No More Learning

Lucaites, John. "McGee Unplugged. " In Rhetoric in Postmodern America: Conversations
with Michael Calvin McGee, edited by Carol Corbin, 3-26. New York: Guilford Press,
1998.
Lucaites, John, and Celeste Condit. "Epilogue: Contributions from Rhetorical Theory. "
In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, edited by John L. Lucaites, Celeste M.
Condit, and Sally Caudill, 610-11. New York: Guilford Press, 1999.
Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. "Audience Addressed, Audience Invoked. " In Cross-talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 77-96. Urbana, Ill. : National
Council of Teachers of English, 2003.
Mailloux, Steven. "Places in Time: The Inns and Outhouses of Rhetoric. " Quarterly Jour-
nal of Speech 92 (2006): 53-68.
Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, N. H. :
Boynton/Cook, 2005.
McKerrow, Raymie. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. " Communication Monographs
56 (1989): 441-63.
Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Obama, Barack. "Barack Obama: A Call to Serve. " Time/CNN. September 11, 2008. http:
//www. time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1840636,00. html (accessed March 23,
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Pickering, Andrew. "From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice. " In Science as Prac-
tice and Culture, edited by Andrew Pickering, 1-28. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present.
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Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Sloop, John. The Cultural Prison. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.
Smith, Neil, and Setha Low. "Introduction: The Imperative of Public Space. " In The Poli-
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16 David J. Coogan and John M. Ackerman
Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, N. H. : Boynton/Cook, 1990. Wacquant, Loi? c. "The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology. " In An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, edited by Pierre Bourdieu and Loi? c Wacquant, 2-59. Chicago: Uni-
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27-38.
[ part1 ]
Rhetoric Revealed
? Should We Name the Tools?
Concealing and Revealing the Art of Rhetoric
Carolyn R. Miller
"Socrates: 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 obvi- ous that I have not the slightest skill as a speaker--unless, of course, by a skill- ful speaker they mean one who speaks the truth. "1
Throughout its troubled history, two opposing impulses have persisted within rhetoric, an impulse toward self-aggrandizement and another toward self-denial. Plato's Gorgias announces grandly that rhetoric is "the greatest boon, for it brings freedom to mankind in general and to each man domin- ion over others. "2 Cicero's Crassus claims that "in every free nation, and most of all in communities which have attained the enjoyment of peace and tran- quillity, [eloquence] has always flourished above the rest and ever reigned supreme. "3 This one art, he says, has the ability "to raise up those that are cast down, to bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights. "4 And rhetoric is not only powerful, it is ubiquitous; it can speak on any subject: as Plato's Gorgias claims, "rhetoric includes practically all other faculties under her control. "5 Thus rhetoric vaunts itself, both in the academy and in the public sphere.
Such self-aggrandizement is not unfamiliar to contemporary minds, as rhetoric has experienced a disciplinary and intellectual renaissance, with jour- nals and books, curricula and symposia, devoted to its power and ubiquity. We have said that rhetoric is "epistemic," that it affects the conduct of in- quiry and the substance of knowledge across the disciplines. We have com- mitted ourselves to using the powers of rhetoric to meet challenges in the public realm, challenges to social justice, democratic process, public respon- sibility, and civility. Kenneth Burke, in an anaphoric, epanaleptic aphorism we love to quote, told us that "wherever there is persuasion there is rhetoric.
