Abstract

The history of rhetoric has been influenced essentially by the versions of rhetoric offered by Plato and Aristotle, both of which can be called logocentric. Subsequent rhetorical theory and practice has been based, to a large extent, upon Platonic and Aristotelian rhetorics. In the tradition of these rhetorics, the dominant impulse in the history of philosophy and rhetoric has been to invest faith in language unquestioningly. The hegemony of the logocentric conception of rhetoric has threatened to obscure another rhetorical tradition, one that predated the dominant paradigm. Nevertheless, we see manifestations of this earlier tradition cropping up throughout the history of discourse; indeed, it seems that for various intellectual climates a rhetoric of stability is not only inadequate but impossible. Certain historical moments precipitate a need for a rhetoric of becoming, a rhetoric that acknowledges the transitory nature of the present and the inchoate nature of present knowledge. It is exactly such a rhetoric that the fifth-century sophists practiced. An analysis of the fragments left by the sophists, as well as their legacy as recorded by other classical writers, offers us a glimpse of a different kind of rhetoric, one that may well be better suited for a postmodern, multicultural world than the prevailing rhetorics. Sophistic rhetoric is both born out of difference and obsessed with difference; it celebrates its own dislocations while at the same time it attempts to locate itself within the mainstream. A close examination of sophistic rhetoric as it was theorized and practiced in the fifth century BCE reveals its similarities with many currents of poststructuralist thought. Certainly it has been said by others before that poststructuralism is yet another form of Greek skepticism. Often, those who call attention to the similarities between the sophists and the poststructuralists do so to use the already discredited reputation of the former to comment upon the latter . Yet this denunciation of sophistic rhetoric is too often the result of a failure to comprehend its affirmative nature. The sophists move beyond the paralysis of skepticism to affirm the responsibilities and potentialities of citizenship, a concept that is fully elaborated in the present study. The poststructuralist version of the sophists' response to skepticism is what Derrida calls ecriture, writing. Deconstruction, claims Derrida, is "essentially affirmative." If terms like "essential" and "affirmative" seem strange coming from Derrida, it is only because deconstruction, especially in America, has been stripped of its dynamic potential and transmogrified into an impotent academic fetish. Sophistic rhetoric, unlike poststructuralist theory, was a practical rhetoric; that is, there was no gap between theory and practice for the sophists. The similarities between poststructuralism and sophistic rhetoric provoke us to examine the pedagogical implications of the former. The insights of sophistic and poststructuralist modes of thought hold the promise of transforming the way students think about writing and about their responsibility as writers, and such a transformation clearly has implications for their quality of life, as well as for our own