Rhetoric historians – I know you are reading. Please let me know what the analogue is to this issue? I beg you, I need to read some of the historical material.
Rhetoric has been ruined by the Institutional Rhetoricians. By this I mean rhetoricians who think NCA is more important than rhetoric; that NCA represents rhetoric; that NCA can provide a good accounting or defense of rhetoric; that think NCA doesn’t exist as a function of rhetoric.
J.M. O’Neill founded the discipline using rhetoric to craft a professional role of speech teachers at the University level. He did this not because he was an NCA officer, went to legislative assembly, or any of that bullshit. He was able to do it because he was an artist, his medium being debate.
We cannot lose rhetoric to the institutional jockeys. Many of the people are interested in power, status, authority – but above all that they are interested in having a substantive role. The mark of the institutional rhetorician is the person who has intense anxiety about what Kenneth Burke labeled “the paradox of substance.” They cannot ever feel comfortable with the label “rhetor” or “rhetorician” because they don’t like having to defend it and explain it – something rhetoricians and rhetors delight in. Instead they invent and lie. They call themselves “political scholars,” “legal scholars,” “scholars of race and gender,” or whatever the title de jour might be.
Instead, why not say you are a scholar of rhetoric and you study race? Or gender? Or trans-politics? Or anything! Why not that? Because they are lazy and they do not want to have the discussion about rhetoric one more time.
The field is in that conversation and that articulation every time. Every time we articulate what rhetoric is to someone, someone who might not have been lucky enough to encounter it before running into us, we breathe new life into the field. We renew it and we welcome more into it. The power of it is that we can articulate, without constraint the importance of examining whatever issue it is that we wish to study and discuss. No other field has that latitude. None.
But that’s not all. Rhetoric has the capacity to instruct others how to talk about what matters in ways that bend other people, that transform matter, that alter what matters to them. It’s a teaching art, and many institutional rhetoricians resent having to teach that. Instead they want to be admired; they want to be the smartest person in the classroom saying the smartest thing about race, politics, the first amendment, whatever they love. Instead of opening the tent wide and inviting others to become advocates – effective advocates for issues – they would like to keep the group small and keep the spotlight on the few people who they think “have it right.”
Grasping to hold onto a slippery rock like NCA for your identity is kind of sad – reminds me of Ralph Ellison’s essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station where he talks about how we hang onto the rocks of tribal identity when we fear the phoenix that results from the combination of various identities. This is a great way to think about “the paradox of substance,” and one that Ellison would approve of, after all he and Burke were friends.
Why do rhetoricians scramble for the stable when the unstable and the shady are their home? I’ll end with a quote:
“The Sophist runs away into the darkness of that which is not, which he has had practice dealing with, and he is hard to see because the place is so dark.” ~ Plato, Sophist (254a) trans. Christopher Tindale (I think).
The Sophist might not be your identity as a rhetorician, but one thing is certain about them – you can call them whatever you wish but they were people who were interested in teaching others how to speak, relate, and create meaning within their community. That’s admirable. They didn’t flee to the institutions of Athens; they used them to riff off of to create the words that would create the meanings that were valuable to their students and their audiences.