20 Carolyn R. Miller
And wherever there is 'meaning' there is 'persuasion. '"6 Rhetoric's imperialism has reached such a pitch recently that critical alarms have been sounded, urg- ing "attenuations" of its epistemic claims and challenging its ambitions as a "universalized," "promiscuous," "free-floating," "interpretive metadiscourse. "7
Criticism like this helps to counter rhetoric's grand ambitions, but there is another countervailing force, and that is rhetoric's own enduring impulse toward self-denial. Here, rhetoric seeks not to "flourish" or to "reign," but to disappear, to get out of the way, possibly even to admit to being "mere rhet- oric. " The motto for this impulse is that the art of rhetoric lies in concealing the art: ars est artem celare. 8 Rhetorical treatises, beginning at least with Aris- totle, point out the need for rhetorical artifice and strategy to remain hidden: "authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally. (The latter is persuasive, the former the opposite. )"9 George Kennedy calls this passage "perhaps the earliest statement in criticism that the greatest art is to disguise art. "10 In De Inventione, Cicero noted that brilliance and vivacity of style "can give rise to a suspicion of preparation and excessive ingenuity. As a result of this most of the speech loses conviction and the speaker, authority. "11 Quintilian put the matter plainly: "if an orator does command a certain art . . . , its highest expression will be in the conceal- ment of its existence. "12
Rhetoric, it seems, must deny itself to succeed. Michael Cahn has called this rule "the very heart of rhetoric," right from its beginning. 13 The principle has become embedded in the tradition, a commonplace passed along and kept alive by writers who include Puttenham, La Rochefoucauld, Butler, Swift, Pope, Burke, Rousseau, and Wilde. The principle is modeled for the Renais- sance in Castiglione's concept of sprezzatura, glossed by Richard Lanham as a "rehearsed spontaneity" and described by Castiglione himself as a capacity ensuring that "art is hidden and whatever is said and done seems without effort or forethought. "14 Sprezzatura is celebrated in the English Renaissance from Herrick to Sidney to Shakespeare. 15 Another Renaissance figure who serves for us as the paragon of dissimulation is Machiavelli, who advises the prince that because it is sometimes necessary to do evil, it is also necessary to dissimulate, to construct what we might now call "plausible deniability," so that "everyone sees what you appear to be, [but] few know what you really are. "16 But the principle of rhetorical concealment is more than the everyday dissimulation of intentions: it is the conviction that the means by which intentions are concealed must also remain undetectable; in other words, we must be convinced that no dissimulation is going on; it is a dissimulation of means as much as of ends. Thus, if "all a rhetorician's rules / Teach nothing but to name his tools," it is best if the tools--and their names--remain under wraps when Sir Hudibras sallies forth.
According to Cahn, rhetoric is the only art with this tradition of self-denial, the one art that "has to live with the requirement of concealing its achievement
in order to attain recognition. "17 Indeed, the ancient arts that were often com- pared with rhetoric, such as medicine, cookery, flute-playing, navigation, and gymnastics, do not seem to have much to hide, and neither do such contem- porary arts as engineering or architecture. We can use and appreciate their products or results even if we happen know a great deal about how they are produced, what materials, ingredients, processes, and techniques go into their success. But other arts are different, and these are used by Plato in a series of complex comparisons and classifications that suggest rhetoric's affinity with arts such as cosmetics, seduction, enchantment, hunting, and military strat- egy. 18 Here the story is different, suggesting that Cahn may not be correct about rhetoric's unique need for concealment. Cosmetics, for example, part of Socrates' elaborate comparison of the sham arts and the true arts in the Gor- gias, would seem to require concealment. 19 Like theatrical illusion, the effect of the cosmetic art dissipates the more we know about its part in the creation of beauty. We admire the skill involved in exercising the art rather than the appearance of the wearer, the art itself rather than its results.
If dissimulation and concealment are indeed necessary for rhetorical success, we face a number of problems as we contemplate both the public work of rhetoric and the educational role of rhetoric. If rhetoric can be more effective, more useful, more powerful, if it remains concealed, what can it mean for rhetoric to go public? What can its "public work" be? Is there a self- defeating premise built into the educational project? Or an entailment of ever more widespread cynicism? If, through the sustained rhetorical education and public acceptance we seek, rhetoric is indeed revealed as a Gorgianic power available to everyone, will public discourse or our social conditions actually improve? The dilemma that intrigues me is epitomized in a New Yorker cartoon, where the public work of rhetoric is unconcealed by naming the tools.
In this essay, I spend some time exploring the principle of concealment in more detail, drawing primarily on the multiple ways that it is expressed in the classical tradition, because the ancients were astute observers of the work- ings of rhetorical power, particularly in the public realm. I examine these sources for what they can reveal about the justifications for and consequences of concealment. The sources give some clues to the conditions in which rhet- oric must work and thus the possibilities for its public role. And I close with some observations about what these conditions mean for the relationship be- tween rhetoric's public work and rhetoric's role in the education of citizens for that work.
