Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology

Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

Walter J. Ong

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801406454
• eBook ISBN: 9780801466328
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression.

Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.

1 Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness

I

Until the modern technological age, which effectively began with the industrial revolution and romanticism, Western culture in its intellectual and academic manifestations can be meaningfully described as rhetorical culture. Any number of scholars have borne witness to the pervasiveness of rhetoric in the West, such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Pedro Lain Entralgo, and the late C. S. Lewis. Near the beginning of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Lewis states that “in rhetoric, more than in anything else, the continuity of the old European tradition was embodied,” adding that rhetoric was “older than the Church, older than Roman Law, older than all Latin literature” and that it “penetrates far into the eighteenth century.“1 He also notes that rhetoric “is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors” and thereupon surprisingly drops the subject forever, despite his avowal that the entire literary history he is writing is “certainly…vitiated by our lack of sympathy on this point” and that “probably all our literary histories” are similarly vitiated. (Significantly, the rhetorical age did not engage in writing literary histories.)

There has been a good deal of water under the bridge since this avowal, which remains the more impressive because it is so reluctant and so stubborn. “Rhetoric” is the anglicized Greek word for public speaking, and thus refers primarily to oral verbalization, not to writing. It comes from the Greek term rhema, a word or saying, which in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European wer, the source of the Latin verbum and of our “word.” All human culture was of course initially rhetorical in the sense that before the introduction of writing all culture was oral. This means not merely that all verbal communication—there are obviously other kinds of communication—was oral, effectively limited to sound, but also that the economy of thought was oral. For human thought structures are tied in with verbalization and must fit available media of communication: there is no way for persons with no experience of writing to put their minds through the continuous linear sequence of thought such as goes, for example, into an encyclopedia article. Lengthy verbal performances in oral cultures are never analytic but formulaic. Until writing, most of the kinds of thoughts we are used to thinking today simply could not be thought. Orality is a pervasive affair.

But when we say that Western culture until recently was rhetorical, we are saying something more specific than that it was oral. We mean also that Western culture, after the invention of writing and before the industrial revolution, made a science or “art” of its orality.

After the invention of script (around 3500 B.C.) the central verbal activity to which systematic attention was at first given was the art of public speaking, not the art of written composition. Scribes learned how to commit discourse to writing, but basically composition as such remained an oral matter. Early written prose is more or less like a transcribed oration, and early poetry is even more oral in its economy. This fixation on the oral diminished only slowly. From antiquity through the Renaissance and to the beginnings of romanticism, under all teaching about the art of verbal expression there lies the more or less dominant supposition that the paradigm of all expression is the oration. With the exception of the letter-writing taught in the medieval ars dictaminis, virtually the only genre of expression formally taught in schools was the oration, with its various parts, numbering from a minimal two to four or even seven or more. Even the art of letter-writing, maximized in the highly literate culture of the Middle Ages, was conceived of by analogy with an oration: as will be detailed in Chapter 3, the letter commonly began with the equivalent of the oration’s exordium, next set down the petitio or statement of what was to be asked for (corresponding to the oration’s narratio, or statement of what was to be proved), the reasons or “proofs” bearing on the petitio, the refutation of counter-reasons (in the oration, refutation of adversaries), and the conclusion.2

This focusing of attention on speech rather than writing we can now understand. In preliterate ancient Greek culture, as in probably every early culture, oral performance had been held in high esteem and cultivated with great skill. But it had not been possible to codify its procedures systematically, to produce a science or art of oratory. An oral culture can produce—that is, perform—lengthy oral epics, for these are made up of memorable thematic and formulary elements, but it has no way of putting together a linear analysis such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. For an oral culture can produce lengthy verbalization only orally, and there is no way to compose an Art of Rhetoric on one’s feet. No one could remember it even if it could be so composed. Even today, when oral performance has the advantage of being able to echo the analytic writing styles and accompanying thought patterns which saturate us, it is still impossible to extemporize a lengthy scientific treatise orally with no reliance at all on writing. At best an oral culture can produce a set of memorable sayings or aphorisms pertaining to a subject. But a collection of sayings such as “Feed a cold and starve a fever” is hardly a treatise on medicine. With writing, attempts to organize such sayings in meaningful sequence, such as the Hippocratic Aphorisms, can begin to move toward the treatise form. Once writing made feasible the codification of knowledge and of skills, oral performance, enjoying the high prestige that it did, was one of the first things scientifically codified. To use an expression still current in the sixteenth century, oral performance was “technologized” (made into a techne or art), earlier by the Sophists, later by Aristotle and others.

Others cultures, too, once they had writing, at least in many cases gave systematic attention to oral performance. But there was a difference. What was distinctive about the organization of rhetoric among the Greeks was the close alliance of the art with another subject which, if we except a considerably later and much less developed discipline in India,3 was an exclusively Western invention: formal logic. Logic and rhetoric have always been uneasy bedfellows, but in the West they have been bedfellows nevertheless pretty well from the beginning. Coming out of an oral background, logic was regarded from antiquity on through the Middle Ages not as concerned simply with private thinking but rather as allied to dialectic. It was typically defined the way Cicero defines it, as ars disserendi or the “art of discourse,” an art of communication, not of solipsistic (and by implication wordless) thought such as is implied by “the art of thinking”—a favorite definition after the invention of print. There was a technical distinction between formal logic as “necessary” or scientific logic and dialectic as the logic of the more probable, governing debate or discussion, but this distinction was most often of little operative value.4 In effect, “dialectic” and “logic” came to the same thing, and dialectic or logic were commonly grouped together as the artes sermocinales, the speech arts.

Aristotle associates rhetoric closely with dialectic (he never uses as a noun the term “logic”—logike, in Greek—nor even the term logikē technē, “logical art”).5 “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic,” for both have to do with “things that do not belong to any one science.” 6 Rhetoric covers any subject matter, for it is the faculty of “discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion.“7 The two means of proof in rhetoric, enthymeme and example, Aristotle defines by analogy with the two means of proof in formal logic, syllogism and induction. Topics or commonplaces he finds both in rhetoric and in dialectic.8

Rhetoric, moreover, for all practical purposes, from antiquity until the eighteenth century, included poetic. This it did often, though not always, in theory,9 and even more often in practice, for poetry enjoyed no particular status as an independent academic discipline whereas rhetoric enjoyed enormous academic prestige, so that any use of words for effects other than the strictly logical was thought of as formally governed by rhetoric.10 Because, as we have seen, rhetoric was closely allied with logic, the association of poetry with rhetoric tended to assimilate poetry, too, to logic all through the Western tradition until romanticism,11 when this association was rather abruptly discredited.

Rhetoric and formal logic could not, of course, simply merge. As the art of persuasion, moving men to action, rhetoric is ordered to decision making. And often decisions must be made when the grounds for decision are not under full logical control. Rhetoric has to deal often with probabilities. Still, it drives toward the certainty of formal logic as far as possible. The computor cannot tell us everything we need to know to make a decision, but it is good to have it tell us all that it feasibly can. Given the existence of formal logic, rhetoric in fact availed itself of everything logic had to offer, as the history of both disciplines in the West abundantly shows. In cultures which did not have formal logic, rhetoric or its equivalent had to take other turns.

The relationship between rhetoric and logic over the ages has been partly reinforcing and partly competitive. Rhetoric overshadowed logic in the patristic age, yielded to it more or less in the Middle Ages (though rather less than even scholarly mythology today commonly assumes), and overshadowed it again in a different way in the Renaissance. The interaction of these two of the artes sermocinales is complex, sensitive to a great many forces in the culture—intellectual, pedagogical, social, religious, political, economic. Certain features of this interaction are the core subject of the studies here.

But there is far more to say than this book can attend to. Indeed the interaction of logic and rhetoric is far too large a subject ever to be exhausted. Since logic and rhetoric correspond to the basic polarity in life represented in other ways by contemplation (theory) and action, or intellect and will, and since logic and rhetoric have come into being not in the hollows of men’s minds but in the density of history, it is quite possible to analyze almost anything in Western culture (and perhaps in all cultures) in terms of its relationship to the logical and rhetorical poles. Needless to say, there is no total theoretical statement of the nature of either rhetoric or logic, much less of their interrelation. Conceivably such a statement might finally be achieved at the end of history, when rhetoric and logic would be outmoded.

With the advent of the age which from one point of view we call the technological age and from the other point of view the romantic age, rhetoric was not wiped out or supplanted, but rather disrupted, displaced, and rearranged. It became a bad word—as did many of the formerly good words associated with it, such as art, artificial, commonplace, and so on. Rhetoric was a bad word for those given to technology because it represented “soft” thinking, thinking attuned to unpredictable human actuality and decisions, whereas technology, based on science, was devoted to “hard” thinking, that is, formally logical thinking, attunable to unvarying physical laws (which, however, are no more real than variable human free acts). Rhetoric was a bad word also for those given to romanticism because it seemed to hint that the controlling element in life was a contrivance rather than freedom in the sense of purely “spontaneous” or unmotivated action, sprung up unsolicited from the interior wells of being. (In support of rhetoric, it might be noted that no such choice is possible: psychology can identify real motives always underlying the seemingly random or whimsical choice—which is precisely unfree because its motives are not under conscious control. Free action is not unmotivated action but action from motives consciously known.)

The displacement and rearrangement of rhetoric is, from one point of view, the story of the modern world. By now this great depository of culture has exfoliated into a variety of seemingly disparate things. In the academic world, for example, in one or another guise or avatar rhetoric is now taught in elementary and high school English courses, in freshman college English courses, in courses in marketing and advertising and creative writing (which is never entirely creative, but always to some degree persuasive, as Wayne Booth has so well shown 12). As persuasion, the operation of rhetoric has become in some ways more indirect (in marketing and advertising—though we must never underestimate the indirect methods of classical orators such as Cicero). Modern rhetoric has become more visualist than the older verbal rhetoric, not merely through the use of pictures for persuasion but also through the presentation of words as objects, with “display type” in “display advertising.” Until the early eighteenth century, it was at best extremely uncommon to find any sign display of lettered words as such: a tradesman’s name or business was not advertised in words on the outside of his shop; instead, the old iconography of the pretypographic world was used, an ivy bush for a tavern, a barber’s pole, a pawnbroker’s three balls, and to distinguish individual shops, easily represented and easily remembered designs such as a Cheshire cheese, a Turk’s head, three casks (the Triple Tun of Ben Jonson’s festive gatherings). In the new rhetoric words themselves are treated as designs and even as physical objects. Movies and television even set words in motion across a visual field, commanding their alphabetic components, like Ariel, “to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl’d clouds.” But at the same time with the help of the electronic media words are also made more active aurally as a means of rhetorical persuasion in advertising jingles, mottoes, and slogans. In the present world, the relationship of persuasi...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness
• 2 Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style
• 3 Tudor Writings on Rhetoric, Poetic, and Literary Theory
• 4 Memory as Art
• 5 Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite
• 6 Ramist Classroom Procedure and the Nature of Reality
• 7 Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind
• 8 Swift on the Mind: Satire in a Closed Field
• 9 Psyche and the G eometers: Associationist Critical Theo ry
• 10 J. S. Mill’s Pariah Poet
• 11 Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology
• 12 The Literate Orality of Popular Culture Today
• 13 Crisis and Understanding in the Humanities