After reading the first chapter of Rereading the Sophists, a few comments and questions come to mind. On page 13, Jarratt writes, “Rhetoric at its most fruitful has historically functioned as a meta-discipline through which a whole spectrum of language uses and their outcomes as social action can be refracted for analysis and combination.” Jarratt notes that the rhetorician has been a generalist. The goal for the historian is agility in moving between disciplines, standing back from them with the critical perspective characteristic of both history and rhetoric for the purpose of illuminating meaningful connections, disjunctions, overlaps, or exclusions.” I see such a perspective as important for understanding not only historical facts, but the context and culture of those facts and how they connect with the past and the future. But who decides what is meaningful, and how do they decide what is meaningful? Jarratt goes on to say. “The choice of texts for any particular history will become an expression of ethos; the historian makes a case for the relevance of a particular combination of materials based on her practical understanding of the issues involved, an ethical commitment, and good judgment about the best interests of the audience.” The question for me then becomes: whose “good judgment?” and who decides what the best interests of the audience are. Perhaps this choice of texts must be an interdisciplinary effort, bringing the perspectives and judgments of those in literature, the arts, science, philosophy, and religion.
Jarratt also writes, “The point for a modern rhetorical historiography is the disruption of the conventional expectation that a history be a complete, replete, full, and logically consistent narrative record. . . . For the rhetorical historians, the point of breaking the chain, of resisting the impulse to fit historical materials into a neat, continuous line from beginning to end, is to achieve the kind of critical distance which allows for re-vision.” (p. 18) I view that “critical distance” as necessary in enabling the student of history to see the big picture, to make connections, and to grasp context.
Jarratt also writes, “The point for a modern rhetorical historiography is the disruption of the conventional expectation that a history be a complete, replete, full, and logically consistent narrative record. . . . For the rhetorical historians, the point of breaking the chain, of resisting the impulse to fit historical materials into a neat, continuous line from beginning to end, is to achieve the kind of critical distance which allows for re-vision.” (p. 18) I view that “critical distance” as necessary in enabling the student of history to see the big picture, to make connections, and to grasp context.
14 comments:
Helen started her post with comments on a historian’s role in studying rhetoric. I agree that this is an important question to consider, particularly when historians routinely decide “what is meaningful” to explore/record/etc. This is clearly a necessary act, but one that should be undertaken with caution. Like Helen, I noted the quote on page 14 where Jarratt states:
“The goal of a historian IN AN AGE OF VAST AND HIGHLY SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BECOME NEITHER THE MASTERY OF A LIMITED BODY OF TEXTS NOR THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK OF KNOWING EVERYTHING AND ORDERING IT, BUT RATHER AN AGILITY IN MOVING BETWEEN DISCIPLINES, standing back from them with the critical perspective characteristic of both history and rhetoric for the purpose of illuminating meaningful connections, disjunctions, overlaps, or exclusions.”
I am including the full sentence here as an example of the very concept of historians’ influence on determining what is meaningful. In my notes, I only recorded the section of the quote set in all caps, while Helen’s skipped over the section I recorded in favor of the sections in normal text (at least in the blog). Now I am thinking that Helen’s distillation of this quote might be more significant than my own. As historians, what was meaningful to each of us was different, and neither was the full statement crafted by Jarratt. Does one of us have better judgment than the other on what was most important? Probably not. But I think this short example is a good indication for the need of the interdisciplinary study in looking at history/text etc that Helen is suggesting.
While reading further in Jarratt, I saw this approach to study as similar to that of the Sophists’ view when Jarratt states “A sophistic method works by exposing and exploring a range of possibilities for knowledge and action by implicitly theorizing the process of their acceptance by the community less on the basis of logical validity and more on the force of their “rhetorical,” i.e., persuasive and aesthetic appeal.” While I don’t think persuasive and aesthetic appeal should automatically override logical validity when analyzing the importance of information, (or the other way around) I like the sophists’ approach to exploring possibilities of knowledge before deciding which to follow.
In another note, I found Jarratt’s angle of comparing the oppression of the Sophists to the oppression of the female influence on rhetoric an interesting one. Certainly both have similarities—most obviously opposition of their views and a recent resurgence in their study by contemporary rhetoricians—and even if these similarities are not deeply significant, an approach to studying one can certainly offer a new or alternative way to studying the other.
I have wanted this book to intervene between our reading of Plato and our reading of Aristotle so that when we begin exploring Aristotle�s massive classification scheme, we are able to historicize him, that is, to understand his work and theorizings as something other than the culmination of all that has gone before. Plato and Aristotle represent for Jarratt the nth degree of a rationality that overshadows other ways of meaning making and has become the unassailable foundation of Western epistemology. She wants us to see the sophists as positioned between what is seen as Homeric mythos and Platonic/Aristotelian logos.