The classical sources are suffused with observations and advice about the necessity for concealment. 20 They reveal a series of recurring themes that jus- tify the need to conceal the art of rhetoric. These themes seem to derive from two foundational assumptions that are fully naturalized in our understandings
Should We Name the Tools? 21
22 Carolyn R. Miller
? (C) The New Yorker Collection 2000. Alex Gregory from cartoonbank. com. All rights reserved
of how humans use language: an adversarial model of human relations and a mimetic model of language.
Human Relations Are Adversarial
1. The dominant and most frequent theme is one I call suspicion. This theme appears in the passage by Aristotle quoted earlier: artifice is not persuasive, because it makes people suspect "someone plotting against them. "21 We treat the intentions of others as plots against us in a zero-sum game: if you win, I lose. You are likely to be trying to cheat me out of something, to deceive me, so I must be suspicious. Athenian suspicion was embedded into a law against deceiving the democracy, a law justified in Demosthenes' statement to the assembly that "A man can do you no greater injustice than telling lies; for, where the political constitution is based on speeches/words, how can it be safely administered if the words/speeches are false? "22
Two examples from the advice about concealment suggest how pervasive the theme of suspicion is in the classical tradition:
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. 23
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. 24
2. The second theme, spontaneity, identifies the notion that statements we can trust are those that come easily and naturally; conversely, a premeditated statement, one that is obviously crafted and constructed beforehand, deserves our suspicion. For example, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium cautions about the use of certain figures involving word-play: "[such figures] are to be used very sparingly when we speak in an actual cause, because their invention seems impossible without labour and pains. "25 The principle of spontaneity presup- poses that dissimulation requires more preparation and effort than telling the truth--it requires precisely the effort of concealment. Spontaneity thus serves as a kind of guarantee that no concealment can have occurred and is thus generally understood as a sign of truth or credibility. Here, for example, is Longinus again: "For 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 emo- tion. "26
But note the "seems" in the quotation and the possibility of counterfeit emotion. Spontaneity itself can be an effect created with no less labor than highly figured speeches, as Cicero makes clear in this passage about the ora- tor Antonius: "His 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. "27
In On the Sophists, Alcidamas suggests that "the style of extemporaneous speakers" is most effective and can be imitated. Quintilian also concedes that spontaneity may be artificial: "Above all it is necessary to conceal the care expended upon it [artistic structure] so that our rhythms may seem to possess a spontaneous flow, not to have been the result of elaborate search or com- pulsion. "28
3. Closely related to spontaneity is the theme of sincerity. Spontaneity affects the trustworthiness of statements, and sincerity affects our trust in the speaker; in this way spontaneity produces sincerity (or, to be more precise, the impres- sion of spontaneity produces an impression of sincerity). 29 Here is Quintilian, for example: "Who will endure the orator who expresses his anger, his sorrow or his entreaties in neat antitheses, balanced cadences and exact correspon- dences? Too much care for our words under such circumstances weakens the
Should We Name the Tools? 23
24 Carolyn R. Miller
impression of emotional sincerity, and wherever the orator displays his art unveiled, the hearer says, 'The truth is not in him. '"30
Similarly, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium cautions that "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. "31
The sincere speaker says what he or she really believes, which should require no effort, and is more interested in the truth than in persuasive influ- ence. Such a speaker treats communicative relations as cooperative rather than adversarial, or perhaps as though they were cooperative rather than adver- sarial. But cooperation itself may be a disarming strategy, a distraction, a way of concealing adversarial intentions.
The themes of suspicion, spontaneity, and sincerity reinforce each other and together presuppose deeply adversarial communicative relationships, as illustrated in this formulation by Alcidamas: The truth is that speeches that have been laboriously worked out with elaborate diction (compositions more akin to poetry than prose) are deficient in spontaneity and truth, and, since they give the impression of a mechanical artificiality and labored insincerity, they inspire an audience with distrust and ill-will. 32
Adversarial relationships figure prominently in Plato's classification of the arts, mentioned earlier.
He classifies rhetoric with the combative, acquisitive, or conquering arts, such as boxing, wrestling, hunting, and military strat- egy. 33 The comparison of rhetoric to these arts is endemic to the entire clas- sical tradition. In such competitive endeavors, knowledge of the opponent's art makes it less effective, reducing surprise and enabling countermaneuvers. The hunter and the general both need to conceal the practice of their arts, because the acquisition they seek is--almost by definition--at the expense of others, who will resist. These arts are necessarily adversarial, and thus for them concealment plays an essential strategic role.
