Philosophy & Rhetoric

Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 91-95

From:
A Symposium on Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture

Jeffrey Walker

For who does not know, except them, that the art of using letters is fixed and unchanging, so that we always use the same letters for the same purposes, but in the art of discourse the case is entirely the reverse?

—Isocrates, Against the Sophists

The essays composing this issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric are based on papers that originally were presented at a symposium on "Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture," sponsored by the Emory University Center for Teaching and Curriculum, Department of English, and Hightower Fund, in March 2001. The ostensible purpose of the symposium was to consider the double nature and status of rhetoric: on one hand, a hermeneutic/theoretical discipline with applications across the humanities (in the analysis of texts, events, culture, argumentative practices, ideologies, and so forth); and, on the other hand, a practical "art of discourse," a techne, whose central or distinctive application is the training of skilled writers and speakers. The former tends to be emphasized in contemporary rhetorical studies, while the latter is the most familiar (though not necessarily essential) characteristic of "classical" or ancient rhetoric. Likewise, we can connect these two orientations, respectively, with rhetorical cultural studies and with the teaching of writing, speaking, and communication in general. While the natural assumption is that these two orientations are mutually supporting, that is not always or necessarily the case. One can argue that the first pulls in the direction of "philosophy" (however that may be defined), while the second pulls in the direction of sheer technique—and at one time or another, each has been [End Page 91] open to criticism for its lack of attention to the other: philosophers are ineffective rhetoricians, and cannot intervene in the public sphere; orators are superficial thinkers, and practice an irresponsible, demagogic art of manipulation and domination. This tension goes all the way back to the first critiques of the sophists, and plays out through the entire history of rhetoric. The symposium's speakers, then, were asked to reflect, in any way that seemed suitable to them, on either or both aspects of rhetoric's double nature, and/or the relationships between them.

A symposium, inevitably, as a rhetorical event, always takes its own somewhat unpredictable trajectory, as papers are produced and presented, and as the ensuing discussion unfolds. And the four essays presented here—Steven Mailloux on Frederick Douglass and the nineteenth-century American debate over slavery; Susan Wells on "double consciousness" in S. Weir Mitchell's account of the case of Mary Reynolds and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; James L. Kastely on the discontinuity between the "philosophical" and "technical" halves of Plato's Phaedrus;and Richard Doyle on the strange intersection between the emergence of LSD and the evolution of biotechnological understandings of DNA—are all revisions and expansions of the original presentations, reflecting the contingencies of their invention and reinvention. Nevertheless, the original motives of the symposium are still in evidence.

As different as these essays are, it can be said that one or two underlying themes run through them, and provide a reply to the original topic proposed for the symposium. Perhaps the keynote is what Mailloux describes as "rhetorical paths of thought": that is, the "migration" and "evolution" of topoi, figures, lines of arguments, bits of narratives, and rhetorical traditions themselves (or fragments of them?) "from one community to another . . . [and] from one cultural moment to the next," as Frederick Douglass takes in the rhetorical traditions, practices, tropes and arguments exemplified in the Columbian Orator, as well as Aristotle's arguments on slavery, and as they become enabling parts of his own rhetorical repertoire in the debate on abolition. In Wells's essay, this appears as the "refunctioning" or reworking of topoi, as the notion of "double consciousness" is adapted as part of a "new logic of scientific authority" in Mitchell's account of "split personality," and also as a way of understanding and performing public discourse and identity in...