If you read the early paragraphs of each chapter, you�ll get a good overview of what Jarratt�s trying to accomplish in each. Undoubtedly you�ll find yourself mired down a bit in some of this, especially when unknown texts are analyzed. So best thing is to keep her objectives in mind, and read �through� what�s not easily comprehended to sections that deal with texts you are familiar with. Then dig in.
Chapter One 1) examines how the sophists have been written into history, neglected till the 19th century, and 2) proposes that the sophists themselves put forth a theory of history writing (historiography). Note on p. 11 bottom line the attribution of Gale re �subjunctive� history. This section discusses antithesis and parataxis as forms of disrupting closed histories and privileging multiple perspectives and narratives. Look for the critique of linear or causal historiography.
Chapter Two addresses the work of Father Walter Ong and Eric Havelock�both powerful scholars who have developed a theory of �great divide� between orality and literacy. In this theory, the advent of literacy enables cognitive development and abstraction�both foundations of Western civilization, in effect relegating other linguistic forms to the "proto" or primitive.
Work with the Gr. terms appearing here. Do you suppose our (finding) Nemo refers to nomos or habitat?
One good way of coming to terms with Jarratt�s propositions is to think about the myths and logics embedded in your own writing and/or in how you discuss logic and narrative�hypotaxis and parataxis--and nomos--before your students (even if you don�t use these very terms).
For class, I�d like to take up the specific passages of Jarratt that you bring to our attention. You can bring them in the spirit of inquiry or the spirit of refutation or the spirit of explanation or the spirit of narrative.
Rigid categorical thinking, as Jarratt is at pains to point out in that section, tends to privilege an exclusivist view of history (and any subject.) There is a case to be made for focus, however, which can masquerade as rigid thinking but to my mind is categorically different because focus allows the possibility of inclusion, whereas rigid classification, which rhetoric suffers from both now and in Plato and Aristotle, does not by definition.
I tend to agree with Jarratt as well in that the texts used to substantiate a point are definitely evidence of the ethos and suppositions of a particular person. Ethos because we have come to associate cherry-picking the literature and refusing to sample widely with intellectual laziness and the kind of cruel exclusionism associated with sexist and/or classist and racist phenomena. Suppositions because the author reacts to the material, be it to agree (giving us evidence of a shared set of assumptions between the authors of the respective pieces) or to take issue with it (forcing the author to articulate the problems with that set of assumptions and occasionally also a proposed set of replacement assumptions.)
It pays, in my opinion, to remember that the current multiplicity approach is also full of suppositions and ethical arguments, and that as such it is prey to its own problems in perspective, namely a lack of focus and the creation of a babble/Babel effect (which is currently backlashing through our polis as a distrust, discomfort and dislike for complication, or a profound distaste for 'them smarties.')
I meant to add that rhetoric can function as a 'master lens' for interpretation without losing the necessity to study it as a discipline of its own. The seeming necessity to continually justify rhetoric as needing its own department and separate course of study always strikes me as unnecessary; any discipline that contributes as heavily to the understanding of all the acts of communication, bleeding backwards into the very choices a courses of study is inherently worthy of its own course of study and, as such, its own department.
Frankly, I think that some of the hoops rhetoric is asked to jump are as much jealousy at rhetoric's relevance as they are anything else.
And now I've been snotty.
I like what mouthy me says about focus. A sophistic, rhetorical approach to historiography presents a nearly unlimited range of topics, ideas, and theories to explore, which can seem overwhelming. Applying a focus makes creating such a historiography manageable without closing off pathways that lead in different directions, and without claiming to have discovered “objective truth.” Jarratt says, “In sophistic history the pretense to distanced objectivity is overshadowed by an open acknowledgement of a value orientation: any realignment is made for a purpose.” Acknowledging that we all have agendas, whether we are aware of them or not, gives us the freedom to accept or reject those agendas, with an understanding that there may be multiple “truths.” What is true for me may or may not be true for you, and no distanced objective other can determine whether either of us is right or wrong.
Jarratt is leaving me with more questions rather than insights, and I’ll just embrace the vacuity and ask some of my questions, of course. First, I’ll pick up with Helen’s question regarding Jarratt’s “revisionary historian today” (13) and the recovery, or the choices made during recovery: “who decides what is meaningful, and how do they decide what is meaningful?” This question is reasonably always fraught with suspicion for me. Speaking for myself as a scholar, self-interest is my primary motivation for any topic I choose to research and write about; altruism for my audience is always a secondary impulse. And of course Jarratt and the historians (or historiographers?) she cites reach a broader audience than I do; nevertheless, I still wonder how interested they are in their audience.
