The Rhetoric Culture Project

Stephen Tyler and Ivo Strecker

The Rhetoric Culture1 project arises from a fundamental chiasmus that leads us to explore the ways in which rhetoric structures culture and culture structures rhetoric. It calls for a program of research whose basic topics are the interrelationships between cultural forms of practice, passion, and reason; and it seeks to understand the culturally generated orders of discourse — and their technologies of production.

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Precursors of Rhetoric Culture Theory

Christian Meyer

Rhetoric Culture theory has its roots in a long history, and in what follows I present some of the ideas that scholars — mainly rhetoricians, but also some philosophers — have developed over the centuries in order to grasp the difficult and complex relationship between rhetoric, culture, and humanity. Throughout, I have given priority to the voices of the precursors of Rhetoric Culture theory and have kept my own interpretation and comments to a minimum. At the end, I recall the work of scholars who were among the first to empirically study the constitutive role of rhetoric in non-European cultures.

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Homo Rhetoricus

Peter L. Oesterreich

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a "renaissance of rhetoric" (cf. Plett 1994), or "rhetorical turn" (Simons, ed. 1990), that has affected not only literary studies but also law, theology, aesthetics, philosophy, economics, politics, and even the natural sciences. The idea that cultures are rhetorically constituted is, of course, not new, and there have been various earlier attempts to address the subject — for example, Plato, Nietzsche, Burke, Heidegger, Gadamer, and others. But I think that there still is much to gain by rethinking this time-honored topic, and in this paper I will explore the possibility of a more comprehensive rhetorical theory of culture that characterizes our species as homo rhetoricus.

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Listening Culture

Daniel M. Gross

Cultural history is a kind of anthropology of the past insofar as it shares a rhetoric of distance. As competent researchers of those others with whom we are ultimately consubstantial, we first must carve out our field of study aesthetically, rendering certain subsets suitable representatives of the whole by way of synecdoche — showing, for instance, how detailed analysis of obscure seventeenth-century British texts on the art of listening to sermons will tell us something crucial about a broader field invoked in a title "Listening Culture," and hence something crucial about ourselves..

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Practice of Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Practice

Vincenzo Cannada Bartoli

The present essay grows out of this question: What is it that makes the chiasmus "practice of rhetoric, rhetoric of practice" at first so convincing but then, on second thought, so agonizingly difficult to understand? To answer, we need to reconsider the intersection of rhetoric and practice. Among the many authors dealing with this subject, Farrell (1999) has examined rhetoric in terms of practice, and practice in terms of rhetoric, and his questions are very close to those I pose below. However, we differ in our basic interests — philosophy for him, ethnography for me — and while Farrell examines the political aspects of rhetoric and phronesis in an intellectual environment influenced by Gadamer, Arendt, and Toulmin, I explore the relevance of rhetoric for a study of practice (and implicitly also for culture) in the intellectual milieu of social studies where Gadamer dialogues with Bourdieu, Foucault, and De Certeau.

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Chiastic Thought and Culture

A Reading of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Boris Wiseman

This chapter entertains a special relationship with the Rhetoric Culture project as a whole in as much as the dynamic at the heart of this project is itself chiastic. One of the characteristics of Rhetoric Culture theory is the reversibility of its "critical moments" (see the introduction to this volume). In as much as all social and cultural practices are linguistically mediated, they are at least in part tributary to rhetoric. One may therefore turn to rhetoric to make sense of these practices and shed light on the dynamics that underpin them. The need to interrelate anthropology and rhetoric arises, in this respect, out of the imbrication of linguistic and social practices, rhetoric and praxis. Rhetoric, construed as an art (technê) of persuasion, is in essence a form of agency theory.

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When Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair

Lessons From Macbeth

Anthony Paul

Shakespeare's interest in the ways that rhetorical discourse and culture interact is expressed in his countless references to the similarity between living and acting, and in his fascination with the figures of the actor, the hypocrite, and the king, the man most conspicuously called upon to perform a part in the drama of life. The comparison of the world with the stage is of course an ancient one, and one that runs through all of English Renaissance drama from the mid-sixteenth century to 1642, the year the theaters were closed down, not to reopen until 1660. But it is a trope that we associate above all with Shakespeare, and with good reason.

