Philosophy & Rhetoric

The publication two decades ago of a collection of essays on the "rhetorical turn" in the natural and social sciences consolidated what had already become a peculiar academic ritual, wherein discipline after discipline discovered, or found itself confronted by, the rhetorical foundations of its own knowledge claims (Simons 1990). The discovery should not have been as shocking as it was, since a robust if often dormant or suppressed tradition dating back to the Sophists had insisted, frequently against fashion, that all truth is the product of rhetorical operations. Nonetheless, the book's editor, Herbert Simons, and most of its contributors eagerly welcomed this belated but auspicious acknowledgment of rhetoric's primacy by its erstwhile rivals. Yet one dissenter, Dilip Gaonkar, expressed skepticism about the enthusiasm with which rhetoricians greeted the rhetorical turn (1990). For Gaonkar, the longing to be taken seriously by its adversaries betokened an anxiety that has plagued rhetoric since its birth as a vocation, the worry that rhetoric had no object, method, or content properly its own. Indeed, the price of this recognition, ironically, would be the confirmation that this anxiety [End Page 194] had been well-founded all along, since rhetoric in fact has no substance and thus cannot serve as the metadisciplinary heuristic framework for which the rhetorical turn was groping.

Gaonkar ventured the hypothesis that substantive disciplines tend to "discover" rhetoric at moments of internal crisis that raise questions about the solidity of their own conceptual foundations, so that rhetorical turns are typically transitory and destined to be repressed when the occasioning crisis passes. The advent of late modernity, however, appears to entail a "crisis" that extends far beyond academic inquiry. It is a commonplace that what might grandiosely be called "Western" (or even "global") culture seems afflicted by anxiety concerning the impossibility of grounding social life in anything more reliable than rhetorical processes. Situated within this context, the return of rhetoric as a metadiscourse could be regarded as an epochal transformation, a shift from the suffocating sterility and violence of Enlightenment rationality to "rhetorical culture" (Farrell 1993). Such a diagnosis, however, implies that some cultures or epochs are more (or less) rhetorical than others, a possibility at odds with rhetoric's claim to universal applicability. What, in other words, does it mean to speak of culture as rhetorical, and how must rhetoric be conceived to meet the diverging challenges of explaining culture "as such" and accounting for the variability of cultures in terms of their "rhetoricality"?

This is a fundamental dilemma implicit within the International Rhetoric Culture Project, a self-consciously multidisciplinary effort to deploy rhetoric as the paradigmatic heuristic for cross-cultural analysis. Designated by the shorthand "Rhetoric Culture," the project is rooted in the long-standing interest of its founders, anthropologists Stephen Tyler and Ivo Strecker, in the rhetorical aspects of cultural practices. While in Tyler's case, this interest dates back more than three decades, the project as such began with a conference workshop in 1998. Since then, a growing group of participants has been assembled; a series of Rhetoric Culture conferences has been held in Mainz, Germany; a website has been established; and a series of books has been planned under the rubric Studies in Rhetoric + Culture. The first volume in the series, the collection of fourteen essays titled Culture + Rhetoric edited by Strecker and Tyler under review here, came out in 2009. Contributors to the collection include eight anthropologists, four rhetoricians, a philosopher, a sociologist, and an independent literary scholar. The volume is divided into two parts, "The Chiasm of Rhetoric and Culture" and "Figuration—the Persuasive Power of Deeds and Tropes," each of which contains seven essays. [End Page 195]

It may seem that Rhetoric Culture is yet another instance or extension of the rhetorical turn, most notably in anthropology. However, Tyler and Strecker distinguish their approach from the earlier turn to rhetoric spearheaded by James Clifford and George Marcus, who, in Writing Culture (1986), focused on the rhetoric of ethnographic method. By contrast...