As a student I am surrounded by people who tell me which books, scholarship, and ideas are meaningful. Lit students in our grad program have to take the 50-item exam, a list that is revised slightly every two years or so, but the list still retains the structure of a prescriptive canon. Thinking of Helen’s other question: “whose ‘good judgement?’ and who decides what the best interests of the audience are.” Identification of a canon and the requirement of learning that canon ensures the graduate student an academic literacy. However, I think the beginnings selecting titles to include in a canon result from subjective motivations, in this case from rhetorical historiographers.
As I read Jarratt I wonder if she ever considers her reader’s perspective, especially at the sentence level. But I don’t want to take cheap shots. I needed more examples though. I tried and tried in vain to understand her comparisons/contrasts and explanations of hypotaxis versus parataxis. Specifically I would have liked an example or two on page 27 and 28, in the section “Arrangement in Tragi/Comic Rhetorical History.” What does she mean by the “difference between sophistic historiography and a deconstructive practice is that parataxis follows or is interwoven with antithetical dissolution.” What? I had been clinging to the idea of the solvent effect of antithesis, but whatever understanding I approached disappeared into what I first called an ether, but Jarratt’s prose is not ethereal; it’s a junkyard of abstractions. Not only am I lost, but I think I’ve contracted tetanus.
I’m one of Shea’s Style Babies, so I already think of parataxis and hypotaxis in terms of prose, specifically, Hemingway’s fiction is paratactic because it shows the reader things, often gently but effectively; Henry James’s fiction is hypotactic because it tells the reader things, often by a relentless bludgeoning of psychobabble. I am willing to adapt beyond Lanham’s terms to better understand Jarratt, but I need help.
I continue to find myself mesmorized by the feminist writing. I feel somewhat frustrated that I’m preparing to graduate and I’ve heard so little about women’s roles in rhetoric and writing. As I read the Glenn piece I questioned the information regarding Sappho. As I read about her contributions I kept thinking why hadn’t I been exposed to her contribution earlier? I enjoyed reading her poetic writing and find the debate regarding her sexuality interesting.
I really enjoyed reading Sappho’s poetry regarding Aspasia. Glenn states that Sappho “gives her version of the Homeric Helen a feminist twist: no longer the passive ovject of a man’s desire, the beautiful Helen is the active, choice-making subject –with her own desire for her own “fairest thing.”’ (28) The fact that Sappho was a woman and able to write about Helen is incredibly impressive. Her ability to ‘hang with the men’ in terms of writing and the idea that her material was distributed and read seems impressive.
I was also excited to read the quote by Wider that women participated in philosophy on a “a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity.” I’m interested in reading more about women’s contributions in antiquity and review the evidence of their presence. So much of what we’ve read is criticized; I’d like to understand more about where the speculation begins and ends and what documentation has survived to support the women’s contribution in rhetoric!
In Chapter 3 of "Rereading the Sophists," I noted the references to women as the "other," as when Jarratt wwrites, "On the Derridian reading of Western philosophy, control in discourse is hierarchical, gained by the displacement of a degraded 'other' in favor of a polar opposite." (pp.64-65). The reference to the "other" reminded me of German sociologist Georg Simmel's concept of the "other" or the "stranger." "The stranger is...not...the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather is the person who comes today and stays tomorrow," he wrote in 1950. Simmel also stated that the "other" "is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of 'objectivity.'" I think it may be a stretch to assume that all who are outside the system and/or undervalued by the system are objective. However, I can believe the "other" brings a different perspective on the system. Women do bring another outlook, another lens different from those of men to their studies and writings. Simmel's concepts eventually influenced the field of intercultural communication, a field which was initially more concerned with communication across national cultures but is now more broadly interested in communication acoss gender, ethnic identities, etc.
Jarratt includes a quote from Cixous on page 75 - "And it is time to change. To invent the other history." The choice of the word "invent" raises questions in my mind. I prefer "rediscover," "open up," "uncover," "reconstruct" as alternatives to "invent" because some readers will interpret the history we may write as an "invention," hence a "fabrication." Yet I am certain Cixous was not talking about fabricating a history.
In your last post, Helen, you made a comment that resonated with me: "Women do bring another outlook, another lens different from those of men to their studies and writings."
In the faith discourse community I'm a part of, I talk about this a lot. I think it's why this little aside on the feminist (or re-gendered?) view of rhetoric is so interesting to me. I wonder--in scholarship, are we really able to view things differently? I think that's a little bit of what made me suspicious of Gale. I don't see her thought processes or methodologies being any different from her male counterparts.
