Crumbs of memory from a conference of the Rhetoric Society of America
by Chris Giofreda
The Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) has concluded its biannual meeting. As rhetoricians left the Baltimore waterfront, they took with them a vision of their field. At least in the United States, the field of rhetoric will draw from this tableau in the years to come.
In his presentation at the conference, Peter Simonson—of the University of Colorado at Boulder—called the situation of the field ‘a new naturalism’. His survey of the research had revealed to him that contemporary rhetoricians are anti-dualist, interdisciplinary, and ontological; ecological rather than categorical or anthropocentric. In other words, contemporary research in rhetoric prefers to peer into larger interrelationships and networks rather than human-centred monolithic themes. But Simonson’s field map also indicates flux.
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Researchers are rethinking where the constitutive power of rhetoric really lies: Language itself no longer seem to tell the whole story of rhetoric or its study. That raises the following question: What does it mean when a group of scholars who think in language choose not to see it as their discipline’s summum bonum—or as its ultimate object of study as well as guiding principle? By analogy, imagine that a conference of legal scholars began to question stare decisis itself. You might ask what radical displacement and discomfort had been brewing in them and for how long. Thomas Kuhn let us know in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that paradigmatic change requires exhaustion of current behaviours. Let’s look at some panelists who are involved in strands of the new naturalism to see what methods they are seeing in their rearview mirror.
‘RSA 2022: the charge for change’ was graced, among other intellectual dignitaries, by Dr. Eileen Schell—the celebrated academic, author, activist, and co-editor of the book Moving a Mountain: Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education (2001). In the background of her photograph above is Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which was close to the conference venue.
A panel that included me as a presenter attempted to show what happens to Plato’s conceptual framework when one leaves behind his better-known texts such as Gorgias and Phaedrus. Titled ‘Towards an epistemology of change: Plato and the rhetoricity of knowledge’, this panel’s topics included writing as a tool for political harmony; embedding critique into dialectic praxis; shaping dialectic through rhetoric and hospitality; and rhetoric’s relationship to mythmaking. Broadly construed, our panel’s work revealed a Plato whose relationship with writing and dialectic was ecological, i.e., in his writings, nomos and phusis (or law and nature—to put it crudely) push each other to extinction: The statesman weaves the DNA of his people together Dr. Moreau-like; the Eleatic Stranger, who in later dialogues seems to alternately stand in for Socrates, displace him, and act as his evolutionary heir apparent, is thought to be divine or not-of-man. Is Socrates being selected out for the error of elenchus and his occasional big lie?
And then there was ‘Rhetoric at the end of the world’, a panel whose members reveled in their defeat and seemed ill-at-ease in the new naturalism. The sources of malaise ranged from the ever-present threat of wildfires in Oregon, to visions of life after capitalism, to dialectics of change as such (the list goes on). But gloom was the real theme. One presenter made an interesting move where she suggested that even if an event happened at the end(s) of the world wherein postcolonial politics were triumphant, the hegemonic struggles of the past century would continue unabated. Only the faces would change. If new forms of political organization were not considered self-evidently superior to the old, what, then, did the panelists want?
Imagining a way forward involved metanoia: a spiritual conversion seen in the Gospels. But conversion of whom by whom? Is it conversion of one’s opponents only? And if so, then by whose grace? The panel didn’t say. What does spiritual conversion mean when it is not anchored to social change? But then again, metanoia—a sort of falling flat before the Lord—occurs after ordinary possibilities are exhausted, which is in line with the trends of the new naturalism after all.
After the presentation I approached the speaker who talked about the 2021 Oregon wildfires. A cockamamie scheme occurred to me: We might re-imagine the fires as a public health issue since they have a primary place in modern American thought. The panelist greeted my re-categorization with the ennui you’d expect. He told me curtly that he once saw a logger put out his cigarette and throw it into some brush. The terms of the ‘debate’ were that debate was over. We had moved into the nihilistic territory beyond Smokey the Bear and the Forest Service. Chastened, I still went away thinking that the panelist should have told the logger not to throw a cigarette into the chaparral.
On what was a very lively last day I attended a talk about the meaning of sophrosyne—an ancient Greek concept relating to an ideal human property and the subject of Plato’s Charmides. At that talk, the point was made that sophrosyne cannot be defined—‘prudence’ is close but not quite correct—but only claimed by virtue of one’s admission not to have it. The negation of virtue appears to secure sophrosyne.
This always-not-having paves the way for rhetoricians to think beyond conventional definitions and toward longer set-pieces that keep the object within its center. In other words, they define connections to the object in question. I say that this center is ontological in character because it attempts to forestall a condition in which sophrosyne is a tool for man instead of a means through which something external measures him. Sophrosyne cannot be had and is naturalistic to the hilt. It can even act as a symbol of an age that is coming to grips with its own anthropocentrism.
Chris Giofreda, an investor, is a doctoral researcher with English Department, Old Dominion University, Virginia. If you wish to contact him, please let us know here.