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Rhetoric, Truth, and the Work of Trope

Alan Rumsey

The main body of this chapter will consist of three parts, the second of which is an antidote to the first, and the third of which explains why. In the first part I will play the part of the gadfly, expressing certain reservations I have about the Rhetoric Culture project. I am in full agreement with what I take to be one of the project's main aims: to overcome the limits of previous understandings of discourse that give pride of place to its truth-functional aspects and devalue others as mere rhetoric. But, for reasons I will argue in the first part of the chapter, I think it would be counterproductive to try to address this problem by simply reversing the terms of the opposition and calling for a revaluation of the rhetorical over the truth-functional.

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Figuration — a Common Ground of Rhetoric and Anthropology

Philippe-Joseph Salazar

To conclude, let me stress that rhetoric's enterprise, even when it is improperly apprehended by outsiders in terms of its inner workings, is oft en correctly appraised by them in terms of its general drift . Rhetoric does not seem to concern itself with local cultures. Its purview is general inasmuch as it carries within itself a general understanding of a unique form of the social arrangement of intercommunication, democracy. Even under the Roman imperial republic, rhetoric managed to retain this (by then utopian) function by channeling it through ceremonial rhetoric.

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Tropical Foundations and Foundational Tropes of Culture

James W. Fernandez

We might first found the tropological point of view in social science inquiry in two ancient founding figures, the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and the Roman Rhetorician Quintillian. As with all the contributors to our common Rhetoric Culture project, "social science inquiry" is understood as investigation into the rhetoric of culture creation and social interaction. Heraclitus may be regarded as foundational, not only in his doctrine of flux and constancy of change, but in his view that for the most part, acting under the requirements of social order, cultural constancy, and personal stability, people do not understand fully what is going on around them and most particularly they do not easily recognize those things that are constantly shaping and bringing changes to their lives.

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Convictions: Embodied Rhetorics of Earnest Belief

Michael Herzfeld

I begin this essay with two polemical propositions. First, I oppose the strong separation of material and symbolic that appears to be the parochial inheritance of Cartesianism in social anthropology, and regard it as an intellectual proxy for relegating certain groups of people into past time or primitive status — Fabian's (1983) "allochronism." However much some of our colleagues seek to avoid the problem by waggling apostrophe-like fingers every time they use the taboo word "primitive," they do not avoid the problem by ironizing it or by seeming to bury it in a self-deprecating gesture: it is apparently as hard to swallow the idea of the materiality of the symbolic as it is to accept the artisanal character of intellectual work or to recognize the theoretical capacities of informants who lack a formal education. These parallels are not a matter of chance: in much anthropological discourse, the symbolic can serve as a proxy both for "them" (when it is vague and unfocused) and for "us" (when it is intellectual), much as "nature" is both the standard of acceptability (as in the process of naturalizing power) and an attribute of otherness (as in notions of primitivity).

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An Epistemological Query

Pierre Maranda

This short note touches on three topics that seem to me fundamental to Rhetoric Culture theory with respect to the "cline of kinds and modes of rhetoric." The first topic concerns the minimal audience of a speech; the second, the minimal speech or rhetorical utterance; and the third, the use of rhetoric by nonhuman animals.

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Beyond the Unsaid

Transcending Language through Language

Paul Friedrich

Life in certain kinds of intense moments leads us to intuitions of realms that stretch or soar beyond speech and everyday realia, but these intuitions resist definition; they cannot be captured. While acknowledging that our reason and our language must always be defeated in such attempts to attain the unobtainable, we still have the deepest desire to edge near to and at least partially glimpse them. We respond to these needs with language and the use of language that, like other aesthetic resources, can give us intimations and rough outlines of the unmanifest beyond the manifest and, even further, the ultimate unmanifest beyond the more immediate unmanifest. These are uses of language that, defeated at description and definition, emerge victorious at suggestion and intimation.

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Future Imperfect

Imagining Rhetorical Culture Theory

Robert Hariman

Surely there are good reasons, even evolutionary wisdom, behind the social discipline that censures excessive expenditure and excessive consumption. Yet there clearly are strong motives for visibly excessive social display, which has survived and may even paradoxically enhance species survival. In modern societies, which experience both unprecedented levels of affluence and distinctive probabilities for catastrophe, excess may acquire additional significance. Let me suggest two corollary claims: First, excess is scandalous because it reveals in hyperbolic form the social order and thereby destabilizes social authority. Second, the aversion to excess has influenced the human sciences to an extent that they misrecognize their subject. That is, in order to understand culture, art, religion, democratic politics, and other signifying practices, one has to understand how they depend on excessive social practices and at times on the display of excess.

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