Don't misunderstand--I can easily move between worlds, and having a long background in business has equipped me to think and act and speak in business dealings as a man would. However, I've learned as I've aged how to add value from my purely female perspective.
As for fabrication, I think that's kind of the point of the restorying of history, don't you? It's the idea that our colonial/empirical histories are indeed all fabrication, or, from a more generous point of view, just one set of the stories that we should be telling.
I have found some of Jarratt's statements against the strict mythos/logos dichotomy to be quite illuminating (e.g. her dismissal of Ong and Havelock's somewhat curious statements regarding the hypnotized consciousness of those within 'oral cultures who might have listened to the recitation of an epic poem. I do, however, question her use of Havelock's sometimes harsh interpretation of Platonic dialogues. For example, "Plato condemned mythos, meaning the poetic transfer of crucial cultural information, because of its hypnotic effects, arguing that it fostered an uncritical absorption of the dominant ideology (Preface). Instead, Plato recommended the hard mental work of dialectical thinking as an objective process."
I think it might be important to note that in one of his "later" dialogues, _Parmenides_, Plato subjects his own Theory of Forms (defended by Socrates) to a destructive critique from the sophist Parmenides. What might be very worthwhile for scholars of Platonic/sophistic rhetoric such as Jarratt (relating to her theory of nomos) is whether Plato already conceived of, and utilized it in this dialogue during his incessant self-critique. I think this might show that the category of nomos is maintained within the Platonic works in an attempt to seize the reality (or perhaps, to admit the inevitable shortcoming) of an articulated epistemological system based on _logos_. In other words, _nomos_ may have still been used by the sophist's "enemy."
Helen, starting just before the sentence you quoted, Cixous says, "And it is time to change. To invent the other history" (75), which seems to me like a call to change how we write histories from this point forward, not to fabricate the past. Or perhaps not...
Although I consider myself a feminist, I have to admit that before I started this class, I was not thrilled with the idea of studying feminism in the context of classical rhetoric. I wanted to study the big names in rhetoric—after all, philosophers like Aristotle and Plato formed the basis of our society. I was afraid that a feminist approach would mean we would gloss over the “big guys” to get to a few obscure female authors. But after reading Jarrett’s book and the other articles on the subject, I’m changing my position. I’m still interested in reading Aristotle and Cicero, but I’m really interested in the idea of discovering what has been covered up and silenced in all of history. I suddenly understand that the reason we have no record of great female contributions to history is not because there weren’t any—it’s because they’ve been excluded from the record.
If Gorgias can give us a feminist reading of Helen in the Encomium, it seems reasonable to me that we can use the same narrative technique to try to discover the histories of women. I like Jarratt’s suggestions for approaching this. By challenging commonplaces and assumptions, reading between the lines, and asking questions about what men’s silencing of women says about the women, we can at least sketch an outline of women’s history. And I don’t think that doing so needs to be seen as an attempt to devalue men. We don’t need to debase the contributions of men in history in order to discover the value in histories of women.
The frustrating thing about feminism is that it, like rhetoric, is regulated to a chronically underfunded and specialized department (I am NOT arguing for defunding the writing and rhet departments here.) When we go (or at least, in the beginning, when I went) to study feminism, it tends to be with the uncomfortable thought that it is somehow detracting from the 'real' study of a subject and the authors.
Which just goes to show you how deeply we buy the idea that men have more to contribute, intellectually, no matter how much lip service we give to intellectual equality. I'm still battling that assumption, and I count myself as not the dumbest or slowest bunny on the block.
When history, like ours, has been so long entrenched in a viewpoint that only accepts very limited input from a selected group while maintaining the illusion of non-selectivity and perfect objectivity, it has performed a neat trick: it has managed to maim backwards and forward. If history is made up of the perspectives of everyone, which have been selected down by time, by the prerogative of the winner, by acts of god and by the biases of the historian, it takes what is already a small group (of surviving accounts) and executes a good selection of the members. No one in their right mind would argue that no women existed before the twentieth century, in which western women began to demand to be included in western history. Of course, if they aren't in the histories, the point is moot. Likewise, the women whose stories aren't included in the flawed, presumptively objective histories we learn are not dead, but the point is moot.
That execution, maiming, whatever you will, goes forward as well. As long as the study of women and their contributions is mostly separate from the contributions of men (and sex is always a part of this, even though the assumption of objectivity attempts to dismiss this), the subject will be maimed and women (the way I struggle and it looks like other women struggle) will feel oddly whiny for trying to find out about their roots, or for even talking about it.
Slick, ain't it?
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