The adversarial spirit, and comparisons between verbal and physical con- test, permeate the rhetorical tradition. Indeed, the sophistic principle of the dissoi logoi, the Aristotelian admonition to argue both sides of the question, and Ciceronian argumentation "in utramque partem" all instantiate the adver- sarial spirit. Aristotle observes that "it would be strange if an inability to de- fend oneself by means of the body is shameful, while there is no shame in an inability to use speech. "34 Cicero asks, "What . . . is so indispensable as to have always within your grasp weapons wherewith you can defend yourself, or challenge the wicked man, or when provoked take your revenge? "35 And Quintilian claims, "This gift of arrangement is to oratory what generalship is to war. The skilled commander will know how to distribute his forces for bat- tle, what troops he should keep back to garrison forts or guard cities, to secure supplies, or guard communications, and what dispositions to make by land
and by sea. "36 In perhaps the earliest source, Gorgias made the comparison between persuasion and physical force prominent in his Encomium of Helen. The adversarial arts were taught and practiced in ancient Greece and Rome in a general culture of agonism in which the ground rule is that both sides cannot win. Such agonism is inherent in the forensic encounter, which was the paradigmatic rhetorical situation for much of ancient practice and teach- ing. Much deliberative rhetoric was also agonistic, with clearly defined ad- versaries advocating contrary policies. Recent scholarship has explored the way that this agonistic culture influenced rhetoric. Walter Ong's study of the "adversative" spirit in human thought and culture emphasizes the "highly agonistic" sources of rhetoric as a formal art for the world of public debate, and in her study of rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, Debra Hawhee notes the multiple ways that the language of athletics (boxing and chariot racing, in particular) became the language of sophistic rhetoric; she claims that an "athletic notion of agonism" informed early Greek rhetorical practice and pedagogy. 37 Noting that Gorgias's epitaph reportedly said that he "armed the soul for contests of excellence," Scott Consigny argues that we can best interpret Gorgias's slim corpus against the widespread agonism of Greek cul- ture. 38 John Poulakos claims that, for Plato, the word for orator (rhetor) and
the word for contestant (agonistes) are "virtual synonyms. "39
Roman rhetoric was also grounded in agonism. 40 The handbooks, for exam- ple, presuppose a hostile or resistant audience in their advice on the insinua- tio, or indirect introduction, which makes the concealment theme explicit and with it all our worst fears about rhetoric. Cicero's youthful De Inventione describes the insinuatio as "an address which by dissimulation and indirection unobtrusively steals into the mind of the auditor. "41 The insinuatio is to be used in a "difficult" case, in which the auditors are opposed, if not actually hostile, to the proposition to be defended. Cicero says that the audience can be "pacified" or made more "tractable" by strategies that substitute favorable topics for offensive ones, acknowledge the sources of offense and agree with them, work "imperceptibly" to win goodwill away from one's opponents, and "conceal" one's intention to defend the proposition that will offend. 42 The contemporaneous Rhetorica Ad Herennium provides similar advice, conclud- ing with the observation that the insinuatio seeks to make the audience recep- tive "covertly, through dissimulation" (occulte, per dissimulationem). 43 If we see through these strategies, we immediately suspect that we are being deceived. The assumption of adversarial relations is not merely a vestige of some ear- lier time but an important force in contemporary culture. Kenneth Burke, of course, understood well the centrality of adversarial relations in human life, characterizing rhetoric as "par excellence the region of the Scramble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, malice and the lie, cloaked malice and the subsidized lie. "44 Lakoff and Johnson have shown how deeply the "argument is war" metaphor is embedded in everyday language. 45 Others suggest that
Should We Name the Tools? 25
26 Carolyn R. Miller
contemporary culture has become too aggressive and polarized. Deborah Tannen, for example, has claimed in The Argument Culture that an "adversar- ial frame of mind" pervades the media, politics, law, and education: "Nearly everything is framed as a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern. "46 She finds these adversarial relations to be at least partly re- sponsible for our increasing alienation and loss of community and ultimately to be "damaging to the human spirit. "47 In one of his last books, Wayne Booth described the adversarial version of rhetoric as "win-rhetoric" and, like Tannen, decried its widespread use in politics and the media. He urged us to distinguish between honorable and dishonorable kinds, based on the justice of the cause. Win-rhetoric using deceptive strategies in a cause that the speaker knows to be unjust is what Booth calls "rhetrickery," and he, like Tannen, urges on us a less adversarial approach to communication, which he calls "listening-rhetoric. "48 Our distaste for agonism we owe not so much to the ancients as to our more immediate predecessors, Enlightenment political the- orists, who recoiled from the bloody religious wars and divisive nation build- ing of the early modern period with a campaign against rhetoric, as both Stephen Toulmin and Bryan Garsten have shown. 49
Under the assumption of adversarial relations, rhetoric's problem is plain. Like the general, the orator/advocate must win; for both, the cause must prevail, and for both, the cause justifies any strategic means. For rhetoric, expedience becomes the overriding virtue and dissimulation one of the most effective stratagems in the arsenal. Odysseus models these dubious virtues for the Greeks: he is crafty, flexible, duplicitous; in Sophocles' Philoctetes he proclaims, "What I seek in everything is to win. "50 He is, as James Kastely has argued, the "embodiment of rhetoric. "51 At times, notes Don Herzog in his study of cunning, Odysseus seems ingenious and admirable and at times devious and reprehensible. 52 Like rhetoric.
