Insignificant Wranglings

Today’s Plan:

• Ethos
• Miller
• For Next Class

Different Senses of Ethos

Aristotle’s On Rhetoric identifies 3 different forms of rhetorical appeals, which are the elements that Aristotle believes drive any persuasive speech act. These are logos, ethos, and pathos. I would argue that, out of the three, ethos is the term that generates the most disciplinary controversy–that is, you will find the least agreement among scholars, teachers, and textbooks as to what the term means and/or how a rhetor can/should develop it. Generally, it means something like credibility, character, and/or culture–but the point of emphases or the nuance or the relationship between these things gets complex.

So let me dig into these three different senses a bit to try and illustrate that complexity (though, let me also say, that these senses overlap–they are not mutually exclusive). My goal here is to unpack ethos in a way that helps us understand its relationship to demagoguery.

Let’s start with Aristotle, who is a logocentric philosopher. In On Rhetoric, Aristotle makes the argument that ethos should be a property of the speech itself and not a valuation of the speaker’s character. This interpretation of Aristotle isn’t universally accepted; I am focusing on one particular discussion of ethos early in the text; moreover, I emphasize should be because–as I’ll explain below, that’s Aristotle’s position as a philosopher; he acknowledges that most other people don’t think about ethos this way. Let me focus on a particular passage from On Rhetoric:

There is persuasion through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly than we do others on all subjects in general and completely so in cases where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt. And this should result from the speech, not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person; for it is not the case, as some technical writers propose in their treatment of the art, that fair-mindedness [epiekeia] on the part of the speaker makes no contribution to persuasiveness, rather, character is almost, so to speak, the controlling factor in persuasion.

Yes, Greeks like long sentences.
What does Aristotle mean here when he writes that “persuasion should result from the speech?” My interpretation is that the formal organization of the speech, as well as its argumentative tone (and the quality of its composition), what we might call the voice and temperament, is perhaps the most important element of persuasion. In essence, I should take the name off the paper and grade it based on the quality of its craft and argument alone.

• Does it present a logically constructed argument, citing evidence as we would expect a smart, rational person to do?
• Does it handle its opponents claims fairly, civilly, acknowledging both their concerns and evidence objectively?

To refer back to a few examples we’ve discussed earlier: an Aristotelian understanding of ethos as I have discussed it here, as credibility inferred by the formal elements of the speech alone, makes it “easier” (that’s probably the wrong word) to read Heidegger–because we can focus on his contributions of thought detached from his private Nazi beliefs. [Note: a retweet is not an endorsement here!] Similarly, such a belief might make it easier for us to vote a racist or spousal abuser into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, since their personal failures can be distanced from what they do in the speech what they do on the field.

Aristotle’s idea of ethos asks us to assess whether the formal qualities and voice of a “textual” object resemble a fair, rational, objective (etc) thinker. Does this voice sound like a credible person in this thing?

Other interpretations of Aristotle, those that focus on other sections of his Rhetoric, speak more to the character of a speaker. To what extent is the speaker a good person? Does her character suggest that this is someone to whom I should listen. Or, even if we think about this in terms of credibility, I might ask: why/is the speaker credible to speak? Rhetorical handbooks (both ancient and contemporary) will encourage speakers to defend themselves as speakers. “Having studied rhetoric for 10 years and having taught graduate and undergraduate seminars on rhetorical theory, I offer the following–narrow–interpretation of Aristotelian ethos.” “While I might not have played professional baseball, I have studied advanced analytics for 10 years.” “As a mother, I have experience raising children. And that’s why…” If you read an author making a case for why they are qualified to write about a subject, then you are witnessing someone make an argument about themselves as a character. If you see an argument about why we shouldn’t listen to Jaylen Brown (basketball player) or Curt Schilling (retired baseball pitcher) talk about politics, you are reading an argument in which someone questions whether he has the character to talk about politics.

Similarly, we might question whether a person’s moral failings exclude them from a conversation. Certainly, one would not ask Harvey Weinstein to talk about the Me Too movement. [Marc: Google Lance Armstrong Charity]. At what point does personal failure exclude? From this perspective, one would feel less comfortable reading Heidegger, because the historic significance of this thought would be overshadowed by the evil in his heart.

