As I read through Book Three, I began to get confused by Aristotle’s seeming flip-flopping. The thing that really confused me is that he seemed to be saying in some places that we should not obscure the meaning of our speeches from our audience—we should use clear, simple words and grammatical structures to avoid confusing them. But then he turns around and says we should avoid being known to our audience. So which is it, Ari, Ole Boy? Should our audience know us or shouldn’t they? Should they be able to understand what we mean, or should we try to hide it from them? What purpose, exactly, would hiding the meaning of our speeches from our audience serve? To make us seem more elevated and lofty in our intellectual obscurity? To confuse and baffle our audience into submission?
Then I decided that maybe I was glossing over the text, as it were (in the modern sense—not the glossing of antiquity). Maybe I wasn’t reading between the lines enough. Certainly it would help if Aristotle were here to read it aloud to us himself, because then we would be sure to catch all the nuances and inflections of meaning that begin to blur on the written page (and now I’m flip-flopping from my former position that the written word is superior to the spoken word...sigh...). Finally, after pacing around my office, reading Aristotle to the empty desks, an idea emerged from the fog in my brain. I think what he is trying to get at is that we should use language and syntax that our audience will understand, but that we should hide our technique to make our speech seem as though it is completely genuine and not premeditated because this will improve our ethos—it will appear as though we are speaking from our hearts and minds, not carefully plotting the best way to manipulate our audience into following the course of action we prescribe. So, if we cleverly disguise the framework, we will use logos to build our ethos and appeal to the audience through pathos? These are just some thoughts to start the ball rolling. I’ll keep digging...
7 comments:
Thanks, Tim! I read your post before I began reading Book 3 and used it as a kind of guiding question/reading strategy to deal with the endlessness of all things stylish. And I came to the same conclusions you did…Aristotle believes in the rhetors shouldn’t let the audience see the strings of the puppet master…
When I started the Pernot reading, I reviewed the end of the previous chapter on Aristotle. Pernot claims that in *On Rhetoric* Aristotle “chose to study the means of persuasion…abstracting from the scientific and moral worth of the statements with which persuasion deals” (Pernot 53). Pernot goes on to say that Aristotle did believe that the “orator must adapt himself to the audience” (53) but that this was “only one stage of his thought about rhetoric…a stage of methodological amorality” (54). Pernot refers to Aristotle’s belief that the good will prevail (which I am still not convinced of!). He also states that Aristotle follows Plato in that rhetoric “does not constitute in itself a knowledge of the subjects with which it deals” but “clears a new path which leads to the reconciliation of the technique’s ‘value neutrality’”(54).
All of which does not really clear up for me Aristotle’s position regarding audience. His statements about virtue winning out seem contradicted by his proclamations that humans “usually do wrong when they can” and “most people are rather bad” (Kennedy 129). Unless, of course, he means that property-owing Greek/Athenian men with excellent educations will always do or say what is good and right, while the great unwashed, the poor and huddled masses (including women and slaves) will usually do what is bad and wrong.
Tim, I to think you are on the right track here. The goal is to be clear, and to use techniques to aid in clarity, but to avoid letting an audience know you are using techniques. There is something about being caught using techniques that kill a writer's (or speaker's) credibility. Perhaps this is a result of the early link between rhetorical persuasion and the study of tropes/techniques that function in language?
On a somewhat similar note, I noticed another place where Aristotle seemed to contradict himself, and I tried to piece together why. In chapter 7 on appropriateness, Aristotle outlines several things to do or not do in a given situation. These seemed very contradictory for a while, with him first saying to approach a situation one way, then explaining why you should do the opposite. At first I interpreted this as finding a middle ground, but on further examination, I looked again at the title of the chapter (duh!) and saw him trying to explain when each approach was appropriate, and urging rhetoricians to look at their situation before deciding on technique. (They are not so much breaking rules, as knowing which ones apply). Hope this makes sense!
Tim, I saw some of that too. Especially in his discussion of "urbanity" and energeia. In Aristotle's definition, urbanity can't exist if it's explicitly stated. It has to unfold in the hearer's mind over time (not too long, though, if it's someone standing there listening), so that it "teaches" the person something. This has to do with defamiliarization—a term Kennedy uses but I don't think Aristotle does. Defamiliarization is an essential element of any art, particularly literature and visual art. It's the way a writer turns a phrase or expresses an idea in a way that forces the reader to stop for a moment and consider its meaning. I'm sure we all have our favorite authors whom we feel have a knack for this. Or the way a painter or photographer presents the world in a new and exciting way that makes us reconsider how we move through time and space.
