 30, 2015
27
Mimesis: Longinus
“Just as people who are really angry or frightened or
worried or are carried away from time to time by
jealousy or any other feeling . . . often put forward
one point and then spring off to another with
various illogical interpolations . . . so, too, the best
prose-writers by the use of inversions imitate
nature and achieve the same effect. For art is only
perfect when it looks like nature and Nature
succeeds only by concealing art about her person.”
October 30, 2015
28
Mimesis: Dionysius
“The distinctive nature of its melodious
composition seems, as it were, not to be
contrived or formed by any conscious art … . Yet
it is more carefully composed than any work of
art. For this artlessness is itself the product of
art: the relaxed structure is really under control,
and it is in the very illusion of not having been
composed with masterly skill that the mastery
lies.”
October 30, 2015
29
Mimesis: Aeschines
“Demosthenes, when he is cheating you, first adds
an oath to his lie, calling down destruction on
himself; and secondly, … he tells the names of men,
when he has never so much as seen their faces,
deceiving your ears and imitating men who tell the
truth. And this is, indeed, another reason why he
richly deserves your hatred, that he is not only a
scoundrel himself, but destroys your faith even in
the signs and symbols of honesty .”
October 30, 2015
30
The rhetoric of no-rhetoric
October 30, 2015
31
My accusers … told you that you
must be careful not to let me
deceive you—the implication being
that I am a skillful speaker. I thought
that it was peculiarly brazen of
them to tell you this without a
blush, since they must know that
they will soon be effectively
confuted, when it becomes obvious
that I have not the slightest skill as a
speaker—unless, of course, by a
skillful speaker they mean one who
speaks the truth.
10/30/2015
Socrates
32
Marc Antony in
Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
10/30/2015
I come not, friends, to steal
away your hearts:
I am no orator as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a
plain blunt man. …
For I have neither wit, nor
words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the
power of speech
To stir men’s blood. I only
speak right on.
33
“I pride myself on being a straight shooter.”
10/30/2015
34
History of the Royal Society
“… a constant Resolution, to reject all the
amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to
return back to the primitive purity, and shortness,
when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an
equal number of words. They have exacted from all
their members, a close, naked, natural way of
speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a
native easiness: bringing all things as near the
Mathematical plainness, as they can …”
Thomas Sprat, 1667, § XX
October 30, 2015
35
Human relations are
adversarial.
Language is mimetic
(or should be).
10/30/2015
36
Human relations are
adversarial.
Language is mimetic
(or should be).
10/30/2015
37
© The New Yorker Collection 2000 Peter Steiner from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
October 30, 2015
38
Rhetorica docens must
name the tools, rhetorica
utens must conceal
them.
10/30/2015
39
“Straight talk express”
10/30/2015
40
“Straight talk express”
10/30/2015
“Too eloquent to be trusted”
41
entertainment mode
critical mode
“looking through”
“looking at”
mimetic principle
adversarial principle
despair
cynicism
10/30/2015
42
antithesis
Rhetorica docens must
name the tools, rhetorica
utens must conceal
them.
10/30/2015
43
antithesis
Rhetorica docens must
name the tools, rhetorica
utens must conceal
them.
anaphora
10/30/2015
44
antithesis
Rhetorica docens must
name the tools, rhetorica
utens must conceal
them.
anaphora
10/30/2015
epistrophe
45