December 11, 2004
Your First Time?
I have been reading a lot of Greek stuff this past week, partially as a distraction from grading and partially to retool the first month of my history of rhetoric class next spring. Page DuBois, in her book Sappho Is Burning, discusses the centrality of pothos in the work of Sappho: "a yearning for someone absent, for a lost time, a lost pleasure, and her poems re-create, in a longing mode, that time, that person, those pleasures, but always at a distance, framed by the poet's voice in the present of the poem, recalling, recollecting" (29). DuBois then connects Sappho's pothos with her own stance as a classical scholar: "My desire is not to return to a world now lost, one in many ways more terrible than our own, marked by cruelty, torture, slavery, and misogyny, as well as by democracy, but rather a desire to know that world in all its complexity and ambition. It is the experience of loss and regret, of looking back . . . the look at another form of social and economic organization, one different from the commodified alienated relations we know, or the yearning characteristic of the 'imaginary,' nostalgia for the mirror phase, a time of fusion and wholeness--that pothos evokes for me" (29-30).
It's a weird thing, this studying of rhetoric. Although I have had a number of moments of doubt over the years about whether I am suited for an academic career, I have never doubted my initial impulse in wanting to study rhetoric--in fact that impulse is even stronger now than it was thirty years ago. But how, to use the Freudian terminology, did I or you, dear reader, get "cathected" onto rhetoric in the first place? If you have a stray moment in the next week or so, I'd like to hear from the Blogora's readers about the moment or process in which your "first time" with rhetoric came about?
Mine started in high school, with a particularly charismatic speech and drama teacher named Michael Tillmann, who first directed me as Mercutio (go figure. . .) in Romeo and Juliet during my junior year. Those were the days (and here my pothos begins) when interest in oral performance carved out a separate disciplinary space for speech, debate, oral interpretation, and theater. By my senior year, Mr. Tillmann had me reading Plato's Gorgias and most of the Greek dramatists. I'm not sure how much of it I understood, but I was "cathected" onto rhetoric by what now seems to be a burst of a Nietzschean sense of power: a shy person, unathletic in a town fixated on hockey, my first real experience of being powerful, in the sense of using my capacities to their fullest, occurred when I was giving a speech or performing in a play. When I went to college, majoring in what then was "Speech and Theatre," as well as in Religion, my next mentor, Jim Pratt, set me to reading Kenneth Burke, who not only confirmed my initial experience with the power of rhetoric but also gave me a way of looking at the world that--with considerable anxiety of influence along the way--I still have.
Enter the antagonist in the drama. By the time I was a senior, I was in third semester classical Greek, and we were translating the Gorgias. While reading that first section, where Socrates wants Gorgias to define "who he is," my Greek professor turned to me in front of the whole class and said,"Jim, you're majoring in speech. How can you justify that, given what Plato says here?" There were some stifled giggles at my expense as I stuttered an unsatisfactory answer to the professor's question. A similar set of experiences followed short thereafter; my political philosophy professor, who was most responsible for my interest in Plato, also embarrassed me in front of a class by saying, "Jim, why on earth would someone like you with such a good classical education, ever major in speech?" And a few others--from faculty incredulous that I had decided to go to graduate school in Communication Studies at Northwestern rather than to study historical theology, my other main interest at the time. This was all quite unsettling to me, but it did make me a much closer reader of Plato in general, and of the Gorgias in particular. All I needed now, I realized, was to point out to my Greek professor the fact that the dialogue ends with a long speech by Socrates in which he does allow a place for rhetoric in public life. (I know it's more complicated than that, especially since no one at Callicles' party appears to be paying attention to Socrates by that point.) So, again, there got to be something personal about my relationship to rhetoric: I studied it more intensely in order to fend off the criticisms of those misguided souls who had attacked "my precious."
Perhaps it's just as simple as that: we gravitate toward those subjects with which we associate enhanced "self-esteem." But I don't think it is that simple. Because the pothos remains: the desire to speak with the dead; the admiration for those past moments at which the yearning for political liberty, oratory, and the arts were connected; the hope for a better college curriculum in the humanities; the belief that public controversy could be better than it is.
What's your story, dear reader?
Posted by jim at December 11, 2004 11:44 PM
Comments
Jim asks, "What's your story, dear reader?" . . .
1967 10th Grade English. The teacher is Barney Selzner, retired Marine sargent, gruff, no fear, lives at the Y. We're discussing a character named Jem (perhaps from To Kill a Mockingbird?). He asks me what the name might mean. I don't know. He asks me what a gem is. I reply, "a precious stone." He says, "not quite; a precious stone *in the rough*." Metaphor, with precision. Something turns over in my head. Later in the term, we are to do oral interpretations of literature. Students chose from a list of suitably literary works. I take the open option and do kiddie lit and Beatles lyrics. I'm really into it--feeling things I haven't experienced before: art, performance, the power of the word. The class is looking at me like I've lost my mind. I look to the back of the room and there is Selzner, grinning from ear to ear. The moment is incredibly rich: perhaps the first truly personal validation of my life, from a wholly unexpected source, who is not whom others think him to be, who is welcoming me to a new world that the others in the room will never enter or even see, a world of art and argument and intellectual community.
Fall 1969, sitting in a seat waiting for my first college class to commence. It's a speech class, which I picked in homage to Selzner. The period begins, but no prof. Then we hear him coming down the corriidor, speaking loudly--he has begun his lecture before he's even in the room. Then he sweeps in, a pile of books and papers in one hand, a cigarette in the other, talking non-stop about language and reality. It's Roger Mosvick giving an over-the-top performance of the life of the mind. My mind is blown. I wanted to be part of the show.