Language Is (or Should Be) Mimetic
The belief that suspicion on our part, and spontaneity and sincerity on the part of our interlocutors, can protect us against deceptive concealment motivated by adversarial relations rests upon another assumption: that language can be mimetic. If the speaker says what he or she sincerely believes, spontaneously, without premeditation or artifice, then words will reveal the truth unproblem- atically. The principle of mimesis presupposes that language can (and should) represent nature, or belief, directly, that words and things can (and should) cor- respond. To the Greek way of thinking, truth itself is a revealing (a + le^theia: un-concealment) that removes obscurity or deception. Among the Romans, a fragment from Cato the Elder is often quoted to similar effect: "rem tene, verba sequentur" (Fr. 15; grasp the subject, the words will follow). George Campbell maintained that the "most essential" quality of oratory is "perspicuity," which he defined as "transparency, such as may be ascribed to air, glass, water, or any
other medium through which material objects are viewed. "53 Rhetorical crit- ics in much of the twentieth century maintained what Gaonkar has referred to as the "transparency thesis," the assumption that oratory is uninterest- ingly determined by its content, that it is a "mirror" of its object. 54
When words and things correspond, no rhetoric need be involved; facts, beliefs, and intentions are revealed by the language itself, by a natural mimetic correspondence between language and the world, under a "degree zero of rhetoric. "55 Philosophers have long hoped for such a language: the correspon- dence theory of truth, in which statements and facts can be matched up together, has its roots in Plato and Aristotle but extends to Bertrand Russell and others in the early twentieth century who sought a theory-neutral obser- vation language. 56 Francis Bacon had advocated purifying the language of the "marketplace" in favor of terms that are close to observation; Thomas Sprat urged scientists to "return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words"; and scientists like Linnaeus, Lavoisier, and Whewell spent no little effort attempt- ing to control the vocabulary of science. 57 But ever since Gorgias argued that we cannot put the truth into words, that language is in essence deceptive because words and things are incommensurable, these efforts have been more hopeful than successful. 58
The mimetic theory persists, however, and the adversarial model helps ex- plain its persistence. Because you can use language to lie (that is, to conceal what you believe to be the case or what you believe to be your intentions with respect to making the case to someone), then in order to be believed, you need to draw attention away from the fact that you are using language. One of the ways we do that is to urge on others (and ourselves) the principle of mimesis: suspicion of the possible lie is reduced if language is believed to be determined by whatever is the case, not by the interventions of the speaker. Thus when language is understood to be mimetic, spontaneity and sincerity serve to counteract suspicion. We might conclude, then, that an adversarial model of social relations requires--or at least wants very badly--a mimetic theory of language. A mimetic theory of language allows for the possibility that truth can be told, that we can hold our adversaries to account for doing so, and that we can get closer to the possibly concealed truth by unconceal- ing our adversary's rhetorical strategies. It is our defense against adversity.