I think this is what Aristotle means with his term "bringing before the eyes," which is an essential element of urbanity. Our days are filled with words, to the point that we're numb to them. In order for words, which are signs, to bring the things they signify before our eyes, or bring them to life within our minds, they must be fresh and provocative. But they can't be those things if our techniques are obvious. If the fishing line that suspends the "levitating" woman is visible, no one pays attention to the magician.
Hey, I want to speak as a budding expert in defamiliarization! And you're right. To create a new context with which to 're-see' an everyday object, an artist must control the pace at which the process unfolds (if I spring the whole thing on you at the same time, it loses its effect and ability to be understood and therefore persuade.) However, I differ with Aristotle on the condition of the 'invisible strings.' It is entirely possible to make the strings visible and still enrapture an audience. Look at the 'breaking the fourth wall' in post-modern fiction. It can still enrapture the audience, even while drawing their attention to the ways in which they are being called to respond to a text.
And I'm with you, Tim. I'd like to add, though, that remaining opaque to an audience allows them to project the qualities they feel like they need to believe or understand the speech (literature, art, etc) onto the rhetor. It keeps the issue from being confused and allows the rhetor to focus his/her attention on the message and the audience on the message and not the speaker. It's a bass-ackward way of creating ethos, in the sense that ethos is a set of observed characteristics and the maintenance of this opacity allows the audience to participate in the construction (based, of course, on what the rhetor presents as material for that projection process.)
Great way to describe Aristotle's writing in book 3. The more I read the more I felt lost but your blog really gave me a new perspective on how to look at Aristotle. I agree that the more genuine a speech sounds the more likely the audience is to 'agree' with or appreciate our ethos ultimately our ability to persuade will increase.
I am currently struggling through epideictic and deliberative prooemia and it is interesting that Aristotle has a sentence that mentions "the prooemia of deliberative rhetoric...are concerned with what the audience knows, and the subject needs no prooemion except because of the speaker or the opponents" Book 3 Ch 14 I think this area of chapter 14 is discussing some of what we are talking about as far as knowing what the audience understands and building an argument from that knowledge while building the speakers ethos at the same time.
I picked up on Carrie’s claim that “remaining opaque to an audience allows them to project the qualities they feel like they need to believe or understand the speech (literature, art, etc) onto the rhetor.” I think that when the rhetor maintains an opaque persona in front of her audience, she simultaneously cultivates a source of power to build or fabricate a persuasive ethos. And I followed this thread back to Tim’s initial post.
And because my recall is weak and my reading comprehension fleeting, I must continue to ask for citations, directly quoted or paraphrased, from the primary text. For example, Tim writes that Aristotle instructs us to “use clear, simple words and grammatical structures to avoid confusing them. But then he turns around and says we should avoid being known to our audience.” I would have liked to have a citation here to follow this claim back to the text. I know this claim can be substantiated; I just want directions to the source.
What I’m trying to address is the paradox of using a plain style to reach a wide audience while mystifying (remaining opaque) said audience. I think Tim is describing this kind of paradox offered by Aristotle. I think that it’s possible for a rhetor to speak plainly, to offer at least an illusion of accessibility, an illusion of not challenging the listener, while challenging the listener, being inclusive and mysterious at the same time. In 3.2, Aristotle advises one to “make the language unfamiliar,17 for people are admirers of what is far off, and what is marvelous is sweet” (Kennedy 1991, p. 221).
Kennedy’s footnote 17 includes “Roman Jakobson’s famous definition of poetry as ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’;” (221). Returning to Carrie’s opacity and the need for the audience to project…. if the rhetor (musician, painter, etc) remains an open book, then they provide the audience with biographical and psychological details, no longer leaving the audience with a blank screen on which to project “qualities they feel like they need to believe or understand the speech.” When the artist (speaker) maintains the disjunction between themselves and their art, I think, when they conceal their personality from their argument—I think a painting can be an argument—the work remains larger than the artist, and paradoxically when the work expands, the artist gains power.
Let me bring this back to a concrete example from pop culture. Andy Warhol was a master of opacity, of defamiliarization. In empirical terms, he was rich and famous from his art and his personality respectively and interchangeably. So I’ll argue that he was a successful rhetor. Warhol mastered self-promotion by embracing his freakish appearance and dramatizing his pathological shyness. He was deliberately vague in interviews, answering questions like is your art commenting on consumerism? A typical and Warhol answer would be, can I just answer by saying “blah blah blah?”. He also received much negative criticism in the art world for his paintings being repetitive in theme. An interviewer asked him, Do you think your art is repetitive? He made the rhetorical move of opting out of any defense. Instead conceding to his harshest critics by surrendering simply with yes my paintings are repetitive. I think responses like this exemplify Aristotle’s paradox of using plain speech, of defamiliarizing it, maintaining a distant persona, appearing marvelous, and enjoying the arguable sweetness of money and fame.
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