To extend Brandon's previous post and the comments that follow it: It appears we are begininning to make some fun and contentious claims. Namely, that what we do as historians of rhetoric is somewhat boundless--that we can take any historical material and make it our own, and that our analyses hold weight even when they impinge on others's disciplinary territory. Another claim is that the history of rhetoric, or just rhetoric, is anti-historical. It resists any philosophy of history as classically understood. It rejects progress, spirit, telos. It is, I suppose, a sort of timeless continuity, eternal contingency.
We reject discipline. We reject history. Is that right?
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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Two thoughts in response your post Daniel:
ReplyDelete1. When you say “Namely, that what we do as historians of rhetoric is somewhat boundless--that we can take any historical material and make it our own, and that our analyses hold weight even when they impinge on others' disciplinary territory” I wonder if what you say wouldn’t apply to any number of other disciplines as well. After all, literary scholars work on material that is not literature, historians work on material that is also claimed by other disciplines, and certain philosophers claim all kinds of material for their own. And don’t get me started about cultural studies or comparative literature.
I’m not sure most disciplines really claim “territory” any more, if by territory you mean a collection of texts or objects that belong to that discipline alone. Rather, I suspect it is more accurate to say that disciplines develop methodologies through the examination of particular objects and that these methods end up having a much more pronounced effect on the way a discipline identifies itself to other disciplines. Crudely put, I might say that rhetorical studies have developed its various methodologies through the study of a number of interrelated objects including “the rhetorical tradition,” if you don’t mind my using that old phrase, vernacular argumentative traditions, public speech, student writing, various philosophies of language, etc (I’m sure I cannot exhaust this list so I am stopping—but a number of people have brought up this point in the previous post). I find that defining a method (or methods) without referring to the history of the development of that method nearly impossible. I think we can have a productive discussion of where historians of rhetoric have drawn their methods from and that such a discussion might be very productive.
To say we reject discipline, however, strikes me untenable. Disciplinarity or inter-disciplinarity provides the structure of what is sayable and thinkable for any moment in our own history. There is no outside of discipline, but, as I think you were saying, individuals disciplines can become enriched through encounters with other ones, something everyone here seems to be doing (and perhaps to a lesser extent, everyone in academia or, at least, the humanities).
2. I wonder if we are really being fair to the philosophy of history. Hegel is obviously a touchstone in that field and I think we are rightly referring to him. But the philosophy of history is a variegated field that includes thinkers like Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Hans Blumenburg and a variety of thinkers I would not identify as positivist, teleological, or normative. Your point (and Brandon’s) about our being not in the territory of traditional histories is fair enough, but I worry we are attacking a straw man.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe you were basically saying these things already and what you really meant was “we reject the idea that our discipline is restricted in scope and the idea of a teleological/ progressive/ overly positivistic history.” I think I can agree with that statement.
Let me finish with something of a provocation. I think there are things that rhetorical studies, as it currently is practiced, cannot discuss. In fact, I think rhetorical studies is caught in what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationalism,” the belief that the world cannot exist without humans and that humans cannot exist without the world. Only the second one of those statements is actually true, as far as I am concerned. Another way of saying this is that rhetoric is always restricted to the human (or at least the living). Objects without people have no rhetoric and cannot be analyzed through any of the methods currently available to us. That said, I can imagine an object-oriented rhetorical studies (which would draw on speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy to develop its methodology—perhaps some combination of the works of Latour, Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux and company) but I don’t see us going there yet.
Ughh…this material is getting a bit convoluted. Blogging is obviously not my form, no matter how much I enjoy reading it.
Sorry about the double comment--apparently there is a limit to how much you can say in one.
ReplyDeletewell, to the question of a discipline and its object: it may be that all disciplines touch on multiple things that are seemingly ditinct from that discipline proper--but not/never without contention. as your tounge-in-cheek reference to cultural studies suggests, the more amorphous, the less legitimized. Literature has suffered real institutional and political problems as it has moved further and further into territories heretofore un-literary.
ReplyDeleteBut even within literature this plays out in complicated ways--if you study 16th century new england protestant writing and you are on a campus interview giving a talk, you probably need to be talking about some of the precious little poetry available in your period, or you're going to have to answer the question, however phrased, 'what does this have to do with literature?' And if you're in comp rhet doing the sort of political or other rhetorical history that does not directly relate to writing instruction, you're going to have to answer the question "what has this to do with comp rhet?" and that comes as often, if not more so, from comp rhet scholars than lit scholars who often, i think, have more sympathy for this kind of work than comprhetors. ergo, I am the only comp rhet person in my department, and no one in the entire university has any real idea what comp rhet is. If they had, I suspect, someone else would be sitting in this office not writing about history right now.
didn't mean to go off on a job market rant--but I do think that territoriality exists in disciplines in all kinds of very real ways. And I do think the history of rhetoric is situated a little differently than many of them.
D--I think we are in agreement and I'm guessing I was simply unclear about what I understood as territoriality. I was simply trying to say that these days disciplines tend to be more defined by method which is usually something that has been derived from an object that used to define a discipline once upon a time. I didn't mean to imply that objects aren't important in just the way you state.
ReplyDeleteBelieve you me--I am more than familiar with disciplinary territorial pissing (pardon the language).
I also that the history of rhetoric has a rather unique situation. I want to say it's a certain self-reflexivity (the rhetoric of the history of rhetoric) but I feel like I've seen that kind of thing elsewhere. Perhaps I'll think of it soon.
It is very interesting to experience
Ergh...cut off again. I was going to say, it's been a very interesting experience seeing whom in what part of rhetoric (or the humanities) has any interest in my work.
ReplyDeleteJust saying I feel you pain, man--that is all.