I should say that when I think of ethos, I think about it in a third sense–as sense of community. Is the speaker one of “us” or one of “them”? I am not idealizing this sense of ethos; rather I am arguing that our tendency–contra Aristotle–is to identify with speakers who most closely resemble our sense of how the world works, of who we are, of what we value. This is a natural process. In the ancient world, this sense of ethos traces back to Isocrates.

20th and 21st century rhetoricians are quick to point out the dangers of this system, since it can quickly lead to dogmatism and demagoguery (and I’m sure we can talk about this in connection with Miller today). When I rhetorically analyze a speech, I pay particular attention to the ways in which the speaker identifies with the audience (link to Wikipedia page on Burkean identification). Burke argues that identification, forming a common bond with the audience [one predicated on the sharing of values and identity], is essential to human communication, and precedes and underwrites any “logical” (in the parlance of rhetorical theory, ethos precedes logos, even if Aristotle would emphasize that logos should take priority over ethos).

However, it is also prone to abuse, since it can easily slide into demonization of those who are not us. For instance, Isocrates, writing at a precarious time for Greek city-states facing Mongol invasion. He proposes that “Greek” is not a matter of birth, blood, or geography, but rather a matter of ideological commitments to intellect, beauty, freedom, honor, and responsibility. Anyone who pledges themselves is thus properly Greek (and here’s potential overlap with Aristotle, since if their speech does those things, then it must be Greek–maybe–I don’t know I’d have to think about this more). Okay–so great, we have a potentially useful term/idea for how to unite city-states under one collective identity. Except Isocrates makes abundantly clear that anyone who doesn’t fly under the Greek banner is a barbarian. And we definitely need to kill all those people. Isocrates thus becomes a really interesting historic figure: someone who advocates for the power of language and compromise as central to peaceful democracy, and someone who develops a rhetorical-philosophical model that supports genocide.

Kenneth Burke wrote “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” in 1939, early into Germany’s aggression but before the start of World War 2. Before most academics (and politicians) took Hitler seriously. Let’s take a look at a few quick passages (as a way of thinking about / transitioning to our reading on demagoguery).

The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts. (p. 205-6)

Burke is writing in 1939. Since then, social and neuroscience have proven this theorem (look up terms like “confirmation bias,” “cognitive bias,” or something like the Dunning Kruger Effect. I want to end today with a brief passage from a podcast I listen to–one that asks a question: who is to blame for demagoguery? Is it a bottom up movement or a top down movement?

There is much more I’d like to quote/write here, but already I fear this stretches long. But I want to take some time with the Miller. How does Miller’s chapter resonate with these concepts of ethos?

For Next Class

Read Miller through page 93. Write Up #2 due Monday.

Today’s Plan:

• Schedule Update
• Lanham Write Ups
• Lanham Discussion
• For Next Class

Schedule Update

As in, now we have one!

Lanham Write Ups

Let’s read/listen to 3 or 4 of these.

Lanham Discussion

I’m hoping discussion emerges. In case we need them, here’s a list of the passages that people cited in their papers:

• “The modernist route is easy to teach, which is one reason it is taught so widely. This is a pity, because the way we teach becomes the way we think.”
• “Thus begins modern inquiry’s long history of looking for its lost keys not where it lost them but under the lamppost, where they are easier to find.”
• Lanham says that the Strong Defense “assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man made
• Lanham writes, “Turned language, man’s best friend, into a potential enemy” [Note: this leads to a bunch of stuff I want to talk about later–human relationship to language, and whether rhetoric *first* divides or collects]
• Quoting Ramus: “For although I admit that rhetoric is a virtue, it is virtue of the mind and the intelligence, as in all the true liberal arts, whose followers can still be men of the utmost moral depravity.”
• “And so, on a very large scale indeed, McKeon puts our crucial question back into time precisely as Castigleone did, suggesting as answer to our “Q” question that is sprezzatura writ large. If we make the Platonic or Ramist assumptions, then to the “Q” question the obvious, indeed the tautological, answer must be “No!” If, on the other hand, we make the rhetorical assumptions, the assumptions built on a dramatistic theory of human reality and a metaphorical theory of language, then the answer, equally obviously, indeed tautologically, must be, as Quintillian has it, “Yes!” How could it be otherwise, since the orator creates the reality in which he acts? He must be at one with it, “just” and “good” in its terms, since it is created for his purpose. Now it becomes apparent that either answer, in its pure state, is logical, true, and useless. And so both sides, once they have returned the answer of their choice, proceed to hedge it. Quintillian brings philosophical coordinates into his discussion continually, so that the basic tectonic oscilation is set in motion without his aknowlegding or, most of the time, even knowing it. Ramus, having separated the two, trusts that they will get all mixed up together again. Who cares, since the purpose is not to describe reality, but to make inquiry and teaching easier?”
• Lanham paraphrasing Bloom on scholars: “Society exists to serve the university and not vice versa, and the scholar remains a “perpetual child,” pure in heart and motive, professing a set of canonical texts…in an environment insulating political pressures–without, in fact, any social context whatever. The scholar does not act in society except by being what he is. He is…what the culture exists to create”
• Lanham, in response to Bloom, on mixing “formal pleasure” (learning for learning’s sake) with real world problems: “Finding the means to resituate this mixing into the curriculum, giving it both a theoretical and administrative home, is the primary item on our current agenda”
• “Philosophy and rhetoric, taken as two great opposites of the Western cultural conversation, can be harmonized only by reversing the Platonic effort, by putting them back in time.” [note: “what does “time” mean here?”
• Anthony Blunt example
• “Sculley calls Apple a “third wave” company and Pepsi a “second wave” one. “Second wave” organizations are hierarchical, focus on stability, institutional tradition, and stable markers; “third wave” wave organizations are flexibly networked, focus on interdependency, individual entrepreneurship, and growth.” AND ““We humanists are becoming ever more career-oriented in the purely competitive Pepsi way
  “
• “Much as we want to evade it, the “Q” question is coming after us these days. It presses on us in the university, for the university is like the law courts: it cannot dodge the “Q” question. It must design a curriculum.”
• Passage worth sharing: Later Lanham compares the traditional viewpoint of rhetoric to the weak defense, because it is two sides of the same extreme: good and evil. The belief that a thing or concept is wholly good and that the opposition is entirely wrong, is just not feasible because every action has a corresponding reaction. The strong defense is attributed to this new definition of rhetoric, which basically takes bias out of the word jumble and takes what is good from several arguments to create a solution instead of a fallacy. Lanham is basically saying that the root of the problem is the bias of extremist ideology and that what questions the virtue of those who use and study rhetoric is in question only because rhetoric is used as a tool for division instead of a tool for unity.

My passage: “Perhaps now we can comprehend how Quintillian might have felt that a rhetorical education as he had traced it conduced to civic virtue. It trained people in the Strong Defense, in the skills needed to create and sustain a public, as against a private, reality. It did not simply train, it created, the public person” (189)

For Next Class

A few things.

• If you did not submit a Lanham Write Up, you can do that for 4/5 points
• Read Miller pages 1-35

You will need to use Miller to analyze a text for our first major assignment. Pay attention to how Miller describes demagoguery, and how she thinks we can combat demagoguery.

Today’s Plan:

• Review Herrick (15 minutes Max)
• Rhetorical Analysis: David Chapelle

Reviewing Herrick

On Monday I learned that 50 minutes goes by really quickly. If we are going to do all the things today, then we have to do this quick.

Let’s carve up and quickly summarize the Herrick article. Here’s how I usually divide it:

1. Rhetoric and Persuasion (pg. 3-5). How does Herrick attempt to nudge our understanding of persuasion?
2. Rhetoric is Adapted to an Audience (pg. 8-10)
3. Rhetoric Reveals Human Motives and Rhetoric is Responsive (pg. 10-12)
4. Rhetoric Addresses Contingent Issues (pg. 15-16)
5. Rhetoric Tests Ideas (pg. 16-17)
6. Rhetoric Assists Advocacy (pg. 17-19)
7. Rhetoric Distributes Power (pg. 19-21)
8. Rhetoric Discovers Facts and Rhetoric Shapes Knowledge (pg. 21-22)
9. Rhetoric Builds Community (pg. 22-23)

I’ll give you five minutes to review your assigned pages and give us something specific.

