Interestingly enough, only a few contributors to the Companion explicitly define ‘rhetoric’. Indeed, implicit in the chapters that follow one can discern the word ‘rhetoric’ or ‘rhetorical’ being used to denote a wide range of phenomena, including oratory, parts of speech, prose genres, figurative language, performance, pedagogical practices, discourse, the strategic use of language, persuasion, and various theories of discourse, language, or persuasion. Indeed, as Poulakos notes in Chapter 2, rhetoric designates ‘many ways of being and performing in the world’ (p. 20). The result is that just about anything and everything could be studied as rhetoric or as rhetorical. Is this a problem?
It has sometimes been argued that failing to limit the denotative range of the word ‘rhetoric’ threatens to render the term so global and universal as to make ‘rhetoric’ meaningless; si omnia, nulla. Notably, there are a goodly number of other disciplinary terms that are just as broad in scope, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and politics. Arguably, once one takes the position that a term such as rhetoric or psychology represents a socially-constructed category or perspective rather than a ‘thing’, then just about any discipline can study anything under the sign of ‘the rhetoric of X’, ‘the politics of X’, the sociology of X’, and so forth.
To answer the question of whether such a broad scope is a problem, consider an analogy with the terms ‘physics’ and ‘physical’. One of the most important moments in Western intellectual history is when a group we now call presocratic philosophers broke from the tradition of understanding and describing the world in purely religious terms and started to describe the world as physis, nature. Their explanations were monistic: Everything has a ‘physical’ basis that can be understood. Not everyone chose to follow such a route, of course, just as not every scholar in academia today claims to study rhetoric. The scope of these physicists’ claims were global and universal. Now, 2,600 years later, most of the sciences are still informed by the general notion that almost everything can be described as ‘physical’. Where is the problem? Similarly it is not selfevident that there is a problem with the fact that almost any phenomena today could be described in rhetorical terms. The fact that we could do so does not mean we necessarily will bother to do so, just as the fact that anything could be described using the language of physics does not automatically mean we will bother.
Arguably, the popularity of the ‘rhetorical turn’ is fueled by the fact that a rhetorical perspective emphasizes two attributes of human beings as a species that are unquestionably important: Humans must communicate to survive and such communication always takes place under contingent circumstances. The birth of the systematic study of using language to influence others in classical Greece recognized these attributes explicitly. The emergence of New Rhetorics in the twentieth century was predicated on two similar theses, one linguistic and one epistemological, that were in direct opposition to the rise of positivism earlier in the century: The linguistic thesis, which stresses the partial and persuasive function of all language-use, can be described by the following syllogism:
All persuasive actions are rhetorical.
All symbol/language-use is persuasive, therefore:
All symbol/language-use is rhetorical.
The epistemological rationale is fueled by the argument that the philosophical criteria used traditionally to separate ‘higher’ ways of knowing, such as Science (as episteme) from Rhetoric (as doxa), have been critiqued persuasively. Since the ‘certain’ or ‘absolute’ side of binaries such as certain/contingent, absolute/probable are unavailable, we are left to dwell in the historicized land of contingency and probability, which means that all cultural knowledge is the product of rhetorical activity.
Whether one gets to what some have called ‘Big Rhetoric’ via the linguistic rationale or the epistemological rationale, the point is that such routes lead to the conclusion that the human condition is coterminous to the rhetorical condition. Thus, it is not surprising that scholars have described such a wide variety of phenomena with the terms rhetoric and rhetorical.
Nonetheless, it is understandable that some readers will be unsatisfied with the notion that rhetoric denotes ‘many ways of being and performing in the world’ and will want to know what the word means in a particular scholar’s chapter or sentence. Indeed, since some chapters are concerned with the very origins of ‘rhetoric’, greater clarity is needed. The Greek word rhetorike is formed by adding - ike (meaning art or skill) to rhetor - a term that was used most typically to refer to politicians who put forth motions in the courts or Assembly. Most scholars agree that the earliest surviving use of the term rhetorike is in Plato’s Gorgias, dating from the early fourth century, and its absence in important texts of the period concerning education and public speaking is striking.4 Obviously the practice of persuasive speech-making dates back to our earliest records of Greek history; indeed, speech-making is an important activity in Homer’s epics. Thus, the practice of ‘rhetoric’ in the sense of ‘persuasive speech’ is as old as history. Perhaps a clearer designator would be the word ‘oratory’, though in Greek this term (rhetoreia) appears surprisingly late and is used infrequently in the classical period.
Though the practice of persuasive speech-making was taught prior to Plato, the scope and purpose of such instruction remains a matter of scholarly dispute. The education offered by the older sophists is often summed up with the word ‘rhetoric’, but it does not appear that any of them actually used the word and M. Gagarin has argued that persuasion was not the focus of their educational training.5 Precisely when ‘rhetoric’ emerged as a recognized, discrete, and identifiable educational activity need not be resolved at the moment. But emerge it did, and over the centuries the term has been used to denote a variety of practices and functions of discourse.
The main point is for readers to recognize that we now can identify at least five ways of using the word ‘rhetoric’ that are informed by classical or contemporary scholarship: 1) rhetoric as an instance of speech-making (or oratory); 2) rhetoric as persuasive technique; 3) rhetoric as a tactical function oflanguage use (rhetoricity); 4) rhetoric as an educational agenda or program that inculcates the art or skill of the rhetor; and 5) rhetoric as a theory about human communication. The scope of rhetorical scholarship is broadened considerably if we note that in addition to texts that explicitly identify themselves with the rhetorical tradition we may add those that we believe implicitly participate in that tradition. Then, once we turn ‘rhetoric’ into the adjectival form ‘rhetorical’ and think of it not as a thing but as a perspective or point of view, these various explicit and implicit senses of rhetoric could describe just about anything. For that reason, the scope of the Companion is large and touches on many aspects of Greek culture. However, the reader might have to pause from time to time to consider precisely which sense of rhetoric a particular author may have in mind in any given passage.
World History