So, although mimesis does not work as a philosophy of language, it works as a strategy. 59 Perversely, it leads directly to the canonical advice about the necessity for concealment, but with a couple of additional twists. First, it em- phasizes not just that concealment is necessary but that the fact of conceal- ment must also be concealed. Aristotle notes that "something seems true when the speaker does not conceal what he is doing. "60 So if, in fact, you are concealing something about your intentions, you must conceal the fact that you are doing so. This is a foundational condition of rhetoric. If you want to
Should We Name the Tools? 27
28 Carolyn R. Miller
be believed, to "seem true," you must not conceal what you are doing. Or rather you must appear not to conceal; you must conceal your strategies of con- cealment. This is from Longinus: "This figure [inversion] consists in arrang- ing words and thoughts out of the natural sequence, and bears, so to speak, the genuine stamp of vehement emotion. 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. "61
And here is Dionysius discussing Lysias's sentence structure: "The distinc- tive nature of its melodious composition seems, as it were, not to be con- trived 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. "62
What is sought is not mimesis but rather the appearance of mimesis. Demosthenes was castigated by Aeschines for this very strategy: "Other de- ceivers, when they are lying, try to speak in vague and ambiguous terms . . . ; but Demosthenes, when he is cheating you, first adds an oath to his lie, call- ing down destruction on himself; and secondly, predicting an event that he knows will never happen, he dares to tell the date of it; and 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. "63
The second twist is that in addition to the covert fact of concealment, there is also an overt rhetoric of no-rhetoric. 64 The overt rhetoric assures you that there is nothing to conceal. Shakespeare knew that this was one of the oldest strategies in the book and gave us a paradigmatic statement in Mark Antony's speech over Caesar's body:
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. 65
Socrates' opening in Plato's Apology (quoted in the epigraph) is another locus classicus, perhaps the original attempt to disarm listeners by denying rhetoric. As Plutarch cautions, "plain frankness" is to be as much suspected as obvious flattery. 66 Herzog's used-car salesman introduces himself by saying,
"I pride myself on being a straight shooter. "67 The charter document of the scientific plain style, Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London, from 1665, reports the Royal Society's preference for "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: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars. "68 To invoke the principle of suspicion, the centuries-long occlusion of rhetoric by Enlightenment thought might be seen as a large-scale conceal- ment of rhetoric, a concealment that has aided and abetted the cultural suc- cess of science. The rhetoric of plainness can be understood as the most deeply concealed rhetoric of all. 69
If, as we saw, the assumption that language is mimetic is sustained by the assumption of adversarial relations, what is the status of the latter assump- tion? Lanham suggests that contest and play, the "engines" of rhetoric, are central human motives, part of our "evolutionary heritage as primates. "70 Burke also sees "division" as our fundamental existential condition: we are "apart from one another," and if we were not "there would be no need for" rhetoric to proclaim unity. 71 Be this ontology as it may, we can also see that this assumption is sustained by the failure of language to be mimetic. Since words do not necessarily correspond to things or facts in any direct way-- people can use language to lie, or they can fail to use it effectively, or lan- guage itself may be inadequate--how can we know what to believe? Do we trust, or do we doubt? If the assumption that language can be mimetic is our defense against adversarial relations, the assumption that human relations are adversarial is our defense against the inevitable mimetic failures--the deceptions--of language.
So we can understand the denial of rhetoric, its need for concealment, as the consequence of these two enduring conditions and their interaction. The adversarial relationships and the mystifications of language in which we are entangled make concealment a native dimension of our communication practices--as Herzog puts it, cunning "sprawls across social life. " He points out that cunning is necessary not only because some people are dishonest rogues, and not only because we cannot determine reliably which people they are, but also because in some cases "the logic of the social situation" embeds cunning into it. When knowledge is unevenly distributed, when in- terests conflict, as they so often do in greater or smaller ways, cunning, he says, is thrust upon us. 72 In some cases the structure of the situation sets us against each other, as adversaries: but can we reliably know which cases these are? In some cases (at least) language radically fails our meanings: again, how can we know which cases these are?
Perhaps the contest will always be between the skill of the rhetor in con- cealing and the skill of the critic or the immanent suspicion of the audience
Should We Name the Tools? 29
30 Carolyn R. Miller
? (C) The New Yorker Collection 2000. Peter Steiner from cartoonbank. com. All rights reserved
in unconcealing. The audience must, it seems, remain the adversary of the rhetor, and vice-versa. As Herzog notes, "the cunning will [always] learn to mimic the virtuous" (this is the dilemma that Aeschines bemoans), and the virtuous are left with no reliable way to signal their honesty and good inten- tions and may as well join the ranks of the cunning. 73 Another New Yorker car- toon represents this hall of mirrors.
For both audience and candidate, whatever else integrity is, it is also an appearance. So recursive and reciprocal are our social relations that the pos- sibility for regress is endless. Art must be concealed, and the concealment must be concealed, and likewise that concealment, and so on. We might con- clude that despair is the only recourse--or cynicism.
And this brings us to the problem at hand. What can rhetoric's public role be under these conditions? What can its educational project be? What hap- pens if we teach students to name--and master--the tools? Can rhetoric be useful or powerful if it is revealed--both as a practice and as a discipline? Will public discourse, neighborhoods, civil society, or individual lives fare better
with a revealed or a concealed art of rhetoric? Under endemic conditions of suspicion, can rhetoric help build social trust, the essential adhesive of social relations? Should rhetoric go into the streets in disguise? Perhaps this has already happened--we have concealed rhetoric as composition, as cultural studies, as literature, as literacy, as professional communication. The rhetori- cal arts that have gone public, like advertising, public relations, and political consulting, are often regarded with suspicion, if not disdain, precisely for their emphasis on expedience--on winning. There is an irony here: rhetoric as the unconcealed art of public discourse, as the means for democratic delibera- tion, has been less successful both academically and culturally than these com- mercial arts. As taught in departments of speech and speech communication in the twentieth century, in the general college curriculum in much of the nineteenth century, and sometimes in English composition programs, rheto- ric was indeed the art of public discourse (or public address, as it was often called). But this effort has not led to either academic status or public respect for the discipline.
Rhetoric does have a long history, as Robert Hariman has pointed out, of marginality, of ranking below a variety of other discourses in status compari- sons, notably with philosophy and dialectic and often with poetics. But the margin, as Hariman notes, is essential to the existence of the center; the mar- gin of a society or a psyche "contains what one is but should not be. "74 He also points out that the margin is a "zone of power"--a zone of suppressed potencies. 75 So marginality may be a preferred--or even a necessary--condition for rhetoric, and rhetoric's ability to conceal itself allows it to operate from the margin, to appear natural, centralized, to take form as the real and not the artful, the natural and not the constructed. The margin is also the zone of what cannot be controlled, of the undisciplined, the unsystematizable-- and we know that as an art of the kairos, rhetoric fits this description as well. But disciplines are ostensibly devoted to unconcealment, to elaboration, to systematization, and they do not survive on the margins--they must promote their own centrality in order to survive. Thus we have rhetoric's "globaliza- tion project," as Gaonkar calls it,76 and thus we have rhetoric's dual identity as the queen of the sciences and the harlot of the arts.
Booth's solution to "reducing rhetorical warfare" and improving the state of our public life is in large part an educational one. We need to teach citi- zens to listen, to find common ground, to seek good reasons for changing our minds, and to cooperate in progressing beyond our differences, as well as to respond critically to the "rhetrickery" that surrounds us. 77 This solution re- quires the unconcealment of rhetoric, the naming of the tools. Indeed, rhetori- cal education, rhetorica docens in the scholastic tradition, makes visible our rhetorical practice, rhetorica utens, by naming, analysis, imitation. The topics, the genres, the staseis, the parts of the oration, the causes of the emotions, the fallacies, the schemes and tropes--if learning these (or any other rhetorical
Should We Name the Tools? 31
32 Carolyn R. Miller
canon) is beneficial, this knowledge will make for citizens who can both lis- ten critically and speak and write effectively. But is there not a contradiction here? Can what is revealed in the classroom remain concealed in the public forum? Rhetorica docens must name the tools, rhetorica utens must conceal them. If citizens become more critical judges of rhetorical practice, they should also become more cunning practitioners themselves. Yet the strategies of the cunning practitioner will increasingly be revealed by the increasing critical acuity of the citizen-audience. We seem to have another endless regress, a continual escalation of cunning concealment and critical unmasking. Or per- haps an endless circle around which rhetorica utens and rhetorica docens chase each other.
As I write this, we are in the 2008 presidential election campaign, in which each major candidate represents a position under discussion here: one can- didate promotes his campaign as the "straight talk express," and the other candidate's acknowledged eloquence puts him under suspicion. An election draws public attention to the powers of rhetoric. The editorial pages, politi- cal cartoons, television pundits, talk shows, YouTube offerings, and late-night comedians have been analyzing and satirizing the rhetorical efforts of both candidates, making visible the strategies and styles of their campaigns, alert- ing us to the ways we are being manipulated, and in some cases naming the rhetorical tools explicitly. But as the scholarship makes abundantly clear, the ancient Athenians were in this same place before us. Jon Hesk characterizes Athenian oratory as "crucially concerned with its own modes and techniques of performance in general and deceptive performance in particular. "78 He shows that the extant speeches employ a number of commonplaces of uncon- cealment, which unmask the strategies of an opponent and occasionally, in re- sponse, justify one's own strategies. 79 Further, as Johan Schloemann suggests, Athenian audiences had a conscious appreciation of the strategies and styles of rhetorical performances, an appreciation opposed to their simultaneous distrust of rhetorical ability: they sustained a dynamic ambivalence about rhetoric in which they were both eager to be persuaded and at the same time suspicious of persuasion. 80
Schloemann goes so far as to propose that the Athenians engaged in "two different modes of reception": an "entertainment mode" that, we might say, suspends disbelief, and a "critical mode" that mobilizes disbelief. 81 The dy- namic ambivalence created by these two modes echoes Lanham's notion of the "bi-stable oscillation" between "looking through" and "looking at" a rhe- torical performance. 82 In the entertainment mode, when we "look through" a text the tools and strategies remain concealed and thus can bewitch (or drug or seduce or deceive) us. In the critical mode, when we "look at" the text we unconceal its machinery and thus immunize ourselves to its effects. Schloe- mann insists that the two modes do not represent two segments of the Athen- ian audience but rather two capabilities of the same audience, and Lanham
claims (by analogy with Gestalt psychology's figure/ground dualism) that we oscillate between these two modes of interpretation but cannot engage them simultaneously. When we suspend our disbelief, submitting to the pleasures of rhetorical engagement, we favor the assumption that language is mimetic, and when we mobilize disbelief, maintaining critical distance, we favor the assumption of adversarial relations. The mutually reinforcing nature of these two assumptions necessitates and help sustains the "ambivalence" about which Schloemann speaks and the "bi-stable oscillation" that Lanham describes. If we favor naive mimesis too strongly, we end in despair, and if we favor the adversarial or critical mode too strongly, we end in permanently disengaged cynicism. Realistically, critical unconcealment can be illuminating about the particular case but does not inoculate us permanently against the next mes- merizing speaker or shrewd marketing campaign.
I do not mean here to dismiss rhetoric as a sham art or to reject it in favor of some other, better description of our communicative dilemmas. I mean, rather, to honor the dangers and powers of rhetoric, which the ancients well understood and which our enthusiasm about the revival of rhetoric may sometimes lead us to forget. We cannot, as Garsten says, avoid the "twin dan- gers" of pandering and manipulation that arise from the nature of rhetoric itself. 83 Some theorists have encouraged us to reconceive rhetoric as a coop- erative rather than an adversarial art, Booth prominent among them. At the same time, he confesses his own failures and inabilities in attempting to prac- tice the cooperative listening-rhetoric he preaches. Booth, Burke, Garsten, and Herzog all conclude that practical affairs, the public realm of rhetorica utens, must be dealt with, struggled with, on a case-by-case basis, and that cunning concealment is necessary, dangerous, and morally troubling. I mean as well to urge a realistic attenuation of our hopes for what it is that rhetoric can achieve in public, both in terms of its status as a discipline and in terms of its capabilities to promote the public good. Under endemic conditions of suspi- cion, we need a rhetoric that helps build social trust. But if the assumptions of agonism and mimesis indeed prevail, such a project cannot be a global or a programmatic one: it must be risked one situation at a time.
Notes
I am indebted to Judith Ferster for helpful discussion about the relevance of current polit- ical discourse, to Richard Graff for both primary and secondary sources, and to the mem- bers of a summer writing group at North Carolina State for suggestions on a late draft.
1. Plato, Collected Dialogues, 17a-b.