RHETORICAL CRITIC

I found this brief essay today while sorting through old papers. I don’t remember writing it save in the vaguest possible way, but it announces its context well enough. The dates suggest I wrote it early on at UHD in 2009 or 2010.

I definitely reference that Asimov essay a lot; I wish I didn’t have to.

There’s an interesting exchange in the latest issue of RSQ (Rhetoric Society Quarterly) between LuMing Mao and Scott Stroud on how to conduct the enterprise of comparative rhetoric. I don’t think either one articulates the problem – which is historiographical in nature – well enough, so I’ll take a stab at it while it’s fresh in my mind.

Mao’s essay is in response to Stroud’s “Pragmatism and the Methodology of Comparative Rhetoric” in the Fall 2009 RSQ. As far as I can tell, he charges Stroud with creating a false dichotomy between “descriptive” or “historical” comparative rhetoric, where the main goal is to accurately describe and contextualize texts, and an “appropriative” or “reconstructive” approach where the texts are used primarily as fodder for contemporary theorizing. Mao opines these two approaches blend together dialogically; you can’t objectively do descriptive work without contemporary bias, and the text itself tends to restrict the limits of reconstruction. My apologies to Mao if this is oversimplified.

Stroud replies to Mao first by restating his arguments: 1) CR assumes a descriptive approach is best; 2) CR should allow both descriptive and reconstruction; 3) “there is no sense of accuracy above and beyond the general criterion of ‘usefulness’ relative to some contingent purpose.” He then charges Mao with further failing to define what “accuracy” or “responsibility” means in the textual criticism of CR, and notes that Mao’s objections themselves have a consistent descriptive bias. Over this apparent confusion, he prefers a “pragmatist” approach that eschews fealty to the text and champions using it for contemporary problems as well as increased attention to important texts. He repeatedly uses Pound’s Tang dynasty translations as an example of a pragmatist approach. He is less concerned with his research being “right” than being “useful: “I think this sort of pragmatic pluralism is much more flexible and non-exclusionary than relying heavily on vague notions of ‘responsibility’ and a ‘proper’ purpose animating work in CR” (74). Apologies, again, if this is oversimplified, particularly in the cultural sensitivity area.

Reading these two pieces reminds me of a problem that I heard Mike Leff once call “chasing the ur-text” – namely, a desire to determine more accurate versions of an ancient text can overshadow the usefulness of the text as received for provoking thought and addressing contemporary concerns. The particular text in question was Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but the problem also exists with any text for which we lack a great deal of original context or a solid philological footing.

My response to these ideas is twofold.

First, the problem here is not description vs. reconstruction. That’s a pointless debate. Mao is right about that. The problem as I see it, though, is a matter of ethical citation. If you are to cite a text as an authority in some fashion, there is an ethical charge to do so in a matter that is as less wrong as possible.

By “less wrong,” I refer to Isaac Asimov’s famous essay, “The Relativity of Wrong,” where he notes that the purpose of scientific inquiry is not to determine truth or to prove anything, but to, quite simply, be less wrong than previous solutions to a given problem. His central example is the curvature of the earth, once thought to be 0 (flat); early estimates of a spherical earth rendered a value of .000126 (the flat-earthers were “right” to three decimal places!); later accounts narrowed the value even further, and Asimov predicted that future measurements would get even closer to the “correct” value without ever quite getting to it. Perhaps, even, the very concept of curvature would have to be revised.

That said, Stroud’s unconcern with “accuracy” to the text is somewhat ironic, as he charges Lao with misrepresenting his article’s argument, particularly his lit review of CR. It seems to me if he is really committed to pragmatism, he shouldn’t care, and should even applaud Lao for using his article for his own “useful” purposes. The problem with that, though, is that Stroud never really defines what “useful” is. Useful how? Useful to whom? How is “usefulness” measured? I suspect this term is no less slippery than Lao’s “accuracy.”

However, Stroud is on to something when he says Lao’s real concern is “moral” (71); he then charges Mao with failing to define what “responsibility” to the text is. I think Stroud is right, but his deconstruction of Mao’s position is somewhat unfair as it skips past a central debate/special topic of historiography: namely, the ethics inherent in writing history. Generally speaking, as Mao notes, separating “historical” from “reconstruction” ignores what history is; the telling of stories by humans. Implicit within that definition is the question of citation. History is myth without citation; it is only when we can attach texts to other texts and archeological evidence that they become history, which is itself a inherently biased account of other biased accounts. Citation is the only glue that keeps this mess together, and it is often not a particularly strong bond if applied poorly.

The pragmatist, then, without a sense of citation, is a teller of myths, not a scholar; they may indeed solve contemporary problems, but their solutions can’t be ethically cited and are thus ungrounded historically. The objection, then, becomes a question of false ethos; a pragmatist gets to put on a historian’s ethical cloak because he or she works with ancient texts, but they reject the very framework of that ethics. One can’t claim, ethically, to be an expert on, say, Erasmus, without being intimately familiar with his historical context, language, source critical issues, etc. If one simply “uses” Erasmus, then you are not an expert on Erasmus – you’re an expert on using Erasmus.

There is “something” to a text that remains after we subtract our situational bias. It is not a reflection of Plato’s forms, but it is something. Respect of this nebulous something is the cornerstone of interpretation. That “something,” in fact, is the only thing what allows us to judge either or not an interpretation is “less wrong” than another. The text allows multiple interpretations and uses, but it also constrains us. Apologies to Umberto Eco, who I am paraphrasing badly from memory – and yet, there is something there.