I of course took courses in other departments and several faculty there became very important to me, but the hook was set. And, like Jim, I also experienced the negative reactions when my major became known. This only helped: as far as I could tell, the animus toward rhetoric was a distinctively academic prejudice. Anything which brought out that reaction from reason itself must be worth knowing.
There still was the question of whether to do rhetoric or some other version of comm. studies--until the Kennth Burke seminar during the spring term of my first year of grad. school. That is where the door finally swung all the way open to reveal what later generations would know as post-structuralism. The vocabulary was not as extensive or analytically precise or powerful as what came later, but the experience of intellectual transformation was not to be missed. And yet, something had been lost, and necessarily so. The encounter now was with books, not charismatic teachers. The task was not to revel in the joys of learning but to become a professor.
I don't want to end on a note of nostalgia. The teachers were decisive, and the writer also was decisive. We need both teachers and writers. And we need what is prompted by Jim's question: commitment to the art that they and we share.
Posted by: Robert Hariman at December 12, 2004 08:34 PM
Great thread!
When a professor shares what he found so engaging about his particular discipline that he decided to devote the rest of his life to it, that brings a sense of life to the field that as an undergraduate I find compelling.
All of you should make an effort to share these sorts of stories with your classes.
Posted by: Matthew Wilkins at December 13, 2004 09:17 PM
I once heard (or thought I heard) a professor refer in a lecture once to the "Rhetorician's epistemological crisis." I wasn't able to get that point elaborated at the time, but I've often thought about what that might mean.
For some of us, the encounter came in a classroom, particularly a basic speech or composition class. To the extent that these are crises of conversion they may fit that phrase, but more often it seems to be an awareness of (or rather a recognition and desire for recognition of) power in ourselves (Jim) and in others (Bob).
In my case, I tested out of both basic courses through high SATs and drama credits. For me the conversion came after leaving school, in a work situation, before I knew what rhetoric was. I was working in New York right after college for a tiny PR firm some guy ran out of his Upper West Side apartment that publisized charitable donations to PBS programs. PBS in turn relied on their underwriters to help publicise the programs.
This led to some interesting corporate relations issues . . . like when General Electric supported a "National Audubon" special about the environment that didn't shy away from controversial issues, like free grazing on public land. The GE answer line flooded with calls from young children asking "why are you taking away my Daddy's ranch?", etc., as you can imagine. The host for that episode was Peter Coyote, and as you might imagine it was a surreal sight to see the former Digger on satellite feed arguing the issue, while trying to work in GE's name into the interview as much as possible (my boss would dilegently count these occurences, almost as if he was getting paid per mention).
Later, we got the Nature contract, and we sent out George Page to do some Thanksgiving Day themed interviews . . . ironic (or "allegorical" if you prefer) because the program they were promoting was an attempt to represent in mockumentary fashion the continent before the white settlement began. My job was to write a release to the local news shows we were pitching this thing to. In a moment of either naivete or citizen critical praxis (or both) I included in the release the observation "perhaps this cooperative moment between settlers and native Americans was a "Road Not Taken" between the two cultures."
My boss and his assistant went down to DC for the taping, I manned the phones. About 7, I got a call. The feed had gone smoothly, George had ably memorized the menu of the 1st Thanksgiving, and trotted it out on cue each time in his melliflous voice. But these was one odd thing about the day: "I think it was the sixth time a reporter asked "George, was Thanksgiving a 'road not taken?'" when we realized something funny was going on."
I never heard anything more about it after that day. But when I was laid off soon afterwards (not for writing the release but for forgetting to pick up some dry cleaning) I wondered what was meant by the impact, as also vaguely why I recoiled from it almost instinctually, because I didn't understand what it was that I was doing (simply put, if it was naivete, citizen praxis, or both).
Before I knew was in grad school, and reading Kenneth Burke, and all the pieces seemed to fall together. (Isn't it funny how Burke has had that effect on so many of us?)
Posted by: jolt at December 16, 2004 04:53 PM
Additional Q's for rhosa from one once (and future) mediaci to another.
I saw rhetoric as explaining my estrangement from (im)media practice. You report an estrangement coming from others because they didn't see how rhetoric explained and deepened your comittment to those media. Is this an accurate assessment of your R.E.C? Does the E stand for ethics?
Posted by: jolt at December 17, 2004 07:47 AM
Like Wayne Booth before me, I first became acquainted with rhetoric in all her varieties as a young and zealous Mormon missionary. I knew then as well as I know now that the variety of rhetoric one chose had deep ethical implications, though I could not then delineate Win-Rhetoric from Bargain-Rhetoric, or Listening-Rhetoric from Rhetrickery. Even earlier, of course, I was intrigued by the rhetorical, like at fifteen when I first saw Kenneth Branaugh's Henry V and rewound the St. Crispin's Day speech a thousand times. Or when I was a smart-ass jock in Mr. Doze's English class (I kid you not, that's his real name), acting too cool for rhetoric even though I secretly devoured every single word of Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and found incredible joy in studying for the weekly quizzes out of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.
The moment I knew I was going to be a rhetorician came later, it was Saturday April 10, 1999 when, as an undergraduate, I attended a panel on free speech at SSCA. It was my first experience with a conference panel. The meeting was in a huge conference room, capable of seating 200 easily, and yet there were only six people in the room sitting around in a circle. (I learned later that was typical, but it felt very strange to me.) Anyway, Dale Herbeck and Jim Aune ended up in a discussion about free speech and I remember distinctly walking out of that panel wanting desperately to be able to talk that way. I couldn't put my finger on what I had just seen, but I knew that it was something extraordinary, something that took years to prepare for and yet seemed effortless, celebratory, in short, everything I had hoped all my life intellectual encounters could be. That's it, that's when I knew I wanted to take part in the communion of minds. I've been trying to do just that ever since . . .
Posted by: David at December 23, 2004 01:04 PM
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