Hi. I apologize if this isn’t an appropriate entry for a blog, but given how late I am with it, I felt compelled to get something down.
In the published manuscript of his seminar on “L’ancienne rhétorique” [The old rhetoric], Roland Barthes suggested that rhetoric, a
“véritable empire, plus vaste et plus tenace que n’importe quel empire politique, par ses dimensions, par sa durée, déjoue le cadre même de la science et de la réflexion historiques, au point de mettre en cause l’histoire elle-même, telle du moins que nous sommes habitués à l’imaginer, à la manier, et d’obliger à concevoir ce qu’on a pu appeler ailleurs une histoire monumentale » (3: 530)[veritable empire, more vast and more tenacious than any political empire, by its dimensions, by its duration, undoes the sphere itself of science and of historical reflection, to the point of putting into question history itself, such at least as we are used to imagining it, to employing it, and to being obliged to conceive what one used to be able to call a monumental history].
In his proposal, Daniel Ellis posed the question of the relationship between G. W. F. Hegel’s idea of history and work in the history of rhetoric. Barthes here suggested that the idea of rhetoric itself was opposed to any historical transformation of spirit of the type that we associate with Hegel. According to Barthes, rhetoric named a continuity between European cultures across ages and continents rather than marking any fundamental difference between them. In proposing that we now pursue a “une histoire de la Rhétorique” (3: 599) in search of “le texte qui n’existe pas encore” (3: 527) [the text that does not yet exist], Barthes thus indicated a fundamental problem: any history of rhetoric would have to call into question the pretensions of its object to transcend historical classification.
In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes remarked that “il est bon que les hommes, à l’intérieur d’un même idiome […] aient plusieurs langues” (5: 436) [it is good that humans, within a single idiom … have several languages], and his reflections on history seem to require this of it as well. In order that a history of rhetoric not partake of the ahistoricism against which it was intended, we would also have to pursue several histories and historiographies of rhetoric. Neither the idea that we think in the same way as the ancient Greeks nor the idea that we can understand our differences from them according to a single practice of history would avoid the problem that Barthes recognized. If we could avoid it at all, this would perhaps—following his thinking—only be by exposing the intractability of the problem for any history of rhetoric: the inevitable dependence of any rhetorical discourse upon the histories that contain it no less than the dependence of any historiography upon the idea of rhetoric that corresponds to it. Such histories themselves may inspire several ways of approaching this problem, but would also thus necessarily gesture away from both the concept of history and that of rhetoric as the exclusive designations for these lines of inquiry.
Hi Christopher,
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a perfectly appropriate blog entry--at least for this blog. At any rate it certainly gives one a lot to think about.
I'm not familiar with this Barthes work, and I'm wondering if it comes in the context of the sort of renaissance of rhetoric and rhetorical historical work that has been going on in France for 20-30-40 years? I'm thinking of the work of Fumaroli in particular though it seems--i don't know much about it--that there were/are a number of others doing similar work--that I think is the kind of historiography Barthes' claim would seem to proscribe or at least preclude: a sort of complex but nevertheless developmental description of how rhetoric moved from classical to medieval and especially through renaissance and enlightenment periods. So I guess my question is how is Barthes's claim situated in its own rhetorical moment?
But much else I wonder about here--especially as the dilemma (trilemma?) you set out seems similar to the stand some new historicists take in relation to the literary past--which is neither accessible through a timeless understanding shared by all people nor ultimately by even the most meticulous of methods--as you say in a way I find really appealing--we [new historicists in this case] are unable to understand our differences from the past through a single historical practice. For the New Historicist this leads to an intention I think to 'expose the intractability of the problem' but that intention moves as you suggest away from the concept of history in exactly the manner you suggest. For Greenblatt, Kastan, Gallagher I think this is exactly the point.
But then--and here I'm rambling for real--the problem becomes one of genre. Bc if the work we're doing or ought to be doing then becomes either unmoored or liberated (depending on your proclivities) from concepts of history and rhetoric as heretofore understood, what work are we doing by still clinging to this terms--is the "history of rhetoric" a kind of trojan horse? false advertisement? bad faith?
I'm probably missing your point here a bit, but thanks for the post and for tolerating my ramble.
Just to comment on this one, I might ask the following quick question-as-proposition:
ReplyDelete"Rhetorical histories" - either a tautology (since history is always narrative interpretation), or incoherence (since history assumes a permanence/essence that rhetoric denies)
"Historical rhetorics" - styles and cultural practices inaccessible to us except by strange ethnographic comparisons that are "doubles"
Are these some of the ideas Barthes is playing with?
In response to Daniel's first question, Barthes published the notes for this seminar in 1970, preceding just about all of the work in France that you mention. The "context" of this course is a big question, but his analysis of ancient rhetoric was certainly presented as the correlate of contemporary efforts to move beyond this tradition and develop a new science of semiotics. Many of the most prominent French writers on language of this period took a similar position toward the old rhetoric, although folks like Fumaroli and Michel may be exceptions here.
ReplyDeleteGenre is certainly one way to think about the problem that Barthes indicates. I don't think there's any sense in trying to avoid the generic conditions of research that continue to govern "history" - for instance - as a discipline. Pretending that a study of ancient Greek political speeches and a study of nineteenth century German philosophical writings belong to the same "genre" may, however, be disingenuous - at least insofar as one leaves it at that.
To Brandon's question, Barthes is associating rhetoric rather than history with the assumption of a continuous (if not permanent) tradition that transcends particular European cultures. In this sense, a history of rhetoric would remain largely ahistorical.