Rhetorical Analysis and Dave Chapelle

Our main activity today involves rhetorically analyzing comedian Dave Chapelle’s November 6th Saturday Night Live monologue. I’ve created a handout to assist your note-taking, with the standard questions we associate with rhetorical analysis:

• Logos
  • What is the argument?
  • What evidence is presented?
  • What is the nature of that evidence? Stats, scientific, personal experience, common wisdom, historic example)
• Ethos
  • Who is speaking? Why are they credible? What kind of voice are they? What grounds their authority?
  • Who are they speaking to (and how do you know this)?
  • Who are “we” (are they speaking to us or to another audience through us? Or both?
• Pathos
  • What emotions does the speaker feel? Assume we feel? Assume the target audience feels?
  • How would you describe the speaker’s emotional state/style?
  • What emotions does the speaker attempt to engender?
  • How do you feel as you listen to the speech?
• Kairos
  • Why is now the right time for this speech?
  • What historic/contextual information would someone need to know to understand this speech in 10 (or 100) years?
  • What must we do after the speech is done?

As with any heuristic (system for generating ideas), not every element above might be useful/relevant to our object at hand. But these questions should help us think through the complexities of any rhetorical performance.

Here’s a link to the handout.

The Write Up

For next Monday’s class, you need to read Lanham’s essay “The Q Question” and write a one page, single-spaced response. Let’s revisit what I wrote about Write Ups in the syllabus:

But I also want to run this more like a graduate seminar–in which we are sharing ideas and learning from each other. Every week we do readings, you will be expected to share one Write Up with the class. What is a write up? It is a one-page, single-spaced, response to the day’s assigned readings. I will leave it up to y’all whether you do Tuesday or Thursday (week one everyone will turn in a Write-Up for Thursday). The first paragraph (¼ to ⅓) of the Write Up should offer a cut and dry summary of the reading. Standard stuff: what was the author’s intention/argument? What evidence does she offer? What changes does she conclude are necessary?

The next (⅓) of the Write Up should focus attention on a particular sentence/paragraph/section of the text. What should we, as a group, pay more attention to? What stung you, to use theorist Gregory Ulmer’s term? What resonated? What matters? What is bullshit? What do you want to pull against? Write ups are as much about reflecting on how readings made you feel as they are about logocentric response. Rhetoric, affect, response, responsibility, reflection. Throughout the course I will undoubtedly and obnoxiously thread words together.

Those two ⅓’s might add up to a whole. You might be out of room. Your page might be filled. But if it isn’t, then you can do the final ⅓: put this reading in conversation with something else you’ve read. Maybe a connection to something in this class. Maybe a connection to something from another class.

The aim of this class is learning. Write Ups aren’t formal papers–they are informal takes. They are snapshots of encounter and learning. They document struggle and success. You are free to experiment with style, voice, and language. If you don’t use “I” in these papers, then you are doing it wrong. They are personal engagements with the material. No one should be claiming universal mastery here.

As you read the Lanham, get in the habit of underlying key sentences. Whenever you do, write a word or two at the top of the page. Once you are done reading, flip back through the text and try to find connections between your notes and marginalia. What stands out? What are they key terms? The key themes to the entire essay? What is Lanham’s over-arching purpose?

The first paragraph at a Write Up is perhaps the most difficult: in a few precious sentences, you have to attempt to summarize the entire work. This is hard!

The other paragraphs should be more familiar to literature students; I am asking to close read a specific sentence or to. Contextualize it (place it in the stream of the over all argument), cite it, and then tell us why it grabbed you, why it is important, why you are skeptical, why it is wrong. In essence–what is a section of the text that we should talk about? Why?

The final paragraph can look at a second passage, or it can do something else. You can put the reading in conversation with something you’ve read for this class, or for another class. You can apply the reading to something in the news. Something you saw on a social media feed. As long as you are thinking, you can’t mess this up. You might open this section with “Reading Lanham made me think of…” You might tell us about a term in the reading with which you were unfamiliar, and what you found when you googled it.

For Next Class

I spent quite a bit of time Tuesday reading the Lanham, and I have decided to push back the due date on the first Write Up until Monday. In Friday’s class, we are going to start reading the Lanham together, so I can try and map out his argument and prepare you to read the second half of the essay on your own.

I will have a more detailed calendar for the course ready by Monday.

So essentially, there’s no homework for Friday unless you want to begin reading